Shape portraits

For this task we are to design and create a series of three portraits made only of shape using no line and with the opportunity to explore any media. I like the idea of hand crafting shapes out of cut paper, but this could also be a good time for me to explore some digital process. 

To start this task I have been trying to create a simple face out of minimal shapes and no intricate detail. Creating illustrations is proving to be quite difficult for me as my drawing style is very line driven.

 More faces and portraits made from shape.

 Seeing as we have to produce three portraits I may choose to do one in the style of these fruit heads, I want to make people laugh when they look at this shape portrait.

 I could possibly include a high detail portrait of shapes like the one in the image above, but I like the idea of keeping them more simple and minimal.

I want to include a character in this shape project, a character who has some sort of an accessory.

Final shape portraits

 These images have all been hand crafted using a range of coloured card and paper. At first I thought I would really struggle with creating these final outcomes but it actually went quite well and I'm happy with what I have made. I like this use of media and will use more of it in the future. I do wish I created a portrait using digital media but I prefer to produce my work by hand and will visit digital media in the next tasks.

Visual Narrative group project

For this project, we were put into groups at a random selection and within our groups we had to go out into Leeds for an adventure/experience. We had a list of things that we could do during the day in order to gain a wide spread of experience. When we got back we had to define our day with three words and create a narrative surrounding these words that symbolise the entire day. The narrative hotdog book had to be screen printed using only 2 colours.

Here are some photos that I took during the day. These are from the crystal healing store Global tribe and a market stand and the Leeds German market. This was our favourite part of the day so we decided to create a narritive surrounding this experience.

 We decided to create a story around our day trip so I started to sketch down some ideas of everything that went off, but with a slight twist such as turning the shop keeper of the crystal store into a witch. We decided to take a fantasy route with our narrative.

We all agreed as a group to create a character to be shown throughout our story, so we all pulled in ideas until we had a final design. We also decided to keep the character quite simple as the project is only 4 days long and the final outcome will be a screen print so we didn't want to over complicate it.

Because the project is only 1 week long we each only had 2 mini pages to design for the screen print. Here are some rough versions of one of my pages. The page includes the character we created and he is carrying a crystal through some dark woods. 

More roughs and further development of my scene of the narrative . As our colour pallet could only consist of two colours, we decided to choose black and purple. The purple is the colour of the crystal and a few other subtle objects.

Final designs for my two scenes ready to be drawn onto acitate and then screen printed.

This is the final screen printed version of my pages in our group narrative project. I am quite pleased with the outcome and I think that i was able to capture the lighting well in the woods scene as the crystal looks like it is glowing and that is the only light source.

This is the final version of the entire screen printed book. The title is "Adventures through the Lost Epic Eternal Dimensional Society" which is and acronym for Leeds. The story is of a character who stumbles upon a strange cottage where an old witch gives him a glowing crystal and he must travel across the lands and take the crystal to the top of a sacred mountain where he will find peace and enlightenment. 

Overall I think this has been a really good short project and I have enjoyed designing and creating this mini booklet. Although, this is the first time I have been made to work in groups and that proved to be slightly difficult at times, simply because people have different ideas and different ways of working, but everything worked out in the end. Also this was my first time screen printing so this was an experience in itself for me. I did enjoy the printing process but I also think it was quite long winded. I am not in any rush to be screen printing in my next project but could visit it again at a later date when the time is right. I think if I was to screen print any work it would be a poster or a simple piece of illustration and not something that is figurative. Also the sleeked media for this project was to use a china graph pencil which is very waxy and is hard to get crisp clean lines so next time I screen print I will use media that can create bolder colours to make the piece look more professional.