Project Report

This year I feel for the first time that the research and process I have undergone during studio practice has really formed the backbone of how I think as a visual communicator, and illustrator moving beyond University.
At the beginning of the year I depended very heavily on digital work, which itself was a departure for me in comparison to my early work from level 5. I was conscious that I did not want to lose the more analog elements of my work that I have always found engaging and the most fruitful in terms of idea generation. However, I was also conscious to not rely too heavily on that aspect either because it has been my downfall before, especially in level 4, wherein I would end up with lots of roughs and potential for finished work, but no actual complete work to be able to show.

This year has been defined by combining practices that I hadn't really considered before, such as collage, photography and typography into illustration that I have found to be some of the more successful work I have made on the course. I think that my time management can always be better, as the balance of the dissertation and context of practice this year did make it quite hard for me to keep up with the briefs I set myself for this module. Luckily, I was able to make up for this after context of practice finished, and I worked hard to create an extensive body of work that I feel best represents both who I am currently as a creative practitioner, and the improvements I desire to make once leaving university.

The briefs within this module have challenged my ways of thinking more than anything else, which I am pleased about because they came along quite organically. Issues such as race and sexism are always things I have wanted to respond in some way to before, but have never really found the appropriate medium or outlet. The creative freedoms of this module allowed me to finally start to explore these things, specifically in my TIMES UP brief and my Black Panther brief. Although I am not a woman and have never experienced sexual misconduct in the workplace, I found researching the topic and making work in response to it incredibly invigorating. That brief made me realise that just because a cause doesnt personally or directly relate to you, doesnt mean it isnt something you can actively campaign for and support through your work. This feels like a lesson that will be much more valuable moving forward, especially as we advance into the industry world and begin to take clients for different purposes and causes.

Conversely, the Black Panther brief gave me the opportunity to address some issues regarding race, something that has always affected me either directly or indirectly. It was a transformative process for me during this brief in particular as I started to feel proud of my work in a sense that was largely unfamiliar with me up to this point, and I feel my research and conceptualisation really helped build a foundation for this.


My longest running brief, the music based brief, was the one that has largely formed the backbone of my practice up to this point in a more practical, commercial and aesthetic sense. A couple of examples of exposure taught me that this work is marketable, something I was very worried about at the beginning of this year. Moving forward, I want to keep doing these designs as a way to excercise the creative muscle, and make sure that no momentum is lost in my practice when we leave university.
An element I always feel is weak in my own submission is my blog, and I could have utilised it more this year. I found myself working practically so much and trying to understand the development of my practice, my blog became for me a less honest place, as I felt somewhat self conscious of trying to analyse each and every decision I made. A lot of the time this process slows me down so I tried to streamline the way I think and work this year in order to hopefully strengthen my practice for the future.

Design Boards

HAIM finished poster

Times Up & Me Too - purpose & context

While researching the current spate of revelations in Hollywood, it's been good to see the amount of positivity arising around the situation, especially in movements like Me Too and Times Up. The main thing I find inspiring about these movements is that they are positively feminist, something that the internet in general largely misunderstands. A lot of people see feminism as something that threatens masculinity, and that feminists want to be, or see themselves as, superior to men. That isn't the point of feminism, the point of feminism is equality. Feminism says that no one of any gender/sex should be above anyone else for any reason, that everyone is equal. So whenever someone is surprised at a man for being a feminist, it's largely because they misunderstand the meaning of what feminism is.
In this same vein, the #MeToo and Times Up movement really speak a positive message to me because they are focused entirely on equality. It isn't as if you have to be a woman to be a member of either of these groups, or that women have an authority over the groups. The members are equally comprised of men and women without discrimination, unified in support of those sexually abused in the industry.

In relation to my practice, and more specifically, the zine I’ve been developing, it is refreshing to see movements like this. Because this issue isn't something that directly affects me (and sexual misconduct from a woman's perspective isn't something that I’ll never directly experience or fully understand, purely because Im not a woman), I was conscious that it might not be my place to make this work or say the things I want to say with it. But seeing these movements taking place has shown me that just because this isn't something that has happened to me, doesn't mean I can't talk about it and respond to it.

Working on this has been a really interesting learning process for me and has helped me to adapt my work to situations I wouldn’t usually approach within my practice.

