After drawing lots of albatrosses I did lots of quick ideas- as many as I could think of as fast as possible- churned out lots of pages. I tried not to judge the ideas before I got them down- and then reflected on them later. I also tried to think harder about certain ideas- so they were less superficial.
After talking with Jamie in my tutorial I decided which 3 roughs to do, 2 of which played on sayings alluded to and based around animals from the article:
-'Elephant in the room'- elephant squeezed into square frame
-Albatross feeding a chick assorted plastic- decided to do this one as the landscape one- fits best.
-Albatross hanging round the neck- I was thinking of using this as the landscape one I realised that the composition didn't quite work and I agreed with Jamie that it would work better as the portrait one.
The elephant (square) image already felt quite resolved- and just needed tweaking- which I did through testing in my sketchbook.
The landscape albatross image was more complicated but I had quite a solid idea of how the composition would work.
The portrait (albatross hanging around the neck) was the hardest- I agreed with Jamie that the 'hanging'- burden- needed to be communicated more subtlety than in the drafts (I had used a rope to connect the two).
I found this image the hardest- getting the balance between communicating the idea and being subtle was hard- but also compositionally. Only fairly late on in the project did I find out that the origin of the saying is from the poem 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' after talking to my mum about the project. Coincidentally, the character I had been sketching had been a fisherman. I wish I had found out about the poem earlier as there are some really nice illustrations from the poem (Gustave Dore).
I thought the fisherman on this image would be better with a slightly different tone of blue (rather than black) outline. This also means the albatross silhouette stands out more- however now I feel I should have atlas experimented with different options with this.
I decided to stick to a fairly graphic style throughout after the elephant idea- so the images had a consistency- however now I feel I may have focused on that too soon- at the detriment of image making. I also tried to maintain a similar colour scheme- and mostly used goache throughout.
In the end, I was really happy with the way the elephant turned out- especially the line work- however it occurred to me that it may not fully communicate the article.
I was less happy with the albatross images. I think I mostly struggled with the backgrounds- wanting to keep the compositions simple so they worked at the scale. I was not happy with the dry brush effect in the end- I don't think it gave it the right finish. Most other backgrounds I tried didn't really work either- but I definitely should have experimented more (COLLAGE) also I got the feeling that the problem may have been easier to solve with photoshop. I think the dry brush added to my feeling that the two albatross images weren't quite 'crafted' enough- similar to the first vis skills brief- maybe I didn't spend enough time on the final images.
Overall, I enjoyed the brief but I felt I need to think more about problem solving- which may be down to being more reflective- probably more just recording my reflections as I go. (USING THE BLOG/NOTES AS I GO).
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