The Word Becomes Art

 For the Personal Poster I decided to go back to my research on the First Things First Manifesto and consider some of the ethical issues within visual communications. It seems to me that things are not quite so clear-cut as the Manifesto suggests. In some ways it’s easy to aspire to only create for worthy causes, such as education and wellbeing, and to stand against consumerism and the manufacturing of demand. However, what do we say about advertising educational resources, or making money from other people’s sense of well-being? I wanted my poster to portray some of these questions and debates.  Having explored the ideas and thought about umbrellas, I then went on to sketch out different elements of the drawing o was planning for my poster.  Following this, I drew our a layout of the poster. There were quite a lot of elements that I wanted to include, so I decided at that point to try to limit my colour palette a bit in order to try to give some coherence to the desperat...

When I looked at the descriptions of the three posters we are asked to make for this assignment, I was initially unsure that I understood the difference between Poster 1 and Poster 3. Poster 2 seemed clearer - to create a poster in the style of a particular practitioner, conveying their idea of what visual communications is. This is termed the Historic Poster. The first poster, the Personal Poster, I now realise is a sort of conversation with the history of visual communications in the OCA reading content of this project, making our own response to something within that history. The third poster, the Visual Poster, is about the sort of visual communications we are interested in pursuing, containing visual elements that express this.  However, initially this wasn’t clear to me, so I went through the underlining process we did with the magazine article and this helped me to better understand the different tasks.  

  Since New Year 2008, instead of making new years’ resolutions, I’ve been choosing a word of the year. At this time of year I consider and select a word which expresses something of what I want to explore or become or be influenced by in the coming year.  Previous words have been: freedom, curiosity, enjoy, balance, passion, nurture, sustain, restore, clear, build, integrate, gentle and fit. Some words have been better than others: highlights have been freedom, passion, clear and fit; whereas balance and sustain, while seemingly good words, were terrible to live with.  This year my word is poise. As with many ideas, it came to me as I was walking in the park. The main thing to say about it is that I don’t think I could have chosen this word if I hadn’t allowed some of the previous words to work in me.  I began with the dictionary and thesaurus, which is where I often begin when seeking to understand or illustrate something. Then I made this.  I then went on, in...

 This was an interesting exercise, and good to get back to some drawing. We were asked to find a newspaper or magazine article and read it as normal, then read it a second time, highlighting the significant words. We were then to read it a third time, paying particular attention to the words we had highlighted, to get at a few words which expressed or summed up the article as a whole. Having done this, we were to use these words to inform an illustration of our own for the article, working on ideas in our sketchbooks.  I chose this article, mostly because I only have one magazine. I looked through to find an article with a particular message and point of view and decided upon this article from the founder of Slimming World, Margaret Miles-Bramwell.  Slimming Workd Magazine, January 2022 I then went on to work in my sketchbook, brainstorming ideas for the two main words I identified : “outdated” and “enlightened”.  As I noted in my sketchbook, I decided to focus solel...

Public domain, for example  http://www.designishistory.com/1960/first-things-first/  First published in 1964 For this task we are asked to research a theme within posters and graphic design, following our interests based on the history of graphic design. Reading through the articles in the course materials, I was particularly interested by the postmodern era and its impact on graphic design, and specifically the First Things First manifestos which began with Ken Garland’s initiative in 1963/1964 and has now seen three subsequent iterations.  When I studied Theology in the early 1990s Modernist thought still underpinned certain areas such as the literary and historical analysis of the Biblical texts, but increasingly postmodernism was growing more influential, especially in areas such as Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology and Eco Theology, all of which had developed out of European/American cultural influences of the 1960s and 1970s. During that time there was more ope...

 This is work not related to the course, but is part of what I’m making at the moment.  I’ve been making my own cards for about 16 or 17 years. Initially I used to make every single Christmas card with collage and purchased or home made embellishments. It took a LOT of time. In more recent years I’ve done a single design and then either had cards printed or printed them myself.  I settled down one day in November and drew this year’s design. I did a bit of Google images searching for ideas on how to draw an angel, then just sat and drew. I then took it into Photoshop to redraw the word ‘Peace’ as it had become a bit blurred with the dark greens of the grass. I also redefined the angel’s mouth as it had come somewhat adrift of the face! Other than these small adjustments the design was simply an ink outline coloured with a number of layers of coloured pencil.  I thought I’d finished with designing Christmas cards for 2021, then I received an email from Penny, one of t...

 I had my tutorial for this assignment on Tuesday and received my first feedback. It was good overall, with a few things that needed some attention. I was really pleased with the words like ‘exciting’ and ‘promising’ and that my tutor likes me using mixed media and that she also likes making books   The things that need attention are: Firstly, referencing. I was anticipating this as I knew I hadn’t referenced everything I should have. When I did my research I just jumped around the internet and didn’t keep proper track of where I had been. I did a certain amount of trawling back through tabs and pages but I didn’t capture every reference I needed. To remedy this in future assignments I’m going to keep a running bibliography as I go, keeping note of everything I look at as I look at it, rather than have to waste time and effort trying to re-find the references and not doing a thorough job of it.  Another issue was this blog. For some reason the posts were not feeding down ...

 In my previous post I started to describe the making process of my little book, My Inner Circle . In this post I will continue that process and then show a gallery of photographs of the finished book.  I began by printing and cropping all the things I needed: title pages, collage images and titled writing pages. I then drew on and inked them as described previously. Then I started sticking everything together. I use Yes! glue because it stops, and even removes, wrinkling that often occurs when sticking paper. The glue has to go over the entire surface, not just the edges, to have the anti-wrinkling effect. I’ve never been one for glue brushes, my fingers go straight in the pot! So I keep a damp cloth nearby to try to avoid gluing that which should not be glued - mostly myself!  I decided to sew the binding before sticking in the collages and writing papers. It’s a bit more fiddly that way, but easier to get things properly aligned. It’s a very simple pamphlet bindi...

  Today I’ve got on and made my self portrait book, called My Inner Circle . However, it’s been a dark and gloomy day so I’m hoping for better light tomorrow so that I can photograph it and document the making of it here.  In the meantime I’ll say a bit about what I hope to gain from the course.  My reason for returning to study is that I feel that I’ve been stuck in a bit of a rut with my drawing. In the last several months I’ve done lots of art for my own use through illustrating the Bible. This is just for myself and doesn’t have to be “good” or meet anyone else’s standards or expectations. Meanwhile I’ve done next to no artwork in recent months for other people and purposes. It’s now 11 years since I completed my HND in Fine Art and I feel that I need to shake things up a bit with some fresh ideas and trying new things.  I decided to study with the Open College of the Arts as I’ve known about their courses for a long time, and they’re more affordable than other h...

  For this assignment we are asked to create a self portrait as a way of introducing ourselves to our tutor. We can choose our format and medium/s. It can be figurative but may not be. It introduces the way we work as artists as well as other aspects of our lives.  I decided to make my self portrait as a small book. This is partly because I like making books, and partly because I have an existing body of collages on this theme, created and reinterpreted over a number of years, and I want to work with them in a new way. Creating a series of self portraits over time has been an interesting process of reflecting on both my inner life and my more public life. The opportunity to make and bind them into a book marks a new point in my self understanding as well as being an introduction to others.  As part of this project we’re asked to look at artist self portraits as a starting point. It’s so interesting to see these self portraits alongside the artists’ style of work, from Fri...