Monday 6 May 2013

FINAL REVIEW - REFLECTION.

Today we had our final group review before our hand in. I had printed out some of my images so far and stuck them on the wall ready to present to everyone.My main questions to ask everyone were:
  • Did people think my images were clear enough?
  • What size should I print my finals?
  • What did they think about adding text?
  • Did they think my finals should be a book or prints? 

Everyone was really helpful in todays review and gave me some great feedback/thoughts. I was really happy that they all took the time to look at my work thoroughly and give me their honest thoughts. Some of the ideas that I received were:

  • In regards to text I should try putting the text on an opposite page next to the related image. My images feel finished enough and text placed over or on the same page might make it too busy. 
  • Look at various fonts or if I want it to be hand drawn maybe link the style with something from the opposing image e.g. The lipstick image could have text written out in lipstick etc. 
  • Everyone thought that my images were clear enough but they thought I could strip them even further down. So will play around with PS to test that out. 
  • As for final pieces everyone imagined my images being turned into a magazine and trying to print them out onto newsprint. This is something I had thought of but didn't think it would be a good idea! So pleased that it got mentioned. 

So those were my favourite feedback points from my sheet and there was loads of other little bits that got mentioned. I'm really happy with everything that got discussed and I feel a lot more positive with what I have produced. I think I just needed that moment to step back from my work and let others do the thinking for a while! 

REFLECTION.

I'm really pleased with how my images are looking at the moment and I feel like I've done well with linking my images together and putting my images across. We have a review on Friday which I'm looking forward to since I'd like to hear other people's views on my work! 

N.B. I wrote these next reflections up last week but forgot to publish them! So apologies if they don't match up with the dates I am talking about.

Thursday 2 May 2013

RICHARD HAMILTON.



Richard Hamilton - Just what is it that makes today's homes so different? 

I came across Richard Hamilton's work and wanted to put it up before I forget! I really like his work, especially his combination of different images! They feel a lot like my own in the sense that they are all clearly from different eras but he's managed to make them all work together. 

DEVELOPMENT IMAGES.



These are some photo montages I made yesterday. I really like these since I feel I have gotten the hang of combining different styles and eras of images together. I like the contrast of modern day photographs next to 1950s imagery since I want it to portray the idea that how a male views a woman's traits can be quite backward, hence the 50s pictures, but the modern contrast with the fashion photography keeps it up to date. 

BABIES AND CLEANING.



I looked at two other ideas/themes within my work and that was women as 'baby machines' and cleaning. I like the top image as the baby aspect but I want to try other versions since I think I can work on it more and make it better. I really like the cleaning image since it's quite quirky and funny too. I've been experimenting with how I choose to cut my images out instead of going round the whole image and slapping it on. Instead I've been cutting up to certain points, e.g. I've stopped at the woman's waist and for the man I've cut round his collar and hand but left his body out. 

COOKING.




More of my cooking ideas development! I'm really pleased with these since I think the images all work well together and nothing is overpowering. I personally really love the top two, I think thats due to the placement of the images on the page and how I've cut them out. I'm not 100% sure on the last one, I can't quite decided why. Maybe its the spaghetti film still that doesn't quite work overall but I'd like to go back to it and work some more on it. 

DEVELOPMENT IMAGES.



These are just ones I was messing around with the idea of cooking/making food. I really like these due to the images working well together and working on an image as a background. I also liked playing around with the perspective, in this case the size of the legs. And I didn't want to default to placing my images bang in the middle so experimented with placing them more to one side. 

MEAT.






I decided to go back to playing with brown paper as a background. With these images I was thinking how a woman could also be viewed as an object or in this case a piece of meat. I still wanted to keep the woman stylish and ready to go about her day. I then played with replacing her head with some meat. I really liked how this worked since I'd tried keeping her head normal with the meat in the background but it wasn't as powerful as making it her actual head. I also wanted to include a peek of a male, as if watching her in the background, so tried out various faces. I personally like the first image and the last. I feel the top one works well because I've kept it simple and then you notice the man peeking in behind her, with his gaze looking up. As for the last one, I like how his face isn't in the image but it's from the neck down. It gives it a sense of power, as if he's controlling her. 