Twin Shadow ft. Haim - Saturdays

• Recommended Listening: Twin Shadow ft. HAIM - Saturdays
  
  Combining hand drawn elements with digital block colour is my preferred way of working at the moment. I think the solid line contrasted with the colours works well to convey a simple and direct message in an illustration like this one.
  The romantic and retro aesthetic of the song communicates a sort of happy naivety, and I thought that approaching this from a perspective of youth was the best way to reflect these feelings visually.
  The idea of making a mixtape for someone is something I would consider a classic romantic gesture, as it's a simple thing but clearly shows that it's taken time and consideration, and I wanted to get that across here. I wanted the cassette to be the only heavily coloured object in the frame, to accentuate it's importance in the narrative of the illustration. The hands I left without colour because the main thing I want the viewer to focus on is the gesture itself of someone giving the tape to someone else, rather than who the people actually are.

Dream Wife - Fire

Recommended Listening: Dream Wife - Fire

For this cover, I tried to find a way of illustrating the band without explicitly illustrating the band, by spending ages making portraits of them or drawing them as full fledged characters or anything like that, as thats something I would probably have leant on in the past.
The band Dream Wife is comprised of three women, so I wanted that element to be present in the design. While listening to the song I thought of the three fates of Greek Mythology, because of the way the three women seem to share a single voice between them, in an almost eerie way. I thought the defining features of these mythological characters would be either their shared eyeball or their hands, that were used to draw out the thread of mortal lives and cut them with scissors to measure people’s lifespan.

Haim - surprise competition brief

Create a poster designed to be sold at HAIM’s gig - Red Rocks, Colorado - May 28th
Communicate the bands sound

Their image? - don't focus on portraits
Instrumental, focus the piece of music - percussion and instruments, not on lyrics - could become too specific and alienate a certain audience

Themes! Work! Change!

The itsnicethat brief has given me a solid kick towards visualising this zine in a specific context. I think it should be linked to feminism as that’s something I often find coming up in my research but never properly coming through in my work. The idea of equal representation for women, especially in music and films, has always been something I’ve found myself very aware of, mostly because I don’t understand how in a modern society the misrepresentation and sexism is still so prevalent.

This has all been at the forefront of my mind with the almost weekly revelations about sexual misconduct in Hollywood. While it isn’t something that directly affects me, that makes me want to make work in response to it even more. I think that if I only make work that relates to me or my life specifically, my practice will just stagnate, so I’m conscious that I want to branch out into different topics moving forward.

Response to ItsNiceThat brief - International Women's Day

Having worked on early roughs for my zine based around the roles of Laura Dern, I found it quite organic to adapt one of these ideas into a response for this brief. From the get go I was sure I wanted to use the image of Dr Ellie Sattler from Jurassic Park, as I’ve always seen that character as a great and under appreciated female icon in a largely male dominated franchise. She is never made into the damsel, she doesn’t have to depend on the men of the story to teach her anything or patronise her. But she’s often forgotten because she never runs around with bravado in front of the T Rex or has as many quotable lines as Jeff Goldblum’s character.

But since being young she’s always been my favourite character in Jurassic Park, I suppose because above all she’s equal to the men in the story, and there is no patronising story trope that shoves that fact down your throat, it is just an element of the story and it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that a woman can do a job as well as a man. For that reason, I wanted to illustrate her alongside my favourite quote of hers in the movie, when John Hammond stammers that it's too dangerous for a woman to go outside and fix something with all those angry dinos around.

ITSNICETHAT - itsbriefthat - International Womens Day

“Create an empowering symbol to celebrate International Women’s Day”.
This Thursday (8 March) marks International Women’s Day and in honour of the occasion our monthly brief is to create an empowering symbol which celebrates and unifies women from all over the world.

The symbol could be an illustration, digital design, collage or photograph, in fact disciplines of all kinds are welcome in this brief. The interpretation of what this symbol could be is also up to you. It could be a character, a photograph, or quite simply words.
There’s no winners when it comes to spreading a positive message, however we will highlight those who we think answered the brief in the most powerful way possible right here on the site, and on the It’s Nice That Instagram on Friday 9th March.

Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history that explores the developing intersection of African/African Diaspora culture with technology. It combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrism and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique the present-day dilemmas of black people and to interrogate and re-examine historical events.

Black Panther - links to music project

Recommended Listening: Run the Jewels - Legend Has It
                                         Kendrick Lamar - Pray for Me

One part of Black Panther that kicked off my interest was the collaborative soundtrack, orchestrated by Kendrick Lamar. An artist whose work I’ve been infatuated with since the age of about sixteen, I feel like it's fitting to now centre my work around themes he has raised in the world. A lot of his music has a strong lyrical foundation and discusses heavy themes while making it accessible for everyone to understand. At the same time, nothing is dumbed down or sugar coated, which is the element I love the most, because it's not afraid to tell the truth, at risk of pissing people off. I think that's important in the world today, as basically everything is usually heavily curated and packaged up all nice.

