Evaluation

Discussing Da Breef

The breif that we were given concentrated on the theme of "Combinations and Alliances". The vague nature of the theme allowed me to explore many different ideas and concepts. My initial ideas ranged from posters to childrens books and my main focus came to be about musicians and how they have met and colaborated through their work. I finialised my idea to that of a childrens book exploring the meeting of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. From this I began to explore further into the lives of these two people, and using a mixture of found material and my own previous knowledge of them, I began to formulate a storyline that the book could be on. I decided to use ideas from the lyrics of the two and came up with the idea of The Grand Wazoo, which followed a Wizard of Oz type story in which they were trying to find it to get things from it. I achieved my final book through a series of experiments and developments. I did character designs and looked at different artists to gain more ideas on how I could draw them. From these experiemnts I decided to concentrate on lino printing and photoshop to produce my book. I feel it worked well and it looked how I imagined it to.


Choose a piece that has been influenced by another artist/designer

I chose to make a book influenced by the work of Jon McNaught who's work I looked closely at. I liked the techniques he uses and the use on monochromatic colours within his work, I felt it gave the work a sence of unity and I felt I wanted to emulate this in my work inspired by him. I feel I gained knwoledge of a new way in which I can use colour in my work. Using all the same colour but in different tones isn't something I had tried before. When colouring my final piece I experimented with this way of using colour before deciding on how I was going to colour it.

Choose a piece where you have experimented with different processes.

I experimented with using acrylic which is something that I'd not used an awful lot before. I felt I wanted to properly use this medium and get better at it so I can expand the ways in which I can work for my final piece and for my work in the future. It developed my ideas as from this I decided that I definitely wanted to use colour in my final piece and not have it black and white which I initally wanted it to be. I feel doing this made me more open minded about using paints and colour in general. I was extremely pleased with how it turned out and because it looked really good it gave me the confidence to try other different processes.

Brain Storming

 

 These are the very first ideas I came up with after getting the breif. I came up with three ideas that I thought were good, and then came up with as many different things I could do with the ideas.

Photos of the subject matter

 

These are some pictures I got together of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart that I got for reference for when I was doing character design for some inspiration. This helped when drawing the initial ideas for characters as I knew which distinct features to include on my characters.

Character Design and Front Cover drafts

 

 These are some initial ideas for front covers, end papers and character designs that I had in the first stages of getting ideas for what I was going to do.

Character designs that are more realistic a bit

 

 To get more ideas for possible ways I could draw my characters for my book, I drew Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart in a bit more realistic way although on most of my attempts of drawing Captain Beefheart, he ended up looking like a fat George Harrison, so I decided that the realistic rout was not for me.

Character design

 

 Here are some initial character designs that I did. I got ideas from it so it was a good thing to do.

doodly things

I did this for an inital idea of what the end papers could look like.