Leeds College of Art BA (Hons) ILLUSTRATION	Level	04
OUIL403 Visual Skills	Credits	20
End of Module Self Evaluation

NAME

1.  Which practical skills and methodologies have you developed within this module and how effectively do you think you are employing them within your own practice?
The use of roughs has been invaluable for me when generating initial ideas and until starting this course was a process I rarely used. It has allowed for the quick and exhaustive generation of ideas as well as developing and understanding how they will transition into a final image. I have also tried to use as many different media and processes as possible. These have included both analogue methods such as charcoal, ink, acrylic, papercut and graphite as well as digital skills such as photoshop. I have tried to push myself out of my comfort zone as much as possible and would site paper cut and the use of photoshop as particular examples of this as I rarely use them for illustrative purposes. Although I feel I have improved to an extent with these mediums I realise that I still have a long way to go yet as I don't feel they have always been as effectively employed within my image making as thye could be.
2. Which principles/ theories of image making have you found most valuable during this module and how effectively do you think you are employing these within your own practice? The importance of drawing out as many potential Ideas of as possible as well as repeat drawing images regardless of how rubbish they are has been invaluable. This was achieved through my use of roughs which I seemed to have been drawing endlessly throughout the project. Furthermore the importance each aspect of image making, ie composition, design, colour, quality, has on delivering the message of an image. This means it's not always enough to create something which simply looks good as the wrong composition or colour combination, even if aesthetically pleasing, can completely distort the intended message of an image by redirecting the focal point or changing the atmosphere within it.
Finally that simple and reductive ideas rather than overly complex ones are usually the most effective due to how legible and immediate they are and that trying to be overly clever with ideas can often result in imagery that is too complex and confused in the eyes of the viewer.
3. What strengths can you identify within your submission and how have you capitalised on these?
I think my ideas development in response to the briefs has been my main strength and I would sight both task 2 and 3 as examples of this. Particularly they demonstrate the time I have taken to get to know the subject matter, ie its content, themes and concepts, allowing this to really inform and shape my ideas. I have consistently been able to produce a large range of distinctly different ideas both visually and thematically for each project which has allowed to be highly speculative when approaching in brief.
4. What areas for further development can you identify within your submission and how will you address these in the future?
I was not happy with any of my final pieces and therefore I need to dramatically improve how I transition roughs/initial ideas into a finished piece. The main way to achieve this is to build upon my image making skills which I feel at the moment aren't up to the standard needed to successfully solve each task. Therefore I need to build upon them as much as possible in my free time as well as within both Visual Skills and Visual Language. Feedback from peers and tutors is also essential for this as it will and has allowed me to see what is or isn't working as why. I think it is particularly important for me to do this as I am by far my own worst critic which often results in me losing faith in my own work that inevitably damages the final results.
5. In what way has this module introduced you to the Ba (Hons) Illustration programme? It has shown me what is expected us when tackling each brief both in terms of how we tackle each problem and how much we need to do in response to it. The introduction to the blogging system has been particularly useful as it has drilled in to me that evaluation and reflection is essential to the process of image making and must be an ongoing process through the course. I have also been exposed to just how high the standards of the course and those on it are. This is because we have consistently received highly engaging briefs to which many have produced work that is highly inventive and being produced to a high level of skill and crafting. In regards to the last point I feel I still have long way to improve as to be on the same level as others within the group and need to focus on improving my practical skills so as to keep my ideas development and image creation on the same level when tackling future briefs.
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

  

Do Judge a Book By its Cover: Final Image and Evaluation

Having encountered so many problems/frustrations with trying to paper cut my final design I decided to start all over again using photoshop to reproduce it. This was frustrating as it meant I created myself a load more work and seemed ironic as I had tried paper cut in response to problems faced in the previous project when photoshoping images.

Once again I created various textures, mainly ink and charcoal washes which were applied via the use of vector masks to add some warmth into my images. I feel I have refined this process much more than last time I used it in that I now can create much more subtle textures which are much less jarring visually.

However, rather frustratingly these subtle details seem to have been lost on my final printed image due to the poor quality of the printers. In future I should be more organised and use either the print dungeon, once inducted, or a printer outside of college.

Despite some positives I was once again I was very unhappy with my final outcome.

On the positive side I do think it is successful in visually communicating the themes of the book. Having taken on board the mistakes of the last task I was careful to make sure colour added to the message rather than detract from it. This is due to the fact that the use of purples with a minimal amount of yellow creates a mysterious but slightly sinister feel to the image whilst the use of black allows the motif of the fairly to stand out and become the focal point of the image.

However the lack of contrast between the tones being used has made the image seem really murky and unappealing, completely detracting from any positives that had been achieved.

I was also particularly careful to make sure no other motifs or visual devices detracted from the message by drawing the viewers attention away from the main focal point as occurred in 2 of my last tasks final images. 

