OUIL406 Evaluation

Leeds College of Art BA (Hons) ILLUSTRATION	Level	04
OUIL406 Visual Communication	Credits	20
End of Module Self Evaluation

NAME	Molly Halson

1.  What have you learned about visual communication during this module and how effectively do you think you have applied these ideas?
·         I've learned to think in simpler terms about image-making, especially during the 4 Cities brief. By this I mean reducing things down to their basic parts and using shape to communicate the message rather than focusing on lots of complex detail. ·         There are a lot of ways to communicate things, sometimes it's best with simplicity and reduction, and others better with symbols.
2. What approaches to/ methods of image making have you developed and how have they informed your concept development process?
·         I've improved my proficiency with Illustrator and vectors, which relates again to the reduction and communication of ideas - sometimes simple is better! ·         I've enjoyed learning how to make GIFs, even though I did struggle with the brief as a whole.
3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
·         I'm starting to loosen up my drawing style and take more risks within my work, being less concerned with perfection. This can actually work to my advantage, as with the Persons of Note brief. ·         I do still like and think I'm good at the process of roughing and getting better at drawing multiples of things in order to improve my general drawing skill. ·         I'm gaining confidence in my work and my practice through each brief as I try new things.
4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?
·         Probably the quantity - within some briefs, like the GIF brief, I wasn't really exhaustive in my approach to the task, and didn't really create that many ideas. ·         Similarly in the Persons of Note brief I didn't experiment that much with colour or media, I was kind of set from the beginning on what I wanted to do and didn't push any other ideas further. ·         I regret that I didn't really put my whole heart into the digital GIF. It had so much potential and I could have learned a lot more if I'd made the effort.
5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?
·         I say this every time (and I do really try) but I want to manage my time better. I need to start coming up with schedules or something and have dedicated time to working on briefs and not procrastinate. ·         Work with a wider variety of media. ·         Push myself to try different approaches to image-making and media, like digital.
6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas: (please indicate using an ‘x’)  5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
	1	2	3	4	5
Attendance				x
Punctuality				x
Motivation			x
Commitment			x
Quantity of work produced			x
Quality of work produced			x
Contribution to the group				x
The evaluation of your work is an important part of the assessment criteria and represents a percentage of the overall grade. It is essential that you give yourself enough time to complete your written evaluation fully and with appropriate depth and level of self-reflection. If you have any questions relating to the self-evaluation process speak to a member of staff as soon as possible.

Persons of Note outcomes!

What went well:

• From feedback, I did set out what I wanted to achieve - the comics made people laugh!
• I was a bit rushed for time at the end so some of the colouring with ink is a bit messy, but I actually quite like it - this brief has let me loosen up a bit and try some low-fi work which allows the idea to be communicated simply and effectively.
• Use of roughing in my sketchbook to flesh out ideas and practice the skill of drawing multiples until I get it right

What didn't go well:

• I started the whole project a bit late and spent a lot of time roughing out ideas so by the time I'd narrowed them down to the ones I wanted to use I didn't have loads of time!

What I'd do differently next time:

• Better time management - not staying up until half 6 the morning of my print booking
• More experimentation with colour and media in my sketchbook
• More research/sketching of the other two people I was given

Ideas refinement

Now that I've drawn out most of the ideas I had in roughs, I thought it was time to narrow them down to the best ones. I decided to pick 20 comics - 16 for the poster, 3 for the postcards and 1 for across the stamps:

Then I started playing around with colours.

And a couple of the comics! They've been well-received so far:

Tutorial feedback

When I came back from the holidays I had my tutorial with Jamie. Since I missed the first crit, no-one really knew what I was up to with this, so it was good to explain my ideas to someone and get a bit a feedback on what could be improved.

Jamie gave me the idea of having a comic strip across the stamps, like each stamp is a panel, which I liked.

I know I'm not as far along with the project as some people in terms of the quantity of work, but at this point I'm definitely focusing more on the ideas. I just need to start moving away from pencil roughs and on to inks!

I'm pretty sure that for these comic strips I want to kinda emulate the style of Kate Beaton, as in just using simple inks or watercolour, again so that the focus isn't pulled away from the humour and idea within the comic.

