OUIL603 Evaluation

I feel this module is one of my stronger modules out of all three years (though maybe not as strong as COP). It’s allowed me to just be able to develop my practice and being able to pick and choose briefs that will help me personally develop works for my portfolio.

Starting off this year I was just starting to notice where my tone of voice sat and this module has let me play with media and develop my practice, giving me a consistent and coherent tone of voice that is very clearly mine and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching my work develop.

I was completely self indulgent this whole module, so all of my work is very much based off briefs that appeals to me and is perhaps not the most commercial. This was simply because I knew I would make terrible work if I wasn’t invested in the brief, and as a professional I would have plenty of briefs I probably wont be so enthusiastic about, so I should spend my learning days doing stuff I like to really hone my practice. For me; this worked and I have a body of work that I am extremely happy with, I can always take these images and apply them to things to show how they would work in a commercial sense.

I have thoroughly enjoyed developing my practice in papercraft and printmaking. I did enjoy the semi 3D things I started to make for FMP as it opened up a whole world of freedom for me in terms of my work because it meant I could create completely different compositions while photographing things that would have taken much longer and much more effort just drawing. Though I don’t think I will do it for every future project, it is something I would like to look more into, as well as expanding on my paper craft. For the EOYS I’m looking at re-making something from this but larger scale so that will be interesting.

Most people I talk to comment on how different my work is and how far I’ve come since I started the course which makes me feel proud of myself, I’m going in a completely different direction to what I initially thought I would 3 years ago but I’m much happier with my work and my budding practice.

I’ve made a bit of money off my work this year so that’s promising and positively re-inforcing me, giving me some confidence than I can continue this as a viable career.

OUIL603 Project Report

OUIL603 Final Solutions

OUIL603 Statement of Intent Review

These are my statments of intent: I'm just going to write some notes about my rationale and what I think I have or haven't achieved this year.

May 2017

I think I have successfully developed a coherent and consistent tone of voice throughout my work that I can apply to a variety of different uses : including publishing, the music industry, posters, packaging / advertising.
 - I would still like to look further at advertising. I am unsure if my work is so commercial but I think it definitely could be adapted. An idea I've had floating around in my head is cocktail menu's or adverts, cause alcohol always has weird limited edition stuff.

In my FMP I finally got round to doing some monoprinting and have continued doing bits of lino printing here and there that I have incorporated into my work. This will continue in my future practice as it has been incredibly helpful in moulding my tone of voice in regards to shape and texture. Monoprinting is also good for me because there's a lot of freedom and spontaneity (for me anyway because I do not intend to make anything solely monoprinted), which is something I kind of need in my practice in some way shape or form.

I think this year I have achieved what I set out to do which was improve technical skills and develop a tone of voice, because at the end of last academic year I felt a bit lost about what I was doing and now I'm at least 5% clearer

FMP || Presentation boards

FMP || FINAL IMAGES

(It took me ages to make the issuu document so all the pieces that were meant to be double page spreads came out that way so, take a moment to appreciate that)

So here they are, the final images!

1. Front cover: full design below. I meant to follow the Folio Society's competition specs but ended up doing just a generic book cover.

2. a pattern shown earlier on my blog, made from monoprinted pieces; could potentially be used as a 'blank' inside cover.

Title Pages:

 The Bloody Chamber title page: Minimal  - similar to front cover, plain white background.
other pages also have title pages for The Company of Wolves and The Tigers bride which all fit into this layout. I didn't want the images to be as detailed as the actual illustrations, but just a teaser for them - like a title is for a story. I'm happy with how these turned out! I think together they're coherent and also don't look too different from the inner illustrations while having a little bit of a more minimalist feel to them.


I would ideally would have liked to have done a couple of smaller floating spot illustrations for this so they're not all images of massive scenes.

I think for the bloody chamber I focused the scenes that I illustrated a little too close together, however these were exciting scenes and if I continued the project I would potentially do many more illustrations for the beginning of the story.

What I really love about how all the illustrations turned out is that I was not limited to just using various reds, I was able to use a bunch of greens and blues which personally I find more visually appealing and exciting. The colours don't detract from the tone of the image which i'm really happy with!

I really wanted to properly show the front of the iron maiden in this, so I slid it behind the text, I'm not sure if I'm happy with it, it looked much the same with or without so I decided to keep it there but it might be a little too clunky.

FMP || Digital Tweaking

I brought the photographs into photoshop and started merging other imagery and textures to create a full, finished image rather than just a kind of shoddy photograph. This phase really pulled things together and helped me to accept and see the images as work that was actually good rather than unfinished things lying about.  

Looking back, this may have worked better as a spot illustration ad the grey background kind of pulls away from the fire, but it shows how I add to the images to make a 'final' 

I knew i would not get as much finished as I wanted to so I did a few rough composition ideas for a Company of Wolves illustration. 

FMP || More final Photographs

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Realised I needed to take more photo's cause I wanted to get some Tigers Bride stuff done!!
Took these at home so they're not quite as good as the ones I took at uni - background paper isn't as smooth, lighting isn't quite as bright but they'll do the job.

FMP || Final Photographs

A selection of the final photographs that I could potentially use for my final final images!!

I did not plan my time well and had to photograph everything in the studio, instead of the photography rooms. I could have gotten lights and a background roll out which may have made the backgrounds of the images slightly clearer but honestly - I was running out of time and figured the natural light would suffice and big professional lights probably wouldn't have made that much of a difference.
Whatever choice I made the photographs came out pretty well, I got some sharp shots from lots of different angles.

