Genevieve FT

Website

What I really like about Genevieve's work is the fluidity of her lines. This is something I have been trying to achieve within my own practice using a brush and ink. Trying to create this fluidity has made me consider how I draw various forms and what information is needed to describe a shape or a motion. 

This way of producing images is definitely influencing my responsive work because some of my illustrations need to be fluid and interesting for younger audiences. 

Studio Brief 2: Life's A Pitch

The 4 P's

Product

• Illustration based convention organised by students, primarily FOR students
• Networking opportunities
• Workshops
• Buy/trade/sell work
• Professional experience

Price

• Venue
• Insurance
• Paid staff or volunteers?
• Promotion
• Security 

Promotion

• Exploit social media
• Posters
• Leaflets
• Word of mouth
• Newspapers (and online news sites)
• Mailing lists

Place

• Town centre
• Accessible
• Close to other attractions
• Beginning of academic year 

Who is your target audience?

• Creative students in and around Leeds
• Local businesses 
• Potential students of creative degrees
• Professionals

Where are they? Where do they go?

• University/Classes
• Shopping
• Bars
• Student Union
• Introduction events (freshers fairs)
• College/Sixth form

Is there a need and if so, what is it?

• Strengthen creative community
• Get students from various institutions talking & collaborating
• Present yourself as a professional practitioner

Why is now the appropriate time?

• Would be beneficial to us whilst on our degree programme
• Active interest in other practitioners work
• Student loans to spend
• Free time

Studio Brief 2: Life's A Pitch

Similar existing events to our proposal:

SameButDifferent (Art Fair)

• Pop-up shops
• Live Music
• Licensed bar
• Gallery space
• Workshops

Thought Bubble (Comic Convention)

• Stalls to buy/sell work (networking opportunity)
• Workshops & panels

Sheffield Zine Fest

• Buy/Swap/Sell Zines
• Workshops

S.W.O.T  Analysis for Thought Bubble

Strengths:

• Creates a great environment for comic lovers to meet the artists behind the comics (and get signed copies)
• Opportunity to sell work, hand out business cards for professionals and budding practitioners (networking)
• Panel discussions
• Gives access to a wider audience for your work - not just peers/fellow pursuers of your discipline
• Takes place over numerous days so more accessible to people who could have potentially missed it
• Relatively cheap entry

Weaknesses:

• The space can get quite cramped due to heavy footfall

Opportunities:

• Local/near city centre and bus station - makes it easily accessible
• Lots of different practitioners - students, professionals, hobbyists
• Lots of different approaches to comics

Threats:

• Well established/been running for 8 years
• Will have a much larger budget than our proposal
• Connections with many more professionals 
• Good media coverage

Thought Bubble and Creative Networks event

Thought Bubble

Babs Tarr

I really enjoyed the talk by Babs Tarr at the creative networks event. She is currently working on the Batgirl comics for DC with Cameron Stewart. I think the most significant thing I learnt from her talk was how important it is to be diverse with your tone of voice/drawing 'style'. She said that when she was sending off character designs for potential clients, she would send ten different versions of the same character drawn differently. This gave the client more options to work with and showed what a diverse artist she was. 

I love her fan art of Sailor Moon & the other Sailor scouts on motorbikes (top) - I think it's a great combination of girly, japanese anime culture and bad ass motorbike gang culture. I actually gave her one of my own Sailor Moon prints and I ended up getting the print below free! Very exciting moment for me - I think I'll try and contact other artists to do more print swaps. 

Matt Forsythe

Matt Forsythe also spoke at the creative networks event. He's an illustrator who also worked on animation projects such as Adventure Time. He talked about the process of creating an animation in a team, including storyboarding, and writing specific notes about which part of the composition would actually be moving. Forsythe also spoke about how the studio he worked for didn't even do the actual animation of Adventure Time - it was done by another studio in Korea, which doesn't even get credit. This kind of taught me how unfair the industry can be but also how rigorous the design process for animation needs to be. 

Economic Sectors - Where does my practise fit in?

Primary Sector
The primary sector of the economy extracts or harvests products from the earth (coal, wood etc).

Secondary Sector
The secondary sector of the economy manufactures finished goods (food, clothes etc)

Tertiary Sector
The tertiary sector of the economy is the service industry (hotels, catering etc)

Quaternary Sector
The quaternary sector of the economy consists of intellectual activities

Tertiary Sector broken down

Public Sector
The part of the economy concerned with providing public aid/state controlled services (hospitals, fire services)

Private Sector
The part of the economy that is not state controlled and is run by individuals/companies for profit

Third Sector
The part of the economy that includes voluntary, non-profit organisations

Design studios/agencies, in-house creative teams and freelance practitioners fit into the Tertiary Sector.

Examples of professional practice from this blog: Which sector were they produced for?

I would say that all of the above examples have been produced for the Secondary Sector (finished goods). I seem to have quite an interest in producing work for this sector because I happen to like buying things with beautiful packaging. The designer (service provider) would have been asked to design a product/packaging that would be attractive to buyers, so I would say that their role as a service provider has been a successful one. 

