LAUIL503: Studio Brief 3 - Final Zine Pages

Centerfold - pages 6 and 7

Double page spread

• Deciding on final pieces is very difficult for em as I can b quite an indecisive person but I am relatively happy with how this final version of the zine is looking!

• There is a sense of coherency with the colour palette of green and black (and anything else that will show up due to digital texture overlays - slightly cheating!)

• There is a sense of balance with mixing full pages with double page spreads for visual interest

• There is a sense of a slight narrative - tickets at the beginning of the zine indicating ticket collection / a journey / an adventure, motifs of the train for boarding, then the illustration of Poiroit on board investigating murder, bottles of poison, and skulls for death

• I can't wait to see how this turns out on acetate!

LAUIL503: Studio Brief 3 - Photoshop Play!

 

• Here are just a few of my favourites from my Photoshop experiments combining gelli prints, my cut out shapes, textures, and mono prints

• Looking to Japanese Notan for repeat shapes, negative and positive shapes for a sense of harmony

• Listening to Michael Jackson, The Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder have really impacted the aesthetic of this! Who knew Agatha Christie could be Disco!!!

• There is obviously no sense of cohesion here and they will need to be edited to reflect my chosen two way colour palette of green and black for this brief but some of the compositions went truly wacky with the layer functions and overlays!!

• I'm really excited about this project now and pushing my ideas further and further have proven fruitful. There will be a lot to choose from when it comes to creating the zine! 

LAUIL503: Studio Brief 3 - Cut Shapes and Textures!

 

Cut Shapes

 

 

• Here are just a few of the textures I created using gelli printing (mono printing at home with acrylic paint on a gelatine pad) and cut shapes based on exhaustive shaketching of motifs in my sketchbook 

• Scanning in the cut shapes with all of those lovely textures picked up from the gelli printing I did adds such visual interest, a sense of "grunge" and "distress" and "vintage," that will look rather effective when experimenting with repeated patterns next.

• Looking back to my proposal and contextual research, I have ticked a number of boxes in wanting to use cut shape for collage arrangement (albeit digital) for  sense of the handmade and "aura", mixing digital and analog in the style of The Printed Peanut for a modern vintage mix, using the blues and greens from Este McLoed's selected illustrations to evoke poison and mystery, and cut shapes positive (I've kept some of the negative too for further printing and experimentations) as seen wit Japanese Notan.

LAUIL503 Studio Brief 3: Screen Printing Poirot

 

• After enjoying screen printing in the Dracula brief, I wanted to find out if it could benefit my zine in any way

• Selecting and mixing a muted blue and brown give illusions to the old, to vintage aesthetics, to old Penguin classic books

• I'm not sure if I want this zine to be character driven or feature Poirot at all, the main character of The Orient Express, and while I enjoyed this experimentation I do feel I have ultimately wasted a morning's work and reflection
• I'm not to happy with the characters design and the only thing I truly like here is pushing the printing process into a weird direction!

LAUIL503: Studio Brief 3 - Contextual Research

The Printed Peanut / Louise Lockhart

Louise Lockhart was a visiting lecturer in my first year of degree 3 years ago and I've been fascinated and has followed her practice ever since. I especially really like her handmade approach and combining that with digital (scanning and overlaying with textures( with give a more modern and contemporary aesthetic white still retaining a vintage and evocative tone of voice. Her process is one that I would like to adopt more as , from my COP research, the element of the hand-made retains a sense of "aura" and ownership of the artist / illustrator. I too would like to mix vintage aesthetics, synonymous with Christie, with a more modern and contemporary execution.

 

Japanese Notan Art

Japanese Notan art aims to balance light and dark to create harmony within an image and often uses positive and negative images and shapes through paper cutting. With minimal / no colour and texture involved there is no distraction. While I will be using two colours plus stock as part of the brief, I want to be able to create a sense of balance and harmony in my zine composition pages for the most part - or do I? I could turn this completely on its head and create something chaotic. Reverse-Notan for a chaotic train journey!

 

Este McLoed 

Unlike the first two parts of my contextual research, Este is not a college or cut shape artist or illustrator - however these works could easily be translated to that process. There is a sense of balance to these illustrations and I am particularly drawn to the green and blue tones... would I want to use these in my own zine to reflect poisons? The textures give a sense of he old and the vintage. I particularly like the use of repeated pattern and motif and draw home that sense of balance and harmony within the composition. I could create could shapes and repeat them digitally.

LAUIL503: Studio Brief 3 - Cowslip Poem Visual Research

• From research into Agatha Christie's life through ITV's Perspectives documentary, narrated by David Suchet who plays Poiroit, a poem was read out towards the beginning written by an extremely young Agatha

• The poem was incredibly charming features characters of a Cowslip, Deadly Nightshade and a butterfly. Would I change my project proposal?

• I didn't find my sketches to be too successful though they helped me to better understand the shapes of the flowers before cutting them

• I really like how the textures and cut outs worked, giving a very childlike and children's book tone of voice - could this direct my final outcome in some way alongside print-based techniques? I find the right hand page to be a bit of a eureka moment for me and I would lie to continue in this direction!

