Saturday 6 December 2014

Summer Project

The brief for my summer project this year was called "Library and the Book" and was about the process of visiting a library and choosing a book, with the final outcome to be an A3 poster. I started by taking some photos and doing some sketchbook work about the journey to my local library.






It was nice to do some exploring of my local area. When I got the library I had a look around and was drawn to the Urdu section because I like look of the writing. I had a look through the books and was drawn to the ones with cheap looking covers and eventually chose a trashy looking thriller. 


As it was in Urdu I couldn't understand the content so just focused on its physical qualities and appearance. The book read from back to front which was interesting. I liked the fact that it was cheaply and poorly printed and the garish, trashy graphic design.



A couple of the pages were torn and scribbled on with crayon which gave some clues about the people that had read it before. I decided to use crayon to make my final poster. I found it interesting how the image of the woman was a central part of the cover design, but I felt that she wasn't a central or well developed character, more of a sex object or motive for the other characters. For my final poster I drew a background of mountains inspired by the mountains on the cover of the book. I drew a portrait of a woman in blue referencing the author photo on the back cover, incorporated text, and finally scribbled over her face to partially obscure her. I guess the poster is kind of meant to show my frustration at the lack of convincing/important female characters.

Dreamscape Book

My longest brief this year has been to produce an artists book on the theme of "scape". I started with some research, taking photos of the landscape and the cityscape.




Next I did some sketchbook work on the theme of dreamscape, trying to work out how I wanted my book to look. I had an idea about trying to make dreams visual/real and spent lots of time in the darkroom trying to make "photos" of dreams using painted acetate as a negative and experimenting with photograms. 




I got some interesting effects but I didn't really feel that it was working so I went back to the black and white photos I took at Tentsmuir Beach.




I liked these photos and the ambiguity of what the building was - it gave a feeling of the surreal which tied in with my dream theme. I experimented with overlaying feathers onto the photo paper before exposing them which gave an interesting ghostly effect.





Eventually I developed an idea and made the finished book using photos I developed and cellulose transfers. I decided to make the content of the book quite ambiguous, tying in the idea of Native American dreamcatchers and the process of film photography. Here's the result.