The soundtrack to Black Panther was overseen by Kendrick Lamar, but he doesn't appear on every song. The album is a large collaborative effort with over 20 other artists. Appreciating these lesser known musicians is the triumph of the album in my eyes, as most of them would never normally get the exposure of performing on an album this size for a film as big as Black Panther. I want to continue this theme with a visual interpretation, as I feel the whole point of the film is giving a voice to those who currently have none.

Black Panther - thoughts and responses

I’ve been looking forward to Marvel’s Black Panther for a few years now, but I didn’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I did. Race is never something I’ve properly talked about in my work before, while it's always been something I’ve been very aware of.

Being mixed race it's weird sometimes to think where you fit in, as I grew up with very few other black kids in my vicinity, I mainly spent time at gigs and parties where I would be the only one there. (Not a great many black teenagers are going to gigs for bands like The Cribs and Paramore). Not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, it's just something that you become very aware of. In music, books and film I’ve done a lot of research into black history and culture, especially in America.I feel like this last leg of the course should be an opportunity to really say something in response to these feelings and thoughts.

Watching Black Panther in the cinema was a unique experience for me, someone that is there for the midnight release of most of these nerd films, Star Wars etc. So seeing a whole new demographic being opened up to these films in the audience for Black Panther just felt like a really special experience. It's proof that these stories are able to access anyone from anywhere, in the same way that a bullied child finds solace in the heroics of Spider-Man, a young black child can now see himself in characters brought into the mainstream like Black Panther.

Paramore - Pool - digital collage

After the design I made before Christmas for the band Ider, i’ve been thinking more about using photography and digital collage in my work. Usually I would spend time drawing whatever visual element I needed for a composition like this, but in some cases, a photo is just more immediate and communicative, so it feels like a waste to not use them in certain opportunities. I do think that the photos I’ve used work quite well here, as I’m not really sure how hand drawn elements of these visuals would have worked.

Water is something I’ve always stayed away from illustrating, because looking at art that contains water sort of bends my mind and I can't visualise how it would work in the context of images I make. So using textures and images of water (and the lack of) was helpful in saying what I wanted to with this image.

The song uses the metaphor of  water and swimming pools to represent emotion and relationship. “Headfirst into shallow pools” suggests to me that the speaker is throwing themselves into a situation that could potentially be harmful, but is carelessly diving in headfirst anyway. I wanted to use the image of an empty swimming pool as it appears as sort of a liminal space, because normally (being full of water) you would float in it and be able to move in any direction. So stood at the bottom of one without water in it is a disconcerting experience, and hopefully that comes across in this design.
I enjoy working like this, it feels like I don't have to depend on certain ways of working to make things I’m happy with, and the message of the work is largely more important than the components that it's made up of.

X - MEN - ideas for prints/book?

Recommended Listening - Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

As COP has started to wrap up I’ve been trying to think again about making a book for part of extended practice, as it's something I don't feel like I’ve done as well as I could have so far in my practice. Linking to COP, my project focused on why people tell stories, and why similar characters and narratives reappear throughout history. I feel like there must be a subconscious link in the human mind that appears regardless of when or where we engage with a story. The same stories that appear in Star Wars can be identified in Flash Gordon, radio serials in the 1940s and books and stories way older than that, such as Lord of the Rings and even works of Shakespeare. Stories and characters are ways for us to see who we are and who we want to be, so it makes sense that so many people connect with the same characters and stories time and time again.

Characters that I have always found recurring in my life and work are the X-Men. I was never really sure why they seem to be so prevalent, I don’t much care for the films on the whole, I never really saw the cartoons when I was young. But I did read a lot of the comics when I was a teenager. The characters are stranger (and less marketable in general) than those present in the Avengers, who have become very much part of the public consciousness. But I realised recently that the point of the X-men is that they’re the underdogs.
They aren’t beloved in their own stories, they aren’t appreciated for their heroism, they are largely dismissed and hated for being freaks and monsters. I suppose the reason they have held a sway over my subconscious is because they were made to represent minorities in the world. They each deal with different facets of society, and how the public reacts to them. So I’ve always felt a connection to these characters because they were created to be reassurance to those who might be minorities or under-represented.