However I feel that on a whole I didn't do my idea justice in its translation to a final image.

This is because aesthetically it feels very empty and bland.

Although I wanted to create some thing graphic and shape orientated, I should have taken the advice given in the group feedback of focusing on adding depth. I completely over looked this when producing my final image and realise now it really has let my image down.

This problem has been further exacerbated by the poor quality print which has served to further flatten the image,

In general I feel my final image just serves to demonstrate how an interesting and well informed idea can fall completely flat on its face due to the quality of craft man ship and design being employed. I feel I am facing the same issues at the end of each task even after taking into account the mistakes made in the previous exercises which I think is really beginning to effect make progress within the course and development as a practitioner. 

Do Judge a Book By its Cover: Development

Initially I decided to develop the rough depicting out body experiences as it had been a particular favourite of mine. Furthermore I was interested in trying to develop a character and experimenting with the different ways it could be created and what effect this was add to the final image.

Therefore after drawing him in various different positions I decided to produce him in a range of different media including ink, acrylic, charcoal and paper cut. In particular I thought both the paper cut version and charcoal one reinforced the idea that it was someone's spirit/conscience floating out of there body.This was achieved in the paper cut version by the lack of outline and choice of soft colours whereas with the charcoal it was the fragile/delicate feel that made it seem less solid.

However, taking the advice given in the group crit, I decided that the final image needed to be something more sinister and disconcerting. The character above felt to charming/innocent to effectively communicate the main essence of the book.

Therefore I tried experimenting with really basic/wobbly ink washed figures depicting this same idea. I particularly liked the fluidity of the forms that give it a sense of movement as well as the immediacy that was achieved through the simplicity of the forms.

 Liking the effect I had achieved I decided to quickly try it out for two other concepts which included that of dopplegangers and the unfamiliar nuclear family to see whether it would be as successful.

After producing these I realised that my peers in the group crit were right in that the nuclear family idea was the most effective. This is due to the fact that it really does give a sense of some thing familiar yet disturbingly unrecognisable. However I wasn't sure if this approach was right as, taking my research into account, I feel the  book covers with the most impact are more often than not those with I more graphic edge to them. Therefore I chose to pursue my original design.

I decided to try using paper cut to create it so as to give it a hand made bespoke feel to it as well as avoid the sterilisation of the imagery which I thought had occurred during my last project through the use of digital media. 

However, when using this method to produce my final image I kept encountering various problems which effected the quality of the outcome. Letters were particularly hard to cut precisely at the desired size and greatly detracted from the quality of outcome achieved through this method. Furthermore it was difficult to get it to successfully fold without further damaging the piece.

All these points, as well as how time consuming it is made me reconsider the use of paper cut over digital.

 

Do Judge a Book by its Cover: Initial Ideas and Final  5 Roughs

Although we were tasked with producing only 5 roughs that were to the actual dimensions of our books I decided to start this project in the same way as 'A Day in the Life' in that I drew out as many smaller roughs within my sketch book as possible. This is because it allows me to really explore/generate as many different potential ideas of possible without being restrained by how good they look aesthetically.

Given the subject matter of this book the initial ideas development was particularly challenging due to the fact that it was simply an abstract concept with no definitive motifs attached to it. This required me to actually read my book in quite a lot of depth to fully understand the concepts it presented and inform how I would choose to communicate them visually.

At one point I was actually considering changing my book due to this but thought that I should just persevere with it rather than give up at the first hurdle.

One of my initial roughs that depicted two graphic representations of a family of four ending up becoming one of my final roughs. The idea behind it was based upon the concept of the uncanny being the juxtaposition of familiar and unfamiliar being experienced simultaneously creating a feeling of dread for the viewer. Therefore I wanted to use the idea of the nuclear family ( married couple with two children ) to show this idea of the familiar but then strip the image down to the bare minimum through use of block shapes and negative space to create some thing somewhat unsettling and unfamiliar.

Initially this was one of my least favourite roughs as I felt it was aesthetically quite boring and conceptually confusing. 

However in the group crits the general feed back was that it was one of my most interesting roughs both conceptually and visually and was to the point in what it was communicating. Therefore this is yet another example of where I need to just have more faith in my own ideas.

My next two roughs were aesthetically very different to the first in that they were both very character driven and visually a lot more humorous. This last point I felt, and this was also shared by those in the group crit, detracted some what from the function of the images due to the tone and subject matter of my book.

However I still feel that the ideas behind them were strong and well informed by the book itself. Both explored phenomenons discussed within the book that can be seen as examples of the uncanny in action.

The first image shows the concept of a doppleganger or double by depicting a janitor within a museum looking at painting of a civil war general that is the spitting image of himself. The latter shows the phenomenon of outer body experiences which is also discussed in depth within the book.

