Project Proposal

Leeds College of Art BA (Hons) ILLUSTRATION	Level	04
OUIL405 Visual Narratives	Credits	20
SB2 Visual Journalist – Project Outline

Picture Book title or theme Sound and Vision

Idea: What is your picture book about? The connections between community, environment and the spread of information in regards to the development and innovation music and the cultural movements that run parallel to them.

Intent: What are you trying to achieve with the tone and atmosphere of the artwork? A serious tone with possibly a touch of melancholy relating to my initial research trips that revolved around solitude. However as the bulk of my research, and in turn the main focus of my project is now on music and the development of culture in the North of England I want to make sure this is kept quite subtle so as to avoid my book becoming too sombre as this wouldn't correctly fit the theme.

Structure: How might this book function in terms of format, layout and sequence At the moment I am not completely sure as due to the wide range of research and subjects, stories, themes it touches upon It is becoming difficult to come up with a straight forward concise narrative in the more traditional sense of a panelled story board. Therefore I think I will end up producing a saddle stitch book containing various related but non-linear images on my given subject. This is so as to best summarise what I've been looking into without leaving too much out.

These ideas are based on my research into…

Warp records and the development of Bleep Techno. The wider development and spread of electronic music and dance culture and how it became a global movement with parallels being drawn in cities such as Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Tokyo, Sheffield etc. The impact that environment and social context has in this development, ie post industrial, post war cities.

In order to develop these ideas, my research over Christmas will be….

Hopefully get an interview with someone from the early days of Warp records as people such as Chris Duckenfield and Winston Hazel are friends of friends. However I do think this will be un likely to achieve at such short notice over the Christmas period. More trips to the country side, particularly areas with vast dramatic spaces with features of human industry/activity. Bring music into it as well-see how/if abstract electronic albums 'sync up' with the environments around me.

Self-Evaluation
What have you discovered about research over the last 2 weeks? Which approaches to research did you find beneficial? And Why?	Which approaches to research did you struggle with? And why? What could you have done differently during your research period?
It is a completely mixed bag. At times it can be highly frustrating and difficult, particularly with regards to finding a start point as well as sometimes spending ages looking into something only to find it too be irrelevant to what you are trying to achieve. However on the flip side of this, once you find something you can engage with, both on a factual secondary level as well as an emotional one, it is highly engaging and rewarding in that it soon takes you to places with your work you wouldn't have ended up before. My approach to using drawing as research was also highly enlightening for this project. Given that I was taking photos, I felt I didn't need to be creating picture perfect representations of what I was seeing and subsequently produced rougher more visceral drawings that actually served as a better representation of what I was feeling and experiencing at the time	Actually talking to people, I did it briefly in Castleton but it was hard to actually shift the conversation towards more interesting/ useful bits of information due to the inherent variables that are involved with talking to random members of the public. Initially secondary as what I found out about Castleton historically was pretty dry and hard to engage with. However this did change once I brought new elements into my research.
It is essential that you begin to consider visual outcomes over Christmas. Begin to use your sketchbook to exhaustively explore and interrogate your ideas further through drawing and image making. In light of this first term, we would stress that you explore both ROUGHS and MEDIA EXPERIMENTATION.
What kind of media, skills, tools and processes are you going to explore?
I want texture and shape to become the dominant visual forces within my work for this project. Therefore I will experiment with a range of different methods such as drawing/block printing ink, acrylic paint, charcoal, markers, pencil etc to create a wide variety of visceral textures. I then want combine this with cut out/ripped/collaged elements. Perhaps digital elements as well however I feel, given the work I've already produced and the themes at hand my body of work with be primarily analogue.