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.

Thumbnail sketches and initial ideas for story

 

This is some scribbly ideas for possibly layouts and storys. I got most of my ideas from working this way.

Cut and paste trying to make a story

 

I did some cut and paste things to get idea's for my story for my book. I got lyrics from both Frank Zappa's and Captain Beefhearts songs and chopped them up and re-arranged them into sentences. David Bowie does this you know. This means I am David Bowie.

Designy things of layout ideas

 

I refined my scribbly ideas here and made some more decisions about how I wanted the front and back covers to look. Working in this way helped me to get ideas of how I wanted the final front cover to look.

Flat plan of Owl Babies

I looked at already existing children's books to get information about layouts and number of pages as well as where to place text. I did this with the book Owl Babies. This gave me a further understanding of the layout and structure that children's books use, and this knowledge was useful when it came to me laying out and designing my own book.

This is my case study that I did of the Jon McNaught book Birchfield Close. I looked at this book in detail as after copying and emulating his work I wanted to explore it further and look more into the techniques and processes as it interested me.

I did an artist copy of Jon McNaught. Whilst doing this I wanted to make it look as if it had been screen printed as that is the way that he works, but I didn't actually want to screen print it, so I did it on photoshop instead and created the effect that way.

Artist emulation thing

                     

After doing an artist copy of Toby Morison, I took the technique and style that I had leanred in doing that artist copy and emulated it in a way that would fit in with my book. The use of line and colour is different to how I usually work so doing this gave me another possible different way to work on my final piece.

Toby Morison artist copy

I did an artist copy of the artist Toby Morison. I was drawn to his work because of the interesting use of line and colour that he creates. I also liked the subject matter of the work. I enjoyed copying his work as it is very different to how I would usually work. I got a better understanding of using watercolour through this and it gave me other options to work in a similar way for my final piece. The overlapped layered technique was something that I enjoyed working with.

Test lino prints for double page

For the double page spread of my book, I used the lino printing technique. Here are some trial pieces of the lino I cut for the double page. I experimented with a rough edge by not rolling the ink all the way up to the edge of the lino to give a different effect. These trial prints were useful as they showed me that I needed to use more ink. I also hadn't cut out the entirety of the design as first, and the trial told me this and I rectified this before I went on to do the actual print for my book.

Intaglio prints

Here are some experiments I did using intaglio printing technique. Using this technique you have to scratch your design onto a piece of plastic and then print the design with oil based inks onto wet paper. The paper and the plastic have to go through a printing press to make sure all the detail is picked up. I don't think this technique worked for the look I was going for with my book as there was too much white space left and therefore too much messy ink.

Artist Emulation: John McNaught

For this, what I did was look at the work of John McNaught, who uses monochromatic colours with different shades of the same colour. As I find it difficult to use colour sometimes I wanted to try out this way of working to see if it was easier and it was. I think this colour technique takes the harshness out of work as if all the images were in the colours they're meant to be in, it would look very busy and not as unified. The Jon McNaught book Birchfield Close that I looked at features lists of different things in the back, so I took this idea for my book and chose to contain 24 moments in pop culture that I find most interesting/my favourite. I chose:

• Jarvis Cocker going onstage during Michael Jacksons performance at the Brits in 1996
• Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol
• The Velvet Underground and Nico is released
• The murder of John Lennon
• The death of Marc Bolan
• The Shining is released
• The Smiths royalties scandal
• David Bowie creates Ziggy Stardust
• Electric Dylan controversy at Newport Folk Festival
• The Smiths first television performance on Top Of The Pops on the 24th November 1983
• Syd Barrett’s departure from Pink Floyd
• Jeff Buckley’s death
• Salvador Dali paints The Persistence of Memory
• Alex James wearing an Oasis t-shirt on Top Of The Pops in ‘95
• The making of The Wicker Man
• Blue Monday by New Order, the best selling 12” single of all time
• The Flaming Lips March Of The 1000 Flaming Skeletons in Oklahoma each year
• The feud between Morrissey and Robert Smith
• A Clockwork Orange is released
• Psycho is released seeing the birth of slasher films
• Ian Curtis’ suicide
• The Stone Roses Jackson Pollock inspired album cover/photo shoot
• Joe Meek’s obsession with the occult
• The Mothers Of Invention ‘We’re Only In It For The Money’ album cover.

Lino print designs

These are some initial design ideas for possible front covers that would be done using lino printing. I found it useful to first map out the ideas using pencil as I got a good idea what the final design would look like and could therefore decide how it would look best.

Artist copy from an artist I don't know the name of

I did an artist copy of this persons work that I don't know the name of. I did it as an initial pencil sketch then did it in acrylic paints. I did it in this technique because that's what the artist did and because I wanted to improve my painting techniques by experimenting in this way. I found it helpful.