Project 2, Week 2

After my tutorial on Monday, I decided to focus this week on gathering lots of visual responses to my primary research from Lisbon. To get a real vibrancy and reflect the tonal qualities in my sketchbook work, I decided to work mainly in paint, specifically gouache. This was a real challenge for me as I tend to do more mark making and find painting especially very daunting. I feel that this is due to a worry of not being able to draw or paint ‘properly’, by which I mean, using correct perspective and accurate representations of my imagery. However, this exercise in forcing myself to paint has allowed me to loosen up my style and not worry too much about it being perfect. My style is definitely more illustrative than realistic, perhaps even cartoonish but I think that this represents my style of working in general and has lent a playful and energetic quality to my work which was something I was aiming for.

Some of my sketchbook pages from the previous week.

I have massively enjoyed working in colour as opposed to the monochrome scheme of the previous project. It has allowed me to be more confident with not only my drawing but my sampling as well, and I think this boldness has encouraged me to sample with materials such as resin which I haven’t previously considered using.

Although it has been a beneficial week in terms of drawing, I have found that it has taken me much longer than expected, and I haven’t managed to complete as much as I had planned to. This has thrown me off, as I had hoped to return to sampling for week 3, but I am going to need to continue drawing for at least a day, so that my painting can then influence my final colour scheme.

Once I have finished painting I will take the colours I’ve chosen and dye fabric to make it more suitable to the overall feel of my samples. One of the comments from my tutorial was that they yellow shade of some of my samples was too ‘sherberty’, so I will need to source appropriately coloured fabric or dye my own to address this.

Despite the slow pace of this project, which I am not used to, forcing and allowing myself to focus on one task at a time has helped me to fully consider and form my ideas for the outcome of this project. I aim to create a resource of samples with detailed notes of the processes and materials used for each so that I can refer to it when considering laser cutting and developing my samples into larger scale pieces.

I would also like to create a publication documenting my materials and processes along with contextual imagery.