Semester Two PortfolioMake Me Think + Independent Study

Graphic Design Aimee Pope

1 My response to readingW a y s O f S e e i n gb y J o h n B e r g e r

When I saw the title, I was intrigued. I was confronted on the off with talk about publicity images and how they belong in the moment. That they are merely ways of working on anxiety, nostalgia and a fundamental human need to be in wealth or position. I like the idea that there are so many publicity images around us and most we don’t take much notice of except for the ones that grab our interest because we have some interest or relation to it. It talks about being relative to freedom of choice for the buyer and freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer.

“The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of “The Free World.” For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice.”

I like the idea it also plays upon sexuality to sell products or services but from what I understand from reading this, the sexuality along with other things that publicity images may appear to offer are not an offering or substitute for the real thing. It’s a reminded or mirage of what could be and where that individual can envy him or herself being in the future simply by looking at the publicity image in front of them.

“In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power”

All in all, Ways of Seeing was a curious insight on how we perceive images around us and how they play on our emotions and how they are everywhere around us from posters to works of art such as Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe in how publicity images are presented.

2 The “I Can’t Draw” Manifesto

For a long time in my life, I have come across plenty of people who seem to coin the phrase, “I can’t draw,” or whatever variant they seem fit to conjure. However, there a subtle difference between being incapable to draw and be-ing incapable to draw. Everyone and anyone can draw, it is a simple matter of picking up a pen or a pencil making marks. That at the core is classified as a drawing, even if it just a stickman.

Why people seem to think they cannot draw is a curious idea and is food for thought. Does this mean that for them to believe that they can draw, it has to be a beautiful-ly hand rendered masterpiece or sketch? An engraving on a cave wall? basic art done by species of man from thousands of years ago?

Drawings don’t just consist of a piece of graphite in-side a cylindrical shape. One can use a pen, a brush, ink, paint, hands, feet… anything. “I can’t draw,” implies a motion, and action that one can’t achieve and yet all one has to do is make a few marks. Do drawings have to make sense or meet the norms and ideals of what makes sense?

With the manifesto I designed, I knew I had to look to people who weren’t in a artistic career field. This mainly consisted of friends and family with the odd stranger thrown in. I decided that badges would be an ideal medium for what I wanted to get from people. I’ve used a badge with a 25mm art space and as you can see above, placed them on one A4 sheet.

This also makes it fun for the person drawing their doodle of what they may consider to look like nothing at all but voila! They have a drawing and a bade all their own. I simplified things by keeping to black and white, though I have played around by changing the background colours which I may use for other projects, both personal and uni related.

All of the depictions set within the art spaces of the badges (except for an obvious one) are relatively simple and not all are clear as to what they’re depicting but that as it is, they’re all classified as drawings.

I think they’re all funky and interesting for people who they cannot draw to save their skins. It’s curious that some of these drawings bear some obvious and some not so obvious references to symbols of religious and film cultures such as the Star of David and the Smiley.

3 Mike Pawson WorkshopVikings, Books and Badges

Mike Pawson came in to do a badge workshop, and this was one of the very few workshops I enjoyed. He showed us his work containing books about Vikings and other subjects even though some seemed completely random. He then moved on to badge work and asked us to create a set of badges that went together using a provide template sheet.

We used materials that were available to use and I rifled through magazines till I came up with two badge sets. The first set was of the British icon, James Bond since he is instantly recognisable by most of the world today. Daniel Craig as Bond specifically. This was the set I chose for Pawson to badge up for me. The other set was of abstract puzzles from the games section of the Radio Times. I had gone on a badge design spree and it turns out that he liked the abstract design. Instead of the four badges I was expecting, he badged up one of the abstract badge designs as extra.

I particularly like the Daniel Craig as James Bond set as I am a Bond fan myself. The only one out of the Bond set I would change would be the close-up of Craig’s face. Other than that, I think they work quite well together. I didn’t particularly like the abstract one I did although I do like how it seems to have a constellation thing going in with the red dots.

4 Words that induce‘Lament’

We had to create a picture or moving picture that others had to guess what the word was behind it. We got Lament, so we tried to use water to create this after and film how the ink ran. Unfortunately, this really didn’t work as well as we expected it to and we ultimately went with something else. I decided to use a song of lament from a MMORPG that I play called World of Warcraft. It is called ‘The Lament of the Highborne.’