This is the only example I wasn't sure about. I think this would belong in the Tertiary Sector because it has been designed for another service provider - in this case, a restaurant to make the environment more attractive to diners. 

Studio Brief 2: Life's A Pitch

What is the idea/concept for your groups proposal?
Student based art fair/convention, completely curated by students. Would include live drawing collaboration space, small showcase space (gallery type area), tables for stalls/students work.

What service do you propose to provide?

• A platform for other creatives our age, to have the opportunity to show the public and peers their work
• Local networking
• Seminars/demonstrations from established professionals or peers
• An opportunity to buy/sell artwork or do trades

Who will benefit/make use of your services? 

• Creative students from the area/surrounding institutions
• Leeds/the local creative community
• Local businesses looking for fresh talent
• Any creative practitioner who attends - they will have to opportunity to show off their work, talk to possible clients, arrange collaborations
• Venue

What are the aims of your proposal?

• Bring together local creatives - especially ones our age
• Create discussion around what is illustration?
• Break down the boundary between professional practitioners and students eager to establish their own practice
• Showcase the talent in the local creative community 
• Promote conversation about design, illustration etc

What are the expected outcomes of your proposal?

• Hold a convention
• Have people visit 
• Arrange for a practitioner to give a talk or demonstration
• Get other students involved (setting up their own tables etc)
• Make money

How will you measure your success?

• Footfall - if people actually show up for the experience
• Media coverage - any tags on instagram, twitter etc?
• Feedback - did people actually enjoy the convention and the services we provided?
• Profit - breaking even would be good too, we don't want to loose money on this
• Did we enjoy ourselves?

What problems can you foresee?

• Funding for venue cost, insurance etc
• Advertising - will have to be substantial to get the right amount of footfall 
• Organising crew/volunteers - it will be hard to maintain the whole event by ourselves
• Food/drink services - are there any health and safety things we need to check out first?

Cosmetic Packaging - Audience

• Cosmetic packaging is made to reach a wide variety of audiences, e.g. men, women, children and older audiences
• Within these categories there are more audiences, e.g. within 'women' we can start to break it down into age groups, interests, price range, vegan/cruelty free etc

Lime crime is a vegan/cruelty free cosmetic brand and just by the packaging we can see that its target audience would be young women who like fun colours and fantastical elements.

MAC cosmetics on the other hand has a much more simple, clean packaging design. This makes the range appeal to a much wider audience and can imply that these products are good quality. Even the limited edition collections, which in turn appeal to more specific audiences, have fairly simple packaging.

I would assume that Paul & Joe cosmetics is aimed at a slightly older age range than something like Lime Crime. This is because of the colours, patterns and price range. However, what makes some of these products appeal to a wider audience, is the 'uniqueness' of the actual product - the cat shape lipstick (which wouldn't last forever) could make it much more sought out for by both younger and older audiences (as well as cat lovers).

Summary of Previous Year

5 Things I learnt that are still relevant

• Still playing with process however still combining analogue and digital methods with texture
• Interested in packaging design, repeat pattern and character
• Drawing repetitively is an important part of my practise 
• It is important to look at contextual illustration and to form an opinion on it
• Make time for things other than drawing - that isn't the only part of my practice

5 Things I want to know more about

• Where do I fit in in the creative industry?
• Which specific kind of illustration does my practice fit into/what am I best suited for?
• How will my work translate onto other processes such as screen printing?
• What do I have to say about the world and how will I use illustration to say it?
• Illustration business proposals - how do I go about the business side of my practice?

5 Strengths

• I am dedicated to my practice and am good at sitting down everyday to do a little bit of drawing
• I have become quite articulate and able to talk about illustrations - e.g my opinions/why I like/dislike a piece
• I think I'm quite good at giving others constructive feedback, which in turn turns my attention to specific points about my own work
• Good at project planning/time management - major stress-head so I plan everything down to a tee

5 Things I want to define/improve on

• Process - continue practising with brush pen - still not happy with quality of my lines
• Figure drawing - need to go to some life-drawing sessions to get in some more practise
• Perhaps look at doing some collaborations and working my practice in with someone else's
• Finished quality of final work - even if it means re-drawing something I'm 99% happy with
• Make the most of the printing facilities - including screen printing and digital

5 Examples of illustration that define my interests

Illustration for packaging - especially cosmetic packaging

Illustration & animation - creating characters etc

Illustration for products - not just packaging

Children's story book illustrations 

Illustration installations - bringing characters to life and creating an illustrated environment (it was hard to find a picture to describe this).

OUIL402 End of Module Evaluation

Throughout PPP I have explored a number of things that influence my practice. It has taught me to take into consideration everyday activities that affect time management and how important it is to be disciplined with my planning.
To tackle my time management, I began using a diary. However that was quickly forgotten about and I found it much easier to have things written on a calender where I could clearly see all the impending deadlines