BIGGER IS BETTER.






Continuing with playing with how I layer my images these are some more that I made the the other day. I'm really enjoying mixing my imagery up so I get different textures and colours together to give my work more depth. I made these with the expression 'bigger is better' in mind. I think all my images have a certain sexual connotation to them, but that's also due to the viewpoint that I am working from. I feel that from a male's point of view, not all males though (!), everything can be sexualised or have those sort of undertones. Although, I know my images are leaning towards showing that aspect, I want to keep them slightly tongue-in-cheek since it can be very easy to go too far and become too graphic. 

DEVELOPMENT IMAGES.


This was just a quick one from the other day where I had a spare moment! I really like this image and I think its partly due to the mixture of images. I like the photography against the 1950s imagery and it also all works well with the graph paper background. Although I would like to try this image out onto the brown paper too to see how it sits. 

DEVELOPMENT IMAGES.






These are some development images that I have been working on. I previously mentioned that I wanted to play around with what backgrounds I used so I've been trying out various graph/grid paper. I've been enjoying working on top of it, although its still white, but the contrast of the grid outline and the orange strip too works well since it doesn't over power my images. With these pictures I want to show the make up aspect of a woman, still keeping with it being viewed from a mans perspective. At fist I kept it simple but then I wanted to see what it was like if I experimented with using make up products as well.  With these images I wanted show either what a man wants his woman to look like or what he views her as when she has a make up on. 

JOHN STEZAKER.









These are some photos I took from a John Stezaker book I was looking at in the library. I've looked at his work before and have always loved his use of photo montage and playing with perspectives. I thought it would be good for me to look at his images again to help me think more about how I use perspective within my own work as well. 

COLLABORATION PROJECT.


We recently had a short collaboration project to work on over the space of two days. I got paired up with another girl, Tocha, in my class that I hadn't worked with before and together we got given the word 'revolution' to work with. At first I found it quite hard since I wasn't too keen on the actual word itself, plus not knowing how well we would work together. 

What I liked about the workshop was that the brief was completely open to us so we could be as out there as we wanted with our ideas. I found working with another person quite liberating since we could both share thoughts that perhaps I wouldn't have thought of just working on my own. It allowed me to view things with a different perspective and experiment in other ways. To start generating ideas for our project we decided to look into the word revolution, using its literal meaning. We also looked at various works of art that had been inspired by real revolutions and noticed that it was all very symbolic, a lot of hand symbols were used. 

We decided to break down the word revolution into 3 stages; the revolution, the war and then peace. Then each stage would be represented by a certain symbol. We chose to use hand symbols at first since they are universally recognised. Tocha drew the hand symbols and together we came up with a fist for revolution, a pistol for war and then the 'peace' sign for peace. After looking at the images we thought it would be good if we could simplify the symbols further down so it could be used as a child's book. I drew up various symbols but we decided on: 

  • Angry red face: Revolution
  • Purple crying face: War
  • Happy blue face: Peace

I kept the drawings very basic and we chose the red/purple/blue colour scheme so it would reinforce our drawings. This was the same for the hand symbols Tocha drew earlier as well. We made miniature mock ups of books using our work and then scanned everything in to InDesign. We chose to play with scale so made the child's book A8 in size and the hand symbol A2. The only problem we faced during the workshop was that the printers decided to not work when we sent our work over! It was really frustrating but we used our mockups for the final presentation and kept our InDesign open so people could see how we had laid the images out in a book format. 

Overall I really enjoyed working with someone else and I'd definitely consider doing a collaboration again. What I enjoyed most was how much quicker you could generate ideas together and being able to work out how to make both your styles work together visually.