I'm gonna use an orangey brown palette because many of the pictures of Valentina that I looked at have her in her orange space suit or brown jacket. Also it's kinda similar to soviet propaganda.

Jamie also liked this sort of thing in my sketchbook, where I was experimenting with just trying to draw straight on to the paper with pen (still something I struggle with!). He liked the line quality and said there's humour in it - I'm achieving what I want to achieve! Wooo

Finally, Jamie gave me some artists to look at:

Dan Berry

I do like this, as he has the same kinda low fi comic style as Kate Beaton, although his work reminds me a little of Quentin Blake, and Kate's reminds me of Bryan Lee O'Malley with manga influenced eyes (big eyes).

Jon McNaught

I do like the colour palettes that McNaught uses, although his work is quite melancholy and scene-focused rather than humour and character based which is what I'm doing at the moment.

COMIX! Development

I started developing some initial ideas for comics using roughs:

I also constructed an ordered chronological list of comic ideas, with an approximate poster layout:

I'm not sure whether to have 20 comics or 16 on the posters - in theory I could fit 20, but there might not be room for a title and the text in speech bubble may be hard to read.

Also as I was developing my ideas, I went back to principles I learned in Visual Language - drawing the same thing out over and over until you get it right! It really helped - Putin's face is really hard to draw for some reason!

Persons of Note research and ideas

I was having kind of a bad week last week, so I missed the first crit because I hadn't done much research beyond wiki (yikes), and couldn't face coming in. However, now that I'm home for the holidays and have my family to support me, I've been feeling better and got some research done!

My 3 persons of note are:

• Noam Chomsky
• Valentina Tereshkova
• Prince Buster

I'd only heard of Noam Chomsky and even that was vague, I wasn't sure who exactly he was or what he'd done in his life.

When I was doing my initial Google searches, I had a couple of ideas for comics for each person! I love drawing comics and inserting humour into my work where I can, as I did in the very first brief we got (typology poster), as well as a little bit of my own personality.

In the last week of term I did manage to venture out to Travelling Man to buy myself something to cheer me up a bit, and I got Kate Beaton's anthology of comics, Hark A Vagrant, which I've been wanting to buy forever. Reading the book was what gave me the idea to make this brief all about comics! Kate Beaton makes funny little comic strips about historical figures and literary characters, based on real events (or fictional if it was a character), but inserting modern humour. 

These are just some of my favourites. I love her line quality and use of pen and ink textures - really simple but there's something about the line quality and low-fi almost childlike drawing that gives the work that added humour. I figured this brief would be a good chance for me to further my development and come out of my analytical shell in terms of my visual signature.

I figured that whoever I ended up choosing out of the three I was given, I could create lots of little comic strips based on things they did or events in their life etc etc, and arrange them across the 3 formats we were given.

SO

I read some stuff, watched some stuff, listened to some stuff and then made some mind maps, which is how I used to like working at school when developing ideas:

As you can see, I had the most ideas for Valentina Tereshkova! I really enjoyed reading things about her life, and I came up with A LOT of ideas for comic strips. I had a few ideas for Noam and Buster, but I just wasn't as interested in communicating them. I found wrapping my head around Noam Chomsky's theories on language quite difficult, but I was quite interested in his political activism in his later years. There were also a few aspects of Prince Buster's life that I found interesting, like his musical feud with Leslie Kong, but I just didn't have the same wealth of ideas that I did with Valentina!

Matt also made me think about something in the last brief. Because I was doing musical genres in cities, I picked iconic figureheads who all happened to be male, and he asked where the women were. So I was also influenced to do a woman. 

Girl power!

FINISHED POSTCARDS

What went well:

• I managed to complete a task using vectors! The thought of this was quite daunting at first because I'd never used Illustrator before, but once I got the hang of it, it wasn't so bad to use, and is a skill I might attempt to refine in the future, if I get another brief where it seems appropriate. Perhaps CoP
• I strayed from my usual practice of focusing on detail, and instead focused on shape, symbol and colour.
• I looked at a few artists to help influence my work, using methods and skills from their practice to influence my own work.

