OUIL403 Visual Skills Day 3/4 - SB1 continued

After finishing my page of 'R's, I found myself immediately dry of ideas. I felt like I needed to elaborate on the stuff I'd pulled from Rosie's questionnaire in physical visual research - I knew roughly what I was trying to go for, but for some reason the ideas I was brainstorming just didn't quite seem to nail it.

To aid this 'dry spot', I went into the library to look up some Sci-fi/fantasy work as inspiration. This ended up being greatly helpful - Not only did I manage to find a fully illustrated Discworld Novel (which is Rosie's favourite book) I managed to source a series of Sci-fi/fantasy anthologies, full of fantasy worlds and buildings that formed a lot of my W's. I found a lot of the work was based on a mix of new with old - very Arts and Crafts/medievil inspired, but mixed with modern technology. Rosie very much painted her interests as very magic-orientated, childish and fantastical which suited this sort of work.

Day 4 entailed a peer-crit to get feedback as to what people felt were our strongest squares. Due to an unfortunate accident in which I sprained my foot the evening before, I ended up missing this session - instead running off the feedback I'd received through the week both from matt and peers in the studio. I was a particular fan of the more minimalist squares, but others felt that these lost the whimsy and the magical theme that seemed to run through most of her interests. Rosie was a particular fan of the creature based squares - particularly a dragon I drew that formed a 'W' square. Baring all this in mind, we then had to select 5 that we felt were the strongest and enlarge them with the aid of a photocopier.

Due to not being present in the session, the skill of enlargement was particularly difficult to get a hang of. Many photocopies had to be done before I managed to get them (relatively) size appropriate - it did, however, present some interesting results that I may choose to play around with in the future. 

Once I got my 5 individual images of choice, we then had to go on to create drafts of our final - incorporating both our given initials into one solid image, experimenting with different media.

I'd used a range of different media when throwing my squares down - from ink and brush, pencil, charcoal, biro and my standard markers too. One thing I've noticed with these medias, is whilst they're very good for fluid loose and energetic sketches, they take a long time to perfect for finished work. Not only this, but a lot of these ideas are very bold in nature, very shapely. As a result, I decided to look at using something entirely different from the tool-based media i'd used on my squares - and started working in paper instead.