The main strength that both these roughs shared was that visually they seemed to be telling a story and giving an insight into what was being discussed within the book. However aesthetically it was argued that they, the top one in particular, looked more like the cover to a graphic novel. 

This last point, when coupled with the humour, shows that how even well informed ideas presented in a pleasing when can fail to serve their function due to both tone of voice and the context in which the image is being used.

My last two roughs explored the idea of telepathy. However out of all my ideas I though these were worst visually and aesthetically. After creating these images the use of the head motif and brain waves seemed both incredibly half arsed due to how obvious the idea was and stale the image making was. 

I also felt that they confused the message of the book, making it seem more like it was about conspiracy theories and new age spiritualism than an actually academic text that explored a philosophical context in depth.

Do Judge a Book By its Cover: Initial Brief

We were briefed with redesigning a book from the library so as to improve its current aesthetic and make it more appealing to potential readers. I therefore chose a book entitled 'The Uncanny' by Nicholas Royle. This was due to the fact that it was a very intriguing subject matter contained within an incredibly boring and drab book cover that communicated very little to do with the book.



After looking at various book cover designs it seemed likely that this project would be a lot more design orientated than our previous tasks. This was due to the inclusion of type within our final pieces ( title,author and duey reference number were all required on the final design ) as well as the immediacy the image on the front needs to display so as to draw readers in.

        
( Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited designed by La Boca )


( Catch 22 illustrated by Neil Packer, Meditation and Other Writings illustrated by Shout )


( Collection of Pelican paper backs )

After looking at various book covers, both those that I own as well as finding various examples on line I realised that the most appealing and memorable are those that use playful and reductive design that serves to communicate the themes of the book in a way that is simple and immediate. This is something I will need to bear in mind when created by designs.

A Day In the Life: Resolved Images and Evaluation

Resolving my final designs:

In the end I decided to take make work into photoshop and work digitally. This was in an attempt to resolve the issues of texture vs clarity of imagery that occurred within my media experiments. I therefore decided to work with out line and focus on shape on to which I could then use vector masks to add analogue textures such as charcoal, ink, pencil, paint etc. This was so as the add warmth and energy to my pieces as I feel quite often overly digitalised work can seem to sterile.

I also wanted to push my self out of my comfort zone by creating work without an outline given that, up until this point most my work has been driven my line. Furthermore I felt it would help me create a more naive feel to my images which would reflect the theme of unconditional, 'child like, love for nature. I wanted to further communicate these ideas of naivety and joy through the choice of soft pinks and blues as a basis for more colour palette.

Therefore I decided to look at practitioners who work digitally but have a hand made aesthetic. In particular I was interested at looking at those whose workers uses limited amounts of line work and instead focuses on shape.
I looked at the work of Jon Mcknaught at the recommendation of a tutor and realised I was actually familiar with his work as he had just been featured in Nobrow. What draws me to his work is the clarity achieved in delivering his message. This achieved primarily through a simplicity in his concepts which is then made the focal point of the image through the use of composition.



Evaluation:

As usual, within hours of completing my final images, I had a complete falling out with my final images. This was based on several aesthetic and compositional issues which I felt harmed the conceptually value of the images by detracting from the message being communicated. This was further confirmed my both peer and student feed back on the work.

These issues were as follows:
-Choice of colour. I tried to move away from using green to describe nature as I personally hate working with green palettes and I felt it was too obvious to work with given the theme of nature.
-Lack of clear natural textures, ie leaves, flowers, plants etc, within the figure of nature's hand. This when coupled with the use of pink made it unclear to the viewer that the hand was meant to be that of a living embodiment of nature.

-Further more within the image of nature being drowned out by modern technology this lack of texture and interest within the plant made it feel life less and depressing where as it was meant to show hope of nature prevailing.
-I also decided not to use texture masks on top of the images of computer so as to draw a distinction between technological and natural aspects of the images. However this only served to make the image flat/not engaging and work less successfully as a set with the other two. Had I instead chose to use analogue tv/electronic feedback/glitch textures on the screens of the computers it would have made the image both more engaging and allowed it to function better within the set.

-The use of composition within my final image massively detracted from the message at hand of nature being a 'true haven for our phyce'. This was because the shadow of the human figure was pushed to the bottom of the image. When combined with the fox motif it serves to draw your attention away from the shadow and instead focus on the fox. This use of motifs detracted from the meaning of my images by unintentionally re directing viewer focus was also present in the first image in the form of a bird's nest.
-Of all the points listed I feel this was the one that took away from my resolved images the most and therefore I need to consider more carefully composition and use of motifs in my next project. In particular I need to be aware of the dangers of over complicating/redesigning images in photoshop which ultimately detracts from he final image.

