Reflection writing
After 7 weeks of practice and study, I have gained a grasp of some of the basic colour principles, compositional principles, and sketching lines of design and drawing. At the same time, I also recognized basic mistakes I made in drawing during these exercises, and learned lessons that will help me make my future work better.
During each week of practice, I learnt different techniques including colour theory, use of line, printing and much more. Firstly, I think the first three weeks in which I was working on the fundamentals of drawing and imagery were useful to work with, especially for images as documents, These basic skills help us to restore the true shape, texture, and structure of objects. For example, in the first week, I practised the colour tools and experimented with simple lines and shapes to express objects, which helped me to understand the structure of the objects as well as explore the role of the tools in the expression of the drawing. In the second week, I practised the light and dark of objects, which helped me to understand the relationship between black and white. In the third week, I learned to express different lines and apply them to comics. At the end of these activities, I did not achieve the perfection I expected, although I tried to do my best. The most important reason is these basic drawing skills need to be practised over a lengthy period for a deeper understanding of lines and subjects’ structure.
Secondly, storytelling and conceptualising to the audience through pictures was also part of our exercise. In weeks three and four, I made comics and persuasive posters, both of which required me to tell stories through pictures. In week three's concepts, there was also mention of photographer Amy Vitale telling a story through photographs, as well as a tutorial where I saw a pencil artist drawing animals and then erasing them to evoke empathy and persuade the viewer of the theories in the picture. This blended into what I was working on in week three and week four. For example, in the third week's comic, I told the story of how I came home to find my cat missing and searched frantically for him, only to find out that the cat was just sleeping in the wardrobe, and that he had deliberately waited until I was going crazy searching for him before he showed up. I used most of the images to show the search for the cat to make the audience empathise with how anxious they were not to find the cat. The biggest challenge of this fortnight's work has been to bring the stories in my head to fruition. In the third week of working on the comic this was easier to achieve, however in the fourth week it was not as easy to turn a story about environmental protection into a poster, which required me to have more skills such as research and generalisation. Also making a poster requires consideration of composition and the placement of the subject in the picture. In addition, I need to have communication skills so that I can explain my design concepts to the client or the audience. Overall, it was challenging.
The thing that challenged me the most in weeks 5 and 6 was the making of the Lino print. I had never carved linoleum blocks before and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be, especially because the force and direction of the carving were hard for a beginner to control, and the transfers were usually not clean enough, with a lot of fine ink dots (which I later found out was because some parts of the carving weren't carved deeply enough or too much ink was used). I tried to keep the image as simple as possible when designing to make the engraving easier. In week five for the environmental theme, I used the same storytelling approach to my patterns; and in week 7 for self-expression, I wanted to abstract my images as much as possible, adding more texture so that I could use more colour practice. Not only linoleum printing, but the use of image-making software was also challenging. However, it is at this stage of my life that there is more room for trial and error in designing with computer software, thank goodness for ctrl+z. Also, image maker software has a wider range of colours and effects to make the images rich, There is a hue adjustment function that allows the colours to change without changing the lightness, which is very useful for me to explore colours.
If I had to choose one concept that I learnt and practised during this time, it would be storytelling. Storytelling makes creating interesting and can be easily understood and empathised with by the audience, as I did in weeks three and four.
All in all, what I need to do in the future is practise more basic drawing skills so I can do the design work better in the future.
