poster 10

During out second week, our brief carried on from our summer work. We had to take one of our ideas, or possibly one we saw from other people's work, and then really focus in on that subject and come up with ten different types of that particular thing.

We used A1 sheets for all our ideas, I loked at doing different types of structures like cranes or water towers, or maybe going into food and doing different types of pasta shapes. Or taking a more comical route and looking at the different places my cat likes to sleep. During the powerpoint brief Matt showed us, he put in some work by Nigel Peake which I was really intrigued by.

Nigel Peake - Maps v Guide to Fields 2008
He did a lot of work where he has zoomed in on parts of a map and has made them look like completely seperate designs which I really like. I wanted to do a similar thing and have my drawings maybe not look completely like what they are. My two top ideas were between either doing a series of different toppings on toast, or looking at different walls which are old or covered in posters ect - where I can really look at texture and detail.
I decided to go with the toast idea, because I thought that could be quite interesting, trying to make each meal look more like a pattern rather than jam on toast. It became a lot more difficult than I thought it would, as I was making my toppings look too realistic, or doing them in too much detail when I felt it was more effective to do them quite simply.

I also had trouble finding the medium that would work the best, as the original drawing I had done on my ideas page of spaghetti hoops on toast was quite small, and the drawings I would need to do on this poster have to be quite big meaning I might have to use a larger sized nib on my pen to create the same effect. However none of the drawings I was doing had the same naivity and simplicity that I liked so much in my original drawing. So I tried experimenting with ink and colour but the drawings were just becoming too much like actual depictions of toppings on toast rather than the pattern approach I wanted. But I became a lot more loose with my sketches and thought more outside the box with my designs and managed to achieve the style I wanted.

Standing back from this poster I think the drawings work really well, because it isn't instantly clear what each drawing is, as they seem more like patterns with the sections of intense detail contrasting with the areas of white, with the occasional thicker black line, it does become more similar to a blueprint of toppings on toast. Although with a couple of drawings - like the beans on toast, I think I used too much detail and it would have been more effective if I had used a plainer plate as it becomes a bit convuluted. I could have pushed this idea further, maybe if I had used more exotic, strange toppings although I quite like making such a mundane subject matter actually quite interesting to observe. But I probably could have experimented more with ways of looking at the toppings, thought outside the box more.I also feel I need to get more into the routine of working and improving on work I have done in the studio once I have come home, as I don't feel I am doing as much as could have done on this project so will focus more on that aspect of working for next week.
I really enjoyed looking around at everyone elses work because of how different it always is, there are so many different ideas and ways of working when given a brief that would seemingly produce quite similar work. There was a lot of technically impressive work with mediums I'm not that confident with - like collage, but am now motivated to try out in future projects.