Assignment 2: Personal Poster

So here is the finished poster. It was all going well until I put down my last pencil and looked at the finished drawing. Then I realised it probably didn’t say clearly enough what I wanted to say by it. 

I began with this drawing to establish where I wanted everything to be. It looked a bit busy to me, but once I had added the grass colours the figures didn’t stand out enough, so I added khaki in the foreground and burnished all of the grass with lighter colours to try to knock it back a bit. Then I added more colour to the figures to try to make them stand out more, with the result that they lost the scribbly marks which had been energising them. 

One thing that I feel does really work is the rain. I haven’t tried to draw rail since I was a child, and I was really pleased with how it turned out.

As a drawing I think it’s ok technically, but I’m  not sure that the umbrella idea works as well on the poster as it seemed to in my sketchbook. I did think of writing ‘the ethics of visual communication’ on the umbrella itself, which might have helped a bit, but overall I’m not entirely happy with the effectiveness of the concept. Also I think I should have stuck with using the marker pens. They were working well in my sketchbook and I could have done more mark-making with them than I initially thought. 

I had an idea afterwards that I could have made a much more simple and direct message by doing a series of cartoons, pairing up the figures who were arguing, something like the below, but keeping the figures with their media as I’ve drawn them in the poster, and using the marker pens. If there was time I would work this up into a finished poster, but I need to move on now, so I’ve only sketched it out. 

I’m not sure what I’ve learnt from this exactly. I would say that I could have auditioned more ideas in my sketchbook, but honestly I didn’t think of the cartoon concept until after I’d finished the umbrella poster. I need to find a way of shunting the idea that works further towards the beginning of my process, but I’m not sure how I can do that.