Original Thalassian lyrics Loose translationAnar’alah, Anar’alah belore By the light, by the light of the sunSin’dorei Children of the bloodShindu fallah na Our enemies are breaking throughSin’dorei Children of the bloodAnar’alah By the lightShindu Sin’dorei Failing children of the bloodShindu fallah na They are breaking throughSin’dorei O’children of the bloodAnar’alah belore By the light of the sunShindu Sin’dorei Failing children of the bloodShindu fallah na They are breaking throughSin’dorei O’children of the bloodAnar’alah belore By the light of the sunBelore The sun

I used inkjet ink and printed out the lyrics both in the Thalassian and English translations and using water, I managed to wet the paper enough so that I could get both to be visible against a light source. I quite like the effect and how simple it was to achieve.

5 AphorismsCuriosity Killed the Cat

Dictionary Definition ;

Aphorism - noun. a short, clever phrase which states something true-DERIVITIVES aphoristic adjective-ORGIN Greek aphorismos ‘definition’

For this brief we had to go off in our groups and make a video that represented an asphorism of our choice. We found two phrases that were to our liking and amusement. We had made a group on Facebook where we place them all.

The first was this ;

“Video games don’t affect kids. If Pacman had affected us when we were kids, everyone would be running around in darkened rooms, munching on magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music” - Davey Whipwreck, Even More Quotes!; jordansplace.net

The second was this ;

“Curiosity killed the cat”

We decided that even though the first was the funnier of the two, it didn’t exactly meet the definition of what an aphorism is, so we chose to depict ‘Curiosity killed the cat’.

We came to the eventual decision after much discussion with each other and tutors that we could use a box and pretend that there was possibly something inside it worth seeing when there was actually nothing. The idea was that the eventual blackness that swallows you into the box would be the translation for our chosen aphorism.

This was ultimately shown along with the rest of the groups animations in the Epsom Playhouse. I think we could have pulled it off a little better by getting two lights so it was brighter and that there was no shadow in play but it worked quite well despite that.

The link to the stop motion animation for ‘Curiosity Killed the Cat’ can be found here;

http://kathleen-pope.livejournal.com/6597.html

6 Make GoPictures that take you places in your memory

This was a group task. We decided to create a set of pictures that would induce a memory from a set of test subjects. We used pictures like beaches, palm tree, phrases and pets that would or could get some response. We tested the set on students from Mark’s foundation years.

7 The Girls workshopSpooky & the cheeky

This was a one day brief where we all got into groups of four and we had to create something that was a representation of ourselves. It was a response to a brief set by two people who came in who go by The Girls.

www.thegirls.co.uk

We decided to take photo’s of ourselves (not something I’m at all comfortable with on the best of days) looking from left, facing the camera and right.

We decided we want to try different avenues given what was interesting to us. Adam went off and made a spooky stop frame animation using the rotations of our faces.

You can find it here at ;

http://kathleen-pope.livejournal.com/6875.html

The rest of us thought we could pull off something remaniscent of Picasso’s paintings with our pictures and we played around with the various parts of our faces to create an even weirder face.

I toyed around with the images, changing

the saturation, hue and even played around with

visual effects like tiling the image with a inversed image showing

through behind.

8 PapercoPaper on the cake

This was a live brief with the paper stockist company, Paperco. In groups of twos, we chose one of four briefs and listened to what the company wanted to say so we could apply the information to the response to the brief.

Me and Stacey decided that because our brief asked for a momento or souvenir. We wanted to keep in mind that the company wanted to be as environmentally friendly as humanely possible and that they only use stock from sustainable sources as governed by the FSC and other authorities. We went with the idea of edible paper stock on the idea that you can’t get more environmentally friendly that eating and recycling it yourself.

For the most part, you can eat normal paper but we decided on using starch or rice paper. We intended to print the info on the paper with printed cake decor or food colouring. After talking the idea and dummy box with Sophie, we applied her advice and changed the standard rectangle box with a triangular, origami box that resembled a cake enforcing the idea that the paper was a tasteful alternative to recycling.

