Due to being unable to get photos from my phone to my laptop I am unable to post pictures from the 1 day exhibition my course and I set up in uni. For this exhibition I presented work from my: grandmaster project, responding to a text and drawing transformation for which I exhibited two of my favourite life drawings I've done this year. I obviously exhibited my 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' comic and my current work for the other two projects.

It was useful planning and seeing what my work would look like within the context of an exhibition. This is especially true for my current project which is the only one of the three that is really made for an exhibition or gallery setting. As I mentioned I don't have any photos from the exhibition itself but this piece didn't look too different  from this photo I posted before. The key difference was this time I could have a proper look at all the pieces as one because they were stuck on a wall (actually it was two tables on their side) and not laid out on a floor. This allowed me to see any problems with the piece/s. First off I don't like the 2nd picture on the second row and the 5th piece on the 3rd row. I just don't think they really gel with the flow of the rest of the work. I think the main reason for this is they both boldly use colour and colours that aren't in any other pieces. I'm going to redo these two. To a lesser extent
 I also have problems with 1st and 6th piece 2nd row and 1st piece 3rd row. This is mainly down to the way the silhouettes are done because I don't think they look natural or human enough. This isn't a major concern however because I still think they work alongside the other pages.
My other concern is that my way of laying out the work didn't quite have the impression I wanted it too. It just looked to small and rather ineffectual. Simply put there wasn't enough pages to create the impression I wanted it too. Due to this I'm going to try presenting my work in other ways maybe, with different layouts.


I want to finish by quickly talking about my comic in the exhibition. Obviously the comic is made to be a comic and not really to be exhibited so to make it more interesting and eye-grabbing in a exhibit context I presented the original larger pages of the comic with it. I think it's important to show things like this because often the process and original pieces of art are more interesting and important than the final product itself. That's what I think at least and is probably why most of my work is just sketchbook stuff because to me that is the most interesting and even best looking work.

Drawing Project

 I continued exploring drawing with colours which is something I've explored quite a lot in this project. Here I've tried it with oil pastel and below with sharpie and ink. I liked drawing with pastel even though I couldn't get the sharpness and intensity of line that I'm used to getting. The drawings below are more of me exploring using sharpies than colour. I started by just doing a normal line drawing I the layered ink of various colours. I would have usually stopped after each layer of media but wanted to see how it would look if I kept adding to it. I took photos of each stage with my phone but unfortunately my phone isn't sending pictures to my laptop correctly. This means I only have the two images bellow to show for now.

I really like these two drawings. They are similar in a lot of ways. They both have an obvious roughness and sketchiness to them both are ink with blonde hair and are of a similar faceless subject matter. The picture on the right came about when I looked at one of the pieces of paper I wipe ink and brushes on and thought that it may look good with a drawing over the top. The drawing on the left was supposed to be just a routine loose ink drawing but a defunct dip pen lead to smears of ink that were hard to control creating a very rough image. I then finished it off with a brush that I think gave a pleasing contrast in line and texture while adding to the roughness of the drawing.

One thing I noticed when working on this project was that many of my drawings had similarities that gave the work as a whole a range of themes and motifs. I wondered whether these came from the book itself or a combination of: my interpretation of the text, what visually interested me and what I like to draw.

Here are most of the pages I have completed by now. I've noticed a lot of planets, close ups of hands and most interestingly spirals or concentric circles. Siren's of Titan is a sci-fi so the repetition of planets and space paraphernalia is to be expected. The close up of hands is partly down to my own drawing preference as I do enjoy drawing hands (they're also easy to get reference material for). There may also be a lot of description of hands in the book because they can be quite emotive and expressive and so allow the reader an insight into the character's feelings. I believe the repetition of spirals and concentric circles (there will be more when I redo a few of the fountain scenes, more on that next post) fits in with the theme of things being predestined, everything working its way to one predestined point.

It goes without saying that my work will be easier understood and probably appreciated more by those who have read the book than haven't. The main difference though are things that may not seem to make sense on the face of it would to those who've read the book. For example the 6th image in the series doesn't seem to be of anything but a reader should realise it being the wave progression of the character Winston Charles Niles Rumfoord around orbit. Even pictures that make sense as they are make more sense if the book has been read for instance the 10th drawing of shaking hands has a blue aura that is supposed to represent the electrical charge passing between the two.
Despite all this I hope that the work can still interest those who haven't read the book and can stand on it's own merit.

(Source: http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/honigman/honigman6-7-8.as)

Here are some images of Zak Smith's project 'Illustrations for each page of Gravity's Rainbow' a similar project to mine at the moment. I'm currently more interested in how he presented this project than the actual style of his work at the moment. I had been wondering whether to present my drawings for the book 'Siren's of Titan' as a booklet or put them on a wall,   or maybe some other way of presenting the pages. I like how Zak's work looks on a wall so will probably go for a similar approach in presenting my own work.

