OUIL505 Applied Illustration SB1 - Initial Visual Journal Research/Project proposal

My initial idea and plans for this module were intially very very different. After starting off my research looking into character and narrative, I was heavy set in doing a module that revolved around character development - I wanted to do storyboards! Character sheets! I wanted to write a comic that had a merchandise line that I could then put on Kickstarter and make a real thing! Then I had a tutorial with fred, who pointed out that my idea didn't really meet the module requirements all that much and decided to re-write my proposal to meet something that was a bit more module-focused, and wasn't more than I could feasibly chew.

I knew I liked to draw things that often explained theories or subjects to people, and I've always been a fan of things like the Observer Book of birds, and so such educational tools - and decided to turn my focus less on Character & Narrative, and more onto illustration applied to Information & Education instead.

I originally had a plan to create a book, designed to inform people about the ecological role of spiders, and their importance - in spite of people's adverse attitudes towards them. I thought this would have been a cool idea, but I figured since spiders didn't necessarily require saving, since a lot (not all) of their species aren't particularly endangered in any way - there might be more pressing environmental issues that I could raise awareness about, which would be a more suitable application.

I have quite a vested interest in environmental conservation outside of uni, especially after the research I did into Naomi Klein on the last 504 module. Something i've had quite a lot of interest in recently is the alarming amount of plastic pollution that is currently not only circulating on land - but in the sea too. 

In recent times, a boy named Boyat Slat gained visability over his plan to clean the sea of plastic using an "ocean cleanup array"  - despite numerous scientists and environmentalists pointing out that due to the scale of the problem, no amount of 'cleanup' would be able to clean the existing pollution, which is causing really big problems for the habitats of fish, and also plastic in the food chain eaten by said fish. I thought this is something that has a lot of teeth to it - and would be a good basis on what to form a project on.