It was a keepsake the person could have a choice over between eating it and using the box for various trinkets, like earrings for example or whether they wanted to keep the edible booklet. It was a brief that was interesting on parts and rather tedious at times when working with another person but since the subject we used wasn’t really in my natural forte, I didn’t really take to it that way and it may have showed in the result.

We raised parts of the Paperco logo on the lid for texture to implicate how many different kinds of paper Paperco stock and how they also have different textures depending on the weights. We kept to the main two of the company colours and tried to keep within the set of restrictions on the logo use the company have set.

I think that with more refinement like making the box a bit neater and adding the website on the sides of the box would have helped it to go further.

9

LAB; Make Me Think

The idea I had with this was to make it a little more about me and those I’ve been with for the past two or more years in my life. People who have had some effect on me. I am fond of the phrase, “Pets leave pawprints on our hearts,” and the same is true of people. We are moulded by events and people and the choices we make in our lives. I decided to merge the two together and so on Facebook and other sites I asked people to tell me what animal they felt they would be if they weren’t human.

I didn’t get as much as I was expecting by the deadline I set for people to get back to me by. I then set out to make simple black and white stencils of those animals, which were quite varied amongst the people that got back to me. Along with the badge workshop, I think this is the only other project I’ve enjoyed.

Once I had made all the prints, I then edited some of them to give an aspect of the specific animal to add a little more personality for the person envovled. It didn’t work with all of the them, but with the ones it did work on... they were all funky. I added their names and where I knew them from before placing them up on one of the studio walls as if it were ground that had been trampled by all these people.

independent studyIndependent study has been something I have been struggling on for quite a while now and I was going to use black card to make an animation of moving silhouettes. Considering how many animals I have for my made up world of Nolfia, I found this to be a horrendously too long a task to complete within the time I knew I had at disposal.

After thinking on it for a while, I later decided to just focus on just one animal. For this, I chose the Hukra which is an animal that resembles a stag but is the size of a horse and walks in a similar fashion.

At first I tried to draw the frames without any reference to see if I could get it from memory but my attempts failed. So, I turned to the world of youtube.com to see if I could find any resource material that would help me with the walking rotations of a horse. I eventually found one at the following link by a guy called Richard Williams, who has done work for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one of my favourite animations. So that was a lovely surprise when I researched him.

He was really helpful with his video’s explaining how the hindquarters and the head go up and down together in the horse’s walk. Whilst his drawings weren’t anatomically accurate to the real horse, they were still very helpful with getting the walk right. I used different coloured fineliners to help me differentiate the legs and the movement. You can see the outline of the Hukra around the frames but I was mainly focusing on the walking rotation, though I realise I’ve forgotten to draw the antlers that appear both on males and females.

bibliography

Draw 50 - Horses (Lee J. Ames, 26/02/1988) Kingfisher Books Ltd. ISBN: 9780862723538

Animating Horse Walk Cycle (Richard Williams, 25/08/2009) Youtube.com HTML LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INQx-Lzs8mU&feature=mh_lolz&list=WL5601D19CE73D9A46

Visited Webb & Webb (James Webb and Brian Webb, 12/04/2011) HTML LINK: www.webbandwebb.co.uk

Even More Quotes! (Davey Whipreck quote) HTML LINK: http://www.jordansplace.net/homepage/quotes.html

BBC Science and Nature UK Wildlife Animal Tracks field Guide HTML LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/wildbritain/field_guides/animal_tracks.shtml

Simon’s Cat (Simon Tofield) HTML LINK: http://www.simonscat.com/Films/

Lament Of The Highborne (World of Warcraft) HTML LINK: http://www.wowwiki.com/Lament_of_the_Highborne

critical evaluation

This year has been rather hard for me and it has had its ups and downs. I’ve not had much feeling or love for the briefs set with a few exceptions here and there. I have tried to engage and try and gain motivation to do work for the briefs but my motivation and inspiration has been lacking for a considerable amount of time over the past year.

The two projects I feel I’ve had the most engagement with or enjoyed the most would be the Mike Pawson Badge Making workshop and the self-directed project with LAB: Make Me Think.

All in all however I’ve not enjoyed the course as much as I thought I would or what was expected for me. The briefs have stirred very little feeling and without that feeling, the work has suffered somewhat as a result.

I feel I have tried to do my best with the briefs set as best as I could without much motivation to help them to be better.