we're a few weeks into our specialisms now, the task one presentation has been done, our group was group c, and we did pretty well I think, I am very proud of our group anyway. We managed to pack alot of stuff into fifteen minutes, maybe a bit too much but our presentation went down well. I think that the way we organized the overall presentation helped us, we tried not to generalize on specific areas, and tried to generalize graphic design and bring all of our specialist areas together, which is easier said than done. I noticed that during a few other group's presentations they spent too long focusing on each specialist area, and because many of them have several similarities, they ended up repeating themselves, but I think that all of them did quite well considering the fact that we didn't have a very long time to prepare for the presentations themselves.
We have had a fair few workshops now with our specialism tutors, I'm in illustration and Frazer was off for a week due to illness, so we were all a fair bit confused with what to do as tutors from other areas had to take over our workshops. He's back now anyway and happily setting us work! Our specialism brief is focused on dogs and machines, exercising machines to be precise. The brief is to create a machine that is able to exercise a dog, and it can be as weird as we want really, or as simple, as long as it's interesting.
In the week that Frazer was absent, we had to wing it really. For the first workshop we joined in with motion graphics students, which was a bit weird really. We had to help them with their brief which was to create an advertisement for the TV channel Sky Arts, it wasn't really anything I'm used to, and I basically had to work with someone I'd never spoken to really before, and we had to come up with an idea together. It was challenging to say the least and I tried to come up with a few ideas with a few sketches but for the most part of it I felt a bit redundant and useless in the process of actually making it, seeing as it was made with after effects and I do struggle alot with after effects. In the end our idea was to get a clapper board, make it clap and rotate to create the "A" in "arts". Pretty good idea eh? But yes, the girl I worked with, Sophie did a great job. In a way it was a useful workshop, it gave us an insight into team working, and working with other people to create a successful working idea. Our finished piece could have been better, but we liked it, and I think if we had been given more time, then I think it could've looked really good!
For our next session we were given instructions to bring in images of dogs and machines, which were then photocopied in uni for us to have a photomontage session, where we basically created exercising machines for dogs! It was a good exercise to do I suppose, to allow us to start thinking of basic ideas, that we could then maybe build from. I did a few...some were a bit strange.
For another session we were to have a print session where we did monoprinting and experimented with textures, I don't really enjoy printing but it was quite fun, it isnt usually a medium that I work in, I did a fair few, but unfortunately some of mine have been misplaced ( or binned! ) because I couldnt find all of them in the print room, so i'm planning on going back to do some more.
We were asked to do 20 rough ideas for exercising machines for our dogs, we were told they didnt have to be perfect, so because of this not all of mine look that great, and i admit I did get a little silly and maybe far-fetched in some cases! To give me some ideas with this, in my sketchbook I made two mindmaps, one for machines and one for Sports./Exercises just to get me going..
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We were then asked to bring them all in last week and choose three ideas to develop a bit more.
We've also been given thirty observational drawings to do, I've done a few so far but I find it so hard to do! It's hard doing detailed drawings of strangers in public, I have learnt from this that people rarely ever sit still! So i'm a bit fed up with some of my drawings at people are missing faces etc! It's really difficult too because I do tend to be a bit too precise at times and like to be sketchy with my drawings, so by the time all thirty drawings are done, I'm hoping I'll have got the hang of it a bit more, its just something I've always struggled with! We were told this was to help us develop drawing skills and that we were focusing a little on body language and placement, so a few of mine are close ups of the hands etc, I wanted to get the form of people holding objects. I'm also trying to use charcoal a bit more! I have never EVER been confident with charcoal, but I did a piece yesterday that I was quite pleased with....Practice makes perfect!
