The first was the primer for Cell Urself, designed to get us thinking about things that were important to us. Again, that was a strange one and I really don't feel I need to consider my identity that deeply when doing illustration work- I'm a designer, not an artist. I design for other people, or a target audience, rarely for myself?
These were also pretty rushed and kinda crap- I really wish I'd used colour but I wasn't confident enough to come up with a colour scheme that would be fast enough to use, would be easy enough to encompass all the subject matters and look good all stuck on one sheet. I think I probably should have just thrown myself into it, as other students did so and their work still had a good sense of identity.
This exercise felt a bit school-level, like the first day of term with a new teacher and they're trying to ease everyone back into learning so do some learning-but-not-learning icebreaker task. I guess, any drawing is good practice but this didn't really help at all with the direction I took this project in, and to be honest I forgot I even did it.
We were then to present our work on sheets and everyone was asked to stick labels on each others' work.
I guess I have some criticisms of this exercise, somewhat tied to the general feeling I had about how Cell Urself was presented as a topic (that being commercially successful has nothing to do with personality or personal preferences, and it's healthier to separate out professional practice and individuality because we're illustrators, not artists). I don't think singular, generalised labels on someone's work are particularly auspicious to developing. I've actually heard most of the labels on here at some point or other- cute, commercial, mediocre. But I hear them from everyday people- people at cons, on the internet, friends who don't work in art, etc. They're not wrong but they're also not HELPFUL, and I expect more from a group of intelligent art students and tutors, at an institution I'm paying £9k for. Single words don't give me a good direction to work on, they just confuse me because there's no intelligent thought or expressed reasoning behind it.
Also, I didn't put any negativity on anyone else's work because I'm not about that life, ha. I don't think pitting us against our classmates is at all helpful.
Anyway, the idea of making a little "logo" for other people's work was cute and a lot more helpful- trying to summarise a "brand" without being mean or too simplistic, because art is open to interpretation and it's easier to understand iconography than it is words. Here's some I did for other people!
Because the actual images are quite broad, I went for more of a feel and then used that to pick an object I think best represented that feeling. For example, this work made me feel homely, nostalgic, maybe a little scattered, and also tropical, I guess from the colours, so I thought of a fruit bowl, how they remind me of my mum and my childhood, were always a little messy and not properly stocked and had keys and coins in them but were ultimately a friend. Also, because it's a logo, I tried to stick to something simple, two-tone with broad lines.
This work brought about a similar feeling- lots of bold prints, like you see on ladies going to church on a Sunday with the matching headress and dress, but also cute, stylish and millenial. The lemon pattern also really stood out to me as a strong piece of work, so again I tried to incorporate that into my design.
I also did an "artist statement" based on those labels I was given:
Eva might be a slick, kool motherfucker but let’s be real: cool aside, beyond the façade, this translates as apathetic and detached. So they’re not bold or real enough to admit they’re dead inside: that’s OK! It’s clear their pop, funksome work is informative enough to surmise as much. Sometimes cute, sometimes cold, maybe even a little bit political; either way, it’s all about loving that commercial, commercial, commercial people! As for the style: fans would praise how clear it can be: a well-observed, detailed and informative look with clean lines and a twist of the light ‘n’ cute manga aesthetic, still somewhat novel in Western illustration. However, those slick crits who know their craft from their craft (of the artisanal kind, that is) would be well-observed to note that much like Eva themselves, behind the classic showbiz is something very normal: nice meaning OK, but not amazing.
The second workshop was a clay workshop, and I know uni likes to do these to make you think about considering things in 3D and then back to 2D, as well as letting the students who are better at 3D have their moment, but honestly I suck at clay so much that I spend most of the time struggling to make anything half-decent and feeling dissatisfied with my work. It kinda sucks, because I really do wish I could think like this and get something out of these workshops because I know my work is very flat and I'd like to change that. This was still quite early on in the project too so I really didn't have any basis for what I wanted to do or what direction I wanted to take it in.
All of these are traight-up terrifying, I'm so sorry...
This is supposed to be a park?? In Leeds?
Pizza from NY Fold (the best pizza in London, save maybe Franco Manca but who wants to queue tbh).
We were also asked to draw ours and someone else's sculpts:
I don't know, it was interesting trying something new but I think unless I put a lot of work into working out clay I'm never going to achieve much in these workshops, and I have other things I want to work to get better at, like my current illustration, lines of direction and making my work less flat and directionless in terms of composition, and HTML/CSS.