My one concern about this approach however is that one of the main things I like about this way of exhibiting is that you get a sense of the vastness and variety of Zak's work in the project. I may not be able to create enough pages to get this effect. The difference in the size of paper used (I'm using a4 paper while Zak used a5) may also change the effect the presentation has.
I'm also interested in presenting my pages on a corner of wall but am doubtful I'll have enough work for that.
(http://academiaposmoderna.blogspot.co.uk/2011_07_01_archive.html)


 One of the issues I had with this project is that there is such a range of things I have to draw that it can be hard to get the effect I want through drawing from my imagination or using reference material. Due to this I have to think of different ways of drawing an image than I would usually eg. different angles, different distances and using things like symbolism and iconography. Much of this work is more suggestive than my usual practice. To get ideas on how to do this I've looked at artists such as Geoff Grandfield who uses silhouettes and strange angles along with simple backgrounds to get across information in a succinct yet simple and interesting manner

I also looked at Sandro Chia who gets away with not drawing everything very realistic with warped proportion and perspective because he compliments these aspects with vivid and hyper expressive colour. It makes his work work I think because you easily see it's not meant to be reality. This may be something I look at however I don't actually like the aesthetics of the distorted figures in his work and think his work is mainly successful due to his large use of colour which is something I'm trying to avoid.

I've neglected my blog a bit this project and now have a bit of a back log of notes to talk about.

After choosing Sirens of Titan for my text I did a few initial sketches based around the aspects of the book that most visually interested me. The main subject of this was an alien robot in the book called 'Salo'. I enjoyed the idea of drawing something completely new and fictional, something that visually didn't already exist (one of the reasons I chose Sirens of Titan is there is next to no art based around it, only a few book covers). After doing these initial sketches around the book I felt that my work started lacking direction.

I remembered a project that Zak Smith did based around the book Gravity's Rainbow called 'Illustrations for each page of Gravity's Rainbow'. In case it isn't self evident enough from the title the project consists of Smith making an illustration for every page of Thomas Pynchon's book Gravity's Rainbow. I decided I would pretty much do the same for my project. I won't force an illustration for every page though, if I feel there is nothing worth illustrating on a page I will move onto the next page. I plan for each illustration to be a4 sized and to be stuck chronologically on a wall. I will use a range of media but will probably focus on pen and inks as they are my preferred medium. I plan for the illustrations to be largely black and white with hints and touches of colour here and there. For the most part where there will be colour I want there to be a reason for it being there. I also don't want to do all the work in complete colour because I just don't think that a wall of illustrations right next to each other, all in complete colour would be very visually welcoming, I would rather do something a bit more low key.

I did contemplate doing another comic for this project as I did enjoy it last time. The problem with a comic though is you can't really spend a lot of time on each drawing as each one is just a panel in a much bigger work and you have to keep going onto the next. Obviously you can make each panel into it's own incredible illustration but this is hard especially when you're constantly repeating the same setting and characters over and over again in each panel in a page, I also always think when most people read a comic they usually move straight on from one panel to the next so their focus on the illustration's is restricted by trying to keep up with the narrative. My current idea doesn't have a clear narrative to it (there are recurring characters and motifs though) so I feel I can spend more time making each drawing a fully formed illustration. I also won't have to deal with text in my work like I had to with my comic book and as a whole don't really enjoy.

Project 6: Reading and Responding

My new project is called Reading and Responding. For this project I have to choose a text (in the loosest meaning of the word) and produce a body of work around it. The text I've decided to work with, at least for now, is The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. It is probably my favorite book and it includes lots of imagery and characters that I want to draw. For now I'm just finding parts that interest me visually and working from there.

 

Here is a first version of the booklet. The pages are a low quality because: 1. I scanned them at a low dpi and 2: I didn't bundle the image files with the inDesign file I made the booklet on. Because of this I didn't take to much care cutting the book down and was using a broken guillotine, this means the pages are a little uneven. I didn't cover enough of the front cove page in black ink and so had to cut off some of the title to stop the white of the page from showing. This is easily rectifiable though by putting more ink on the original cover. I put text boxes over Herbs narration as I had made some spelling mistakes, but also wanted to change some of the wording slightly and wanted the narration to stand out a bit from the rest of the comic (Like how breaking the 4th wall always stands out in a movie). I think they may stand out too much and not fit in with the rest of the comic. I don't think it's too bad however and part of the reason is the difference in quality which will disappear when the images are printed to a higher quality. I believe slightly yellowing or greying the text boxes should solve this issue. I may resize the back cover image so that it takes up most of the page or at least expand on the ink shading over the top so that it blends into the background a bit more. I'm also playing with the idea of putting the image into the inside back cover and leaving the back cover blank maybe black.