A Day in the Life : Development and Media Experimentation

Although in the first week of this task I had settled upon to ideas/potential out comes my third, relating to nature as a 'true haven for our phyce' still needed refining so as to effectively communicate its message.
Therefore I drew out more roughs so as to wrestle with this concept.
I tried to be as subtle as possible with it and rather than drawing a little figure of a human I included the impressions of a figure hidden within the shadows,puddles and reflections of the various roughs.

I also began some character development of the figure of nature holding the child's hand. Although it wasn't necessary to draw out the entire figure I felt it would help give me a better understanding of how to construct it and build up textures and motifs relating to nature with out obscuring the form of a figure.

However the more I tried to develop the character and experiment with different media the more obscured I felt the forms were becoming within the composition.
I tried a variety of different analogue techniques including ink, water colour and pencil crayon. This was because I wanted to give my final images a warm and naive feel so as to reflect the theme of inner join. This was also the reason for switching from the use of greens to inks to describe the natural forms.
However I stated above I was still struggling to get the right between natural textures and clear forms within my images.

A Day in the Life : Initial Ideas and Roughs

For our second visual skills brief we were tasked with producing 3 images illustrating a given article. They had to each distinctly different from each other and produced at 3 different sizes: 200x200mm, 200x105mm and 105x290mm. This was so as to push us to produce s many alternate concepts and compositions as possible.
My article was titled 'Channelling the Joy' and its underlying message was that enviromentalism should be driven by our inner propensity to love nature.
Therefore I chose a few highly visual quotes from the article which I felt both summed up the article as well as provided a base on which to create a visual response.



















The first roughs I created involved having humans figures with roots, trees, plants etc growing within them much in the same way veins are shown on a anatomical diagram so as to communicate the '...deep ingrained propensity to love nature' that is within us all.
However I felt the motif of a human figure used in this affect was both lazy and boring and that something more subtle would be more engaging.
I also felt this was true of the roughs I created in an attempt to communicate nature as a 'true haven for our phyce' where I had used motifs of the human head and brain.

However my roughs relating to the idea of our love from nature being 'drowned out by the noise [of modern life] that assails our mind' were too complicated/over thought which confused the message. In particular I like the image of a man on a phone sat on/drowning a tree within water.
After feedback from both peers and tutors I realised that the various motifs on show, particulary that of a man sitting on top of tree roots confused the image a removed the intended message of.
Therefore I decided to go for the simpler and more immediate images of a plant being drowned out and truggling to grow through a bombardment of technological devices.

My final set of ideas revolved around a child's unconditional love and wonder for nature that was discussed towards the end of the article. I tried to communicate this by creating roughs relating to a child's unconditional love for a parent.
Therefore I draw out various roughs showing a toddler holding its parents hand but with the parent figure being constructed out of various plants, vines flowers and leaves. I particularly like the simplicity and immediacy of this last idea which was a feeling shared by both peers and tutors within group crits.

Out of all the things we have learnt so far I feel the use of roughs has furthed my developmeant of ideas the most. This is because it simultaneously allows you to quickly produce ideas in an exaustive manner whilst also allowing you to get a greater understanding of how your images will work within there from and therefore resolve any issue that may be detracting from them.

Photoshop Workshop

Cleaning up images

The first thing we were shown was how to clean up images using photo shop. This was achieved by using the levels options to select the tonal ranges we wanted to keep so as to leave the basic out line of the images. We could then further clean are images up by using both the healing brush tool as well as adding a vector mask to the layer containing line work and apply the brush tool in black to remove any imperfections in a non destructive manner.

Adding block colour

The ability to clean up line work was a really useful as it allows for a way in which to add colour and texture digitally. The first thing I experimented with was adding block colours to my images. This was achieved in a variety of different ways all of which revolved around the use of multiple layers which serve as the fundamental way to alter images in Photoshop. 

The first method involved adding layers on top of the line work using the screen and multiply blending options to retain the original line work. The second was much more basic and involved simply adding layers below the line work.

Colour could be built up in a variety of ways such as the use of the polygon lasso tool, quick selection or path pen to create areas in which to add colour using the paint brush and paint bucket tools. 

The way in which I chose to apply colour created flat bold imagery which potentially could work well for the creation of screen prints. However I also realise there is a lot of potentially to use Photoshop to create more in depth images through use of brush tools and adding texture.

 

I briefly experimented with using the brush tools and saw the potential to create more abstract imagery as well as how, given more time you could use them to create more realistic/analogue looking paint textures. The creation of custom brush tools in particular could be used to further this effect.

However, out of all the things we were shown it was the adding of texture that interested me the most. This was achieve by importing images of textures, ie charcoal, in the layer above our line work. A invert vector mask was then added and the areas within our image we wanted to to show the texture were then revealed using the white brush tool. Further more overlay could also be used within the blending option so as to add the texture on top of any line work, shapes or colour work we had created.

The reason this interested me the most was the way in which it can be used to add an element of warmth and interest to our images by burring the lines between digital and analogue methods of image making.