Week nine

Putting together the project

I decided to go with either the environment brief or the subcultures documenting the atmosphere of the nightlife in Soho on a weekend out. I have been to Soho multiple times before and it's always interesting to see how busy it gets and how there are so many different people around. I ended up walking around Soho just looking at people and the different bars with a friend a while ago. There is something about how chaotic and vibrant it is at night that I think would be great to document, but how do I capture this?

I started off by mind mapping different ideas and came to the conclusion of a short mixed media animation combining as many things as possible since Soho is the place that combines as many different people as possible, capturing the nightlife without actually showing too much about it.

Week four

Chris Killip & Black and White Photography

Chris Killip captures people's lives all in black and white. When walking into the exhibition there was a big red wall, was this to create a contrast between the pictures and the environment or was this purely an accident?

Each of the pictures tells a different story. Some of them made me feel like I knew the person or the story but some of them were just simple pictures that anyone could have taken. What intrigued me about this gallery were the monotone colours. This is probably a personal preference, but it almost felt sad. While it represents a nostalgic feeling I would love to see some of the images in colour. In my opinion, colour always brings life to things so while capturing nostalgic and emotional pictures

in black and white makes sense, I think it would grab life even better in colour.

Week three

Lighting Darkness

Illustrating a sad or harsh topic can be really hard. An example is Genocide. How do you make good-looking but not too intense illustrations about such a topic?

Anna Steinberg talked to our class and showed us how she illustrated the topic using only black and white. She underlined a large number of people by making them look like they're going over the paper and to make them look dead she cut them apart.

We started with a simple task of cutting apart a symbol and collaging it together into new pieces. This immediately opened up doors for me. It's easy to cut apart objects to make them seem broken or hurt but also glue them back together to make them seem fixed.

For the brief, I decided to stick with the Domestic Abuse Topic. It's hard to draw or create something like this without it being too sad or harsh. I tried out coming up with different characters which have a funny or sweet look to them so I could make the topic seem less harsh. But then I conquered the question do I want to make it look less harsh than it is? Isn't it better to illustrate it in a way that people would look at it and immediately see how bad and sad domestic abuse is?

I guess this depends on what the illustration would be for. If it's a poem, for example, it would be better to kind of hide the roughness in the picture but if it's an informative text with facts the illustration should be straight up forward to really show the reader what the issue is.