What didn't go well:

• Time management! Still something I struggle with, especially during the initial stages of a brief. I can get stuck in if there's a buzz in the studio and everyone's working right after we're set a new brief, but then my motivation can start to lack once we have to manage our own time.
• I'm not sure that these final postcards are innovative enough. I started out quite ambitious but was forced to hone down my ideas due to time restraints and my limited skills with Illustrator, as well as own ideas.
• I'm not sure I 100% stuck to the brief - these don't necessarily immediately portray cities, as the brief suggests, I focused on character and people instead, which is what I'm passionate about, but could have considered the cities themselves more in my final outcomes.  

What I would do differently next time:

• Manage my time better and start the process of ideas generation sooner.
• Generate more ideas directly related to the brief, i.e. the cities rather than the people.
• Innovate!

Last two postcards

After simplifying Kurt and Liam, I decided outright to start simple with Biggie Smalls and Sid Vicious. I tackled Sid first because I had a Noma Bar-esque idea for him:

 For Biggie Smalls I tried to somewhat emulate the work of Stan Chow by using gradients:

However, I realised I was actually outright copying his style, rather than just being influenced by it, especially considering Chow had done a portrait of Biggie already. I decided to go back to simple shapes and forms, but kept the gradient in the crown.

More development (postcards)

After my last post I decided to look specifically for existing vector illustrations of the four people I chose to represent my cities, specifically work by Stan Chow and Noma Bar.

I wasn't expecting both artists to have made portraits of all of them, but I found a few:

• The first one is actually Noel Gallagher, not Liam, but it's an example of how features can be exaggerated and the people turned into easily identifiable caricatures.
• I love Chow's use of gradients in his work - it gives just a little bit of depth and complexity rather than symbolic flat colours.
• Kurt Cobain by Noma Bar I really love. Noma Bar is incredible at using objects and motifs incorporated into portraits to further represent who they are. For example, the music notes in the sunglasses, and in an earlier post, Amy Winehouse with facial features made up of a spoon of heroin and a lighter. This is an example of how simple can be really effective, and it's something I'd like to be able to do.

After trying to experiment with a more complex original idea for the portraits, I felt like simple could work a lot better. It would also be something new for me, as I like to draw details and line, rather than simple shape forms.

I made quite a few different versions of Liam Gallagher and Kurt Cobain, once I started looking at these two artists. I was inspired and influenced by their simplicity, as when I started the project having never used illustrator before, I think I was quite arrogant maybe about what I could achieve? Or was creating too much work, unnecessary work, especially when these simple portraits convey meaning just as well, maybe even better, than a very complex drawing.

Anyway, development of Liam:

So going from complex, to simpler and simpler still. The last one is my attempt at super simplicity, like Noma Bar, although I couldn't think of an appropriate associated object to incorporate, apart from the sunglasses, but I think all you need is the hair, as his was so iconic.

Development of Kurt:

Again, a similar process of complex to simple. After talking with people in the studio it was suggested that maybe the third one wasn't clear enough as to who it was, without any other signifier apart from the hair, so I made two other versions, one with a beard and one with Kurt's iconic sunglasses. I do think his face look too bare with nothing apart from the hair, and my favourite is probably the second one, as you can easily tell who it is. I like the sunglasses one but again couldn't think of a way to make use of them without copying Noma Bar.

Poster communication

For this task we were instructed to pick a famous person and represent them on a poster without using their face. I chose Kurt Cobain since I'd just been representing him in the 4 Cities brief.

I came up with a few roughs, some expanding on ideas I'd had in the previous brief, such as the white sunglasses he wore, which were iconic among fans.

I enjoyed the going back to basics in the 4 Cities brief, by using vectors and simple shapes, rather than a lot of complex detail, so I decided to do the same here.

Matt questioned the use of space around the sunglasses, but I quite like the simplicity and not using the whole frame. I placed the glasses approximately where Kurt's face would be if it were a portrait of him. Could be symbolic - the fact that he's not alive anymore. I used a blue background reminiscent of the album Nevermind.

However, this poster didn't take me very long to do, so I decided to make another while I had time. I used the song Heart-Shaped Box to create a visual pun, again using space around the image. 

I also quite liked the Pennyroyal Tea idea, but it's not one of their most famous songs, so I wasn't sure if people would get it. I guess fans would.