Primer/Worshop during Cell Urself

I've forgotten what these projects were called! But these happened in the early stages of the Cell Urself project. I'm not sure either of them helped my work, besides stressing me, for different reasons each. The outcomes for both are also pretty sub-par, I think I was going through a difficult patch with my work.

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.

Project: Fiction

The first project of the year was a relatively interesting brief- illustrating a short story or poem from a reading list. This seemed more free than the Great Expectations project from the previous year though in another way was a lot more narrow, as the illustration created had to have a much more narrow function: rather than just an illustration it was an editorial gif, or a bookplate, or a book jacket.

I chose "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl", mostly because I'd read the writer Yiyun Li's work previously- she writes a lot about Chinese history in an empathetic yet weirdly standoffish and melancholic way, as though telling an anecdote about her late neighbours. It's the story of an arranged marriage but also looks at single parenthood and the clashing of tradition and modernity. Weirdly I think a lot of people missed the latter, although that's always seemed quite an obvious part of China's identity to me.

I started by reading the book and researching imagery related to the themes, to get an idea of the feel and ideas explored. Siyu is what's called a "leftover woman", expected to have already married and considered weird and even socially outcast for being in her 30s without a husband. 

Hanfeng, on the other hand, is potentially gay (I was told, I didn't pick this up in the text despite actually being gay so I'm not sure how much water that holds) and is being pressured to marry by his mother. This is essentally the only thing they have in common; otherwise the relationship seems cold, empty, and lifeless, a marriage only of convinience with the figure of Professor Dai and social expectations looming over it like a dark cloud.

 

I also found a photographer who does pictures of urban China in black and white who seems to capture the emptiness and blandness I could convey in the landscape surrounding their relationship.

I then started to find similar places in London. Thankfully I have been to Beijing so I had a relatively clear idea of what I was looking for, as well as some places that I personally thought of whilst reading the book.

I did some digital layouts using sketches drawn on-site and put into Photoshop, where I used the polygonal lasso tool to draw what I hoped would be dispersonal, almost clip-art-y shapes. The first one came out OK but this was quite a challenging and new technique for me so once I made the compositions more complicated, they lost the effect and I didn't finish the third one as a result.

The last sketch I was going to use as a digital drawing I instead turned into a pen drawing in order to focus more on detail.

These were of the university and around the gentrified parts of Elephant and Castle, but I also wanted to see the more traditional side of the book, which conviniently is the only side of Chinese culture you can find in London, so I did some drawing in Chinatown. I started in the Candy Cafe, which isn't entirely what I would consider the teahouse Siyu and Hanfeng to look like, but it's always really quiet and melancholy and has really dispersonal furnishings, plus they serve my favourite flavour of milk tea.

I also drew Jess, who I ran into. She's not really what I thought Siyu would look like, since Siyu is older, has longer hair and I assume is Chinese not Taiwanese, but since I had to collect drawings of people and I thought the studies of epicanthic folds and East Asian facial features would help somewhat, even if they weren't exact.

I then went to Jen Teahouse, a much more traditional teahouse where I also thought I could draw some food and drinks. Also their dumplings are to die for and I'm very motivated by nice food, if you can't tell!

I also did drawings of bikes in the street, as although it personally didn't particularly sway me as a theme (evident from what I ended up choosing to draw) it was very pervasive in the past imagery relating to the book so I felt like I should cover it.

I also drew some portraits, some from life, some from the internet, which wasn't optimal but I felt I needed to flesh out my research.

I felt my sketchbook research was adequate but potentially a bit lacking for this project: a lot of the other students seemed to have less exact but more emotive observationals and therefore I think I focused too much on form and less on getting more of a metaphorical and atmospheric feel for the story.

We then had a workshop which I feel forced me to loosen up more, using collaging and quick booklets to explore different aspects of the story. For example, I did a small and inexact flipbook of Siyu focusing on "emotion" and "small details".

Although far from perfect, this was an interesting exercise and quite new to me, and was also apparently quite liked by other students.

I then did a series of unrelated collages within a handmade booklet focusing on "background" and "colour". These vary in effectiveness, and towards the end I began to run out of ideas; however I believe being forced to make work even when I felt I was at a dead end was a good exercise in working through art blocks etc, and forces improvement.

Part of me wanted to extend on these, to further explore this visual language and actually get it right, but by this point we were pretty constricted on time and as I had an idea of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to to look in my head, I thought it better to move onto that and trying to get it right. I decided to do an animated gif, which I've never done before (I've done gifs but not animation) so I wanted to put together some quick tests.

These are OK; I really didn't have much time to learn animation more intensely, or in fact learn Flash, which I think would've helped make this an easier task, as I instead did it on Photoshop Elements. It'd be nice to go back on these and learn to do them properly, as well as improve on the final.

"The teahouse where Hanfeng and Siyu were meeting, at a hillside
pavillion in the Summer Palace, had been chosen by his mother..."

I'm not satisfied with my final piece but I feel like it's one of the stronger things I made in the Autumn term. I wanted to do their first "date" because I've been on arranged dates before and they're really awful and awkward. I also thought the teahouse could be quite dispersonal and was therefore a better place than say, Professor Dai's apartment. Their body langauge is tense, the atmosphere cold and the furnishings uncomfortable. In the background I've tried to contrast modern and traditional China, and the extra chair is supposed to be for the presence of Professor Dai in their relationship, but I've been told it looks more like it's part of the window, so maybe another angle needed to be used to make it look more 3D. The animation is a bit clunky (something that could be improved on Flash) and the form of the characters makes them look too young, and has some mistakes: Hanfeng's face looks a little off, for example. 

All in all though, this was one of the first projects where I tried to integrate my own style into university work and hile it may not have been entirely successful, I'm still glad I took that leap.