LAUIL503 :Studio Brief 3 - Project Proposal

BAIL – LAUIL503

STUDIO BRIEF 3 PROJECT PROPOSAL

What is an ‘Author’?

NAME: Kimberley Burrows

What are you responding to?

·      Who is your author? Agatha Christie ·      Why have you selected them? A number of things draw and magnetise me to Christie. She is the epitome of the Classic Author and has so much rich imagery repeated throughout her catalogue of novels. Often referred to as the 'Queen of Crime', her books combined are the best-selling in the world - second only to the Bible. She was largely popular as a female writer when men still very much dominated the genre and writing in general, and broke down many barriers. We have many things in common as people including our love of British heritage, travelling to new places, writing, being alone, a love for dogs and being by the sea. She lived a fascinating life outside of being an author, as a nurse during the war ad going on many archaeological expeditions with her second husband, even ‘disappearing’ for a few days when she was younger and her first marriage had collapsed - creating a real-life mystery for herself which was highly sensationalised by the papers, with a national search party! ·      What is their work about? Christie often focuses on themes of mystery, crime and murder, with poison as the murder weapon, often referred to as a woman's weapon of choice. She had a great knowledge of plants and poisons, being a nurse during the war and dispensing medications. Her settings were often exotic due to her vast travel experience and archaeological knowledge, ·      What are you responding to specifically? I.e. poem, song, book etc… I will be responding the novel ‘The Murder on the Orient Express.’ The strong symbol of the train paired with the sense of adventure and travel juxtaposed with darker themes of murder and mystery excite me greatly and the visual outcomes will be both challenging and fun to experiment with.

What processes do you intend to use? (a minimum of 2.)

·      Which processes are relevant to your own creative practice? Cut shapes, type, monoprinting / gelliprinting ·      Why? These were some of the most successful processes in my Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Dracula brief pieces and I would like to revisit and expand on the skills I have gained so far. Cut shapes and gelli printing (similar to monoprinting) gives the aura of the handmade and the analogue, providing many textures that imbue elements of mystery and intrigue – something that can marry well with Christie’s work. Type is an essential aspect of Christie’s practice as she used an old typewriter. ·      Which were the most successful/challenging? Type ·      Why? I’m not used to using this as an aspect of illustration or design as I previously saw it as something a graphic designer would do, completely separate from myself, but am I not a designer too? Since creating my own handmade type for Dracula, I feel like I have gained a new skill and a newfound appreciation for how strong type can be within a composition and how it can be used to convey a feeling. ·      Justify your choices…

What outcome do you intend to pursue? (speculate at this stage)

A publication to marry with the fact she is a published author. I plan on experimenting quite a lot with the aforementioned selected processes both in analogue and digitally so a number of outcomes produced will exceed the prints or the gif. While I found making a gif enjoyable, and it retained the hand of the maker, I’m not sure if it is a suitable outcome for what I want to make. A series of prints feels very limiting.  I want to experiment more with paper stock nd how it can juxtapose or compliment my outcomes which I found to be a successful aspect of my Dracula screenprint.

Considerations: Dimensions, a belly band for the publication, compositions, paper stock, colour palette, the type process I want to use (digital type on the computer, handmade type, type in the print wood from wood block and why)

Be critical and reflective. Make sure that you justify your decisions through your research. Staff reserve the right to VETO any unsuitable proposals. This should be a minimum of 100 words.

LAUIL503: Studio Brief 2 - Moving Image Test and Final Outcome

Test Gif

• Before going in and photographing my the assets for my actual gif, I decided to do a test with some blue-tac

• This helped me get used to the process and the magnetic tripod which seemed to need more and more support!

• The lighting kept changing a little bit over the course of a few minutes which causes a bit of inconsistency. Is this the charm of the hand-made?

• The good thing about this is it allowed me to get used to putting it in Photoshop and setting up the specifications correctly for my actual gif too (700 pixels along the longest side, 72 dpi, saving for web, etc.)

Dracula Gif

• Here it is! I'm so proud of what I've achieved today!

• I was really nervous at the beginning of this session because I was pretty soured at the prospect of collaboration with how the lino printing outcomes turned out with no space left for my stamp design and not many wanting to redo theirs to accommodate my design in the final piece.

• My team were very helpful with assisting in my set up of the tripod for my mobile phone using a mix of blue tac and masking tape and helping to get some red gouache for me for the blood drips. I was incredibly grateful for this and perhaps collaboration isn't all bad! 

• It isn't perfect by any means but I think there is an element of "aura" to the handmade

• The lighting changed a lot in the studio while I was taking my series of photographs so there's a slight inconsistency there that couldn't be helped. In a more professional setting, the lighting would not change and be dictated by natural light which is prone to change

• I had brought other props in (cut out letters of my type on black paper) to perhaps play against lighting, but I'm glad I decided against it in the end as perhaps too much would have been happening at once which I am known to do 

• Lighting happened anyway against the paper cape and the directional lighting onto my coloured background which was pretty neat and reminiscent of the ballet!

• I'm glad I kept it simple