Artist Identity Crisis!

I'm having a bit of an issue going into SB1!

On the one hand, I really enjoyed doing 'messy', quite quick gestural brush drawings for the zine brief with ink and bleach (above), which I think convey the themes and tone of Carter's stories (at least in The Bloody Chamber), but on the other I really love drawing comics that focus on humour, narrative and storytelling - something I identified in PPP last year.

I'd love to be able to do both (and even a variety of other things), but since this year is about specialising and starting to think about our professional practice, I think I have to choose to only focus on the comics, since that's what I enjoy most and would rather do for a living.

I'm still struggling with my own personal style - I don't really have one yet. Last year I did a lot of things inspired by other artists, and still haven't quite grasped how I personally draw things (like faces/people). I just wish we had more time to experiment!

Final zine and crit

I completed a task in time, and actually enjoyed doing it! I've been feeling quite low recently, so this is an achievement for me. I thought about composition whilst using a photocopier to make a zine - something I haven't actually done before.

However, I think the feedback I got was right - the dark, messy wolf drawings and the funny comic character of Carter don't really go together. Although I enjoyed messing about with gestural ink and bleach, it's not what I want to take further into my professional practice.

Study Task 1 - further zine development

I've photocopied some drawings I've done in my sketchbook and played around a bit with the photocopier, like scale and inverting some imagery:

I'm starting to think about the organisation of my zine - having some full bleed images and a contrast of some dark, and some light images.

With this wolf piece I've played around with the composition of the image and text on the page to see what looks best - I think I have to go for a portrait orientation, as everything else in the zine is portrait, and I think it would ruin the flow of reading a bit if it was landscape.

I think I've figured out how everything will look by cutting and pasting various bits on to paper, and so now I'm going to go photocopy the final thing!

Study Task 1 - zine-making process

Struggling to pick an author

I'm having trouble picking between Angela Carter and Shakespeare!

Pros of Carter:

• Rich descriptions - plenty of material for visual work
• I really enjoyed reading The Bloody Chamber
• Potential for lots of comics

Cons of Carter:

• Her work (at least this book) is quite dark. I generally prefer to draw quite light-hearted, funny comics, which might be quite challenging with Carter. However, maybe it could be a good challenge?

Pros of Shakespeare:

• A lot of his work is quite light-hearted and funny (Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream etc.), and focuses a lot on storytelling, character and humour, which I indentified last year as being important to my work.
• I already know a few of his plays quite well from studying them in English Literature
• He has a lot of work to choose from

Cons of Shakespeare:

• I already know a lot of his work - maybe I should focus on someone whose work I don't know so well and challenge myself a bit more.

I think I've left it a bit late to still be struggling with which author to pick! I planned to do loads of work over summer but got distracted and haven't done as much as I would have liked. I think I'll stick with Angela Carter - I've only read one book but I did really enjoy it and I think it'll be a challenge to use her work.

3rd author?!

I did a quick Google search of each author after the briefing and identified a few I might be interested in. I've settled on Shakespeare and Angela Carter for 2 of them but I'm struggling to pick a 3rd. It's between these 3 as it's getting a bit close to when we have to hand this in anyway!

• Ursula Le Guin
• George Orwell
• Cormac McCarthy

I read some of A Wizard of Earthsea by Le Guin, but it didn't really grab me. I like fantasy fiction,but this didn't really interest me that much.

George Orwell - I tried to read 1984 again (I've tried before), but just found it very slow and hard to get into. I usually really like dystopian fiction but this bored me a bit.

Similarly with Cormac McCarthy, I like dystopian fiction but the way he writes just irritates me! I can't get on with the fact that he doesn't really write dialogue. It's not in quotation marks, and that just really bothers me?? It's a shame because the book's been recommended to me a lot, and I feel like I would like it, but I just struggled to read more than a few pages after realising how he wrote dialogue.