The photography let me get different angles on the more 3D items which gives me a lot to work with when I go on to play with the images digitally. This is pretty fun because it gives me more freedom with composition and different options to change the entire look of a piece without having to redraw an entire image, just chopping and changing different elements. I was able to twist and fiddle about with things while photographing them which gave me a variety of shapes and changes to use.

This was a difficult experience because I have not done this before and my time management and deteriorating mental health problems fucked my work ethic. The 3D stuff was interesting - construction wise cause I was basically just winging it.

I appreciate the fact that I can mix media, as my stuff thats solely papercut is a little messy but being able to digitally mash things together.

FMP || 3D THINGS

I've made about half the 3D things I wanted to for this.

I have not really worked very much in this kind of method before but it is mostly papercut stuff. There's so many bits and pieces about.

I know the final images will be digitally enhanced so I"m having a hard time viewing my pieces as 'good' because I know they're all unfinished and so they look kind of rough and janky on their own even though I have spent a lot of time and effort on making them!!!!

I have some ideas in my head for what I want the images to look like once I've completed them fully; but I do have to take the final photographs to be able to edit them.

I took Jamies advice and added foamboard to the backs of things so that they would stand up properly for photographing purposes, it was a good shout.

The iron maiden is the pieces i'm most happy with because I think the paintwork on the outside has that really aged spooky aesthetic.

The pieces allow me to make some pieces that can be a little more abstract and unsettling but still capturing the narrative and the feel of the stories without being wildly blatant about things???

S7 : PERSONAL JESUS

A bit of a spontaneous idea; I wanted to do an MSI song and remembered they did this cover of Personal Jesus. 

From here I decided I was going to do a general concept for 'personal jesus' with three varying covers, a Depeche Mode one, a Marilyn Manson one and a Mindless Self Indulgence one. 

So far I only managed to get the general concept image and the MSI one done.

The general layout of the image is pretty obviously based off religious iconography of Jesus... doing the hand thing?

It might be a bit blasphemous but I don't think any heavy religious people are gonna be into my work anyway!

I added the phone because of the lyric "flesh and bone by the telephone, lift up the receiver I'll make you a believer" 

The MSI variant had to be pink, to match the video and basically their entire musical career. I'm cheating on the 'secret 7' rules cause this is my brief i'll do what I want to and I've added the initials of the band. 'MSI', just to be able to properly differentiate when I actually get around to doing the other two variants. 

This was a pretty spontaneous idea I think I did a whole one sketch of this, and I'm pretty pleased with how it's come out so far. It's pretty much exactly how I imagined it. 

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the lyric sheet that I usually do yet though. 

Tutorial with Jamie : 03/05/2017

All my stuff is kind of bits and pieces still getting towards a final thing right now. I know what I'm doing but I've come down with a spot of crippling depression and my work ethos has gone out the window. lol. 

My dangly bits and pieces connected to the wolf are kind of like this Cornelia Parker doodabber. 

( the bits and pieces weren't connected yet, I just proposed it as what I wanted to do with the pieces: Jamie said to consider a large scale version of this for the EOYS)

3D things are pretty cool - Just make the damn things : Think about how they're going to work in context  - roughs of how they'll sit on the page as an illustration - not just how they'll be put together as an image you feel me? Think about adding backgrounds or other things digitally.

Laura Carlin's Book:

http://www.lauracarlin.com/a-world-of-your-own/jlrhl4hz9ktajiujw4t7bkj3ist3eo

uses a mix of 3D / 2D drawings together - Think about doing something similar, adding extra bits, mixing things together (definitely, thats like my favourite thing to do, but I've got to get the pieces finished first ahhh) 

The little excess scraps of paper are cool to have around cause I can mix and match with all the bits and pieces. 

compared to cop work it's pretty restrained (I mean my cop was pretty fucking wild you gotta admit)

maybe I need to let loose with it, I mean I like what I'm making. I just hadn't gotten all the weird stuff together. I don't really like making things just to cut them up (when its an actual image and not a textured piece of paper so I guess thats holding me back a little. I'm a messy worker and guess I should just embrace being messy at this point, like why try and be restrained??? Idk I feel like I don't realise I'm 'restraining' myself I just do what feels right for the project lol)

Questions brought up: Where do I see my work being? / my portfolio appealing to (I've done a whole PPP module and I still have no idea, especially right now I'm in this mental health hellscape it\'s not something I've been too focused on. I want to dabble, and don't want to limit my options) 

How does my COP fit into my other work? / Is it in my portfolio. 

-It's not in my portfolio but maybe it should be. 

The ideas behind my cop was the important part, the whole feminist thing and such - the image making was just some weird shit stuff that was appropriate to that and not something I see being interwoven with my practice so much?

What do I want people to think looking at my work?  

Again I don't know, generally I get the "thats a bit weird that" and I like that but not everything I make is super weird???

Anyway for this I should up the weird. 

S7 : Shake it out - Florence and the Machine

Image inspired by the line "I am done with my graceless heart, so tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then re-start" and "it's hard to dance with a devil on your back" 

I didn't intend this to be part of the series but after I made it I realised it fits the format and could very easily be applied to a record sleeve so I decided to include it. 

This was more feelings based for me so I think the imagery is a bit more visceral. It didn't come from a sketch I just started on it while I was listening to the song.