Women's Day & Artificial Womb Zine

For international Women's Day there was a fair and talk from Kate Evans - who has done a graphic novel of Rosa Luxemburg's life (Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg) down at Leeds Museum. The talk itself was interesting as the writer / artist had really become totally enthralled with the subject matter - it emphasized how much knowing about and enjoying the project is important in the process of creating.

 

While I was looking around the stalls I mentioned I was an Illustration student to a group who make a Zine called 'Artificial Womb' (https://artificialwombzine.com/). Creatives can submit their work each month, there is a theme per month and  the artists are paid for their contribution if it gets in. I have not had the chance to submit anything yet but I would really like to look into it more and perhaps make a project out of it for extended practice - as it will be good to communicate my thoughts on issues and make some more meaningful work. 

What even am I interested in?

Trying to think about what I'm interested in so I have a better idea of what I should be looking at next year. I simultaneously know that there are a lot of fields I want to dabble in but also in the spur of the moment forget everything I like in a split second.

Character -

 Films, TV, Comics, Video games

Narrative

Concept art

character design

world building

stories

Book Covers - Sleeves, boxes

Tattoos

Feminism

zines

Music - record sleeves, Gig posters, Event posters

Film posters? 

I've highlighted some of the stuff I've been thinking about a lot as of late. As I've gone through this year I've had a lot of thought about what I want to do based on what I've enjoyed doing. One of the projects I most enjoyed was doing A Clockwork Orange cover, so I'd definitely like to look more at book covers. 

I feel like I have more of a drive to do work when it's something I care about, I had a lot of fun with my COP so maybe some more social issue related things? More into the lo-fi zine side of things rather than editorial 

Livia Falcaru

(https://illustrationage.com/2016/04/19/raw-emotional-illustrations-by-livia-falcaru/)

I found this artist while browsing through websites and loved the look of their work. With this image I particularly enjoy the colours and textures, as I personally really enjoy pink and blue together. There's something a little bit abstract about the image as you can tell there's a girl in a bed but there's not a lot of other information - The shadowy background could be a wall or a cityscape. I think it's nice how there's something left to the interpretation of the viewer. I also really love the line quality in this artists work, its like the lines are smooth but also sketchy, which gives it a more human feel to it.

OUIL501 Evaluation

This module stressed me out much more than it did last year. I had a really hard time coming up with a question because I had so many ideas that I kept getting lost in, whereas last year I was able to choose a solid question quite quickly. This caused me a lot of stress but in the end once I chose a question I really got into it and enjoyed researching the topic as it was something I was really interested in finding out about. I reached my essay question of “How have representations of women in classical nude European paintins influenced modern beauty standards?” in a weird way, as in the beginning I was thinking about how we in the modern age don’t view classical painting as sexual but we are offended by the female nipple – I went on to find out that a lot of classical nudes do generally have sexual connotations as a lot were painted for high ranking men (Lords, Kings, etc ) of their mistresses. Which lead me to thinking about the ideal form and the idealisation of women, and how this is similar in classical painting to now. I was able to draw on research I had done last year, as I had found out about the elongation of proportions to make the woman more pleasing for the male gaze. I was able to further this research and it was really interesting to find out more, the best piece of information I found was about body hair being an indicator of sexual dominance – and that is why women are portrayed hairless most of the time!

Again my time management has been terrible, I absolutely did not plan it at all and I really should have. The draft that I submitted was unfinished and while I still got really useful feedback from it I think I really shot myself in the foot there. I definitely need to work on balancing my time and planning it so I can spread out my work and not end up with this one week rush of having to finish off everything. I am definitely going to go down to learning support and get some help with time management, because it’s becoming a regular occurrence in each module and I am a terrible human being and never do anything about it.

I don’t feel very confident writing long chunks of writing, I feel like I can never quite hit the word threshold by some miracle I did this time but I still felt uneasy writing it. Everything I wrote didn’t seem to make sense, but when I read it back it did? I feel like I should have finished my essay a lot sooner and gotten more feedback on it as while I think the structure is sound, the content might be a little thin. I’m worried I’ve used too many quotes and it looks like I’ve just padded it out with quotes rather than having written anything useful, though I did think through everything I put into it and it went through a heck of a lot of editing.  

In regards to my practical work I am happy with the concept and overall happy with the final publication I made. I think the interactive element of the book being a ‘make your own paper doll’ type thing, makes it fun and engaging while also commenting on the issue of idealism in art and media. If I had managed my time better I definitely would have liked to have made the imagery a bit more polished, as it is a bit rough around the edges and there are some elements I didn’t manage to erase in photoshop before printing. Though I do feel a lot more confident using indesign and making a booklet style book, as this is probably the best experience of folding / cutting / putting together a booklet I’ve had. Usually my folding skills fail me. Also I am really enjoying pattern, I made a quick pattern for the cover of my book and think it looks pretty cool – this is definitely something I could move forward with in my practice.

I am apprehensive about the looming dissertation next year, as I am not confident with my writing at all. I will have to choose a subject that I can really get stuck into. I am still interested in representations of women, and particularly female sexuality and empowerment but I’m not sure what elements I want to focus in on as of yet. I just want to make sure I choose something exciting, and give myself enough time to DO something really exciting with it! I definitely want to strive to be better at everything than I have been this year!

The realisation

The realisation that the style of work I thought I wanted to make, is not actually the work I want to make.

Tutors keep noting my use of shape, but I never thought of myself as much of a shape person. I like to work with outline a lot, but to try and capitalise on the use of shape I've given it a go several times this year. Also thinking back to last year, the most successful piece in my opinion was the "Dragula" collage poster, which included a lot of shape and texture. 

Some of my most successful work this year has combined shape, line and texture in ways I'm really enjoying

I used to think I wanted to be good at making digital art, as in making an image completely digitally with really smooth colours and lines etc. however the more I try at this the more I realise, NO. That isn't me! It's a style that works for some people, and a lot of the art I enjoy is made in this way. While I am not giving up on digital media I know I much prefer using a combination of digital and traditional media as I like creating things traditionally, and I feel like the textures and style of that media suits me a lot better than a slick digital piece ever could!. 

Comic Arts Society

This year I have been attempting to be president of the Comic Arts Society along with Abi. 

I haven't been the greatest at keeping up with it, it started off successfully but people stopped coming around the stressful times of the year and I found it difficult to make the posters quickly enough. 

Next year I plan be better with my time management so I can get on this a bit better. I have a few ideas for activities so I plan to make some posters and plan what to do over summer so that I won't be rushing to make posters closer to the time. Hopefully with better planning I can get some more traction behind the society. 

Off The Page

I was part of the PR team for the Off the Page exhibition. I had wanted to do the poster, but I thought that some other people had expressed interest so stepped back from it (a wrong move, no one else actually wanted to do the poster. I should have just gone for it) but I still enjoyed being on the PR team.

The ream was pretty big so we split into different sub-sections. Social Media, Poster design, Invites, Photography, Flyering etc. Me and Molly mostly did the social media side of things, where we documented people's work and showed snippets in the run up to the exhibition and reminders after the exhibition that work is still on at CMV.

This was a really good opportunity to  practice more professional social media, as I am active on personal social media but I definitely want to keep those two things separate because I'm a terrible person. We tried not to share all the images, or full images as we thought putting a full show of the images on facebook would discourage people from seeing the show because they would have already seen the art online. 

I think showing images of the framed prints, and everyone framing their prints etc. was good because it built a sense of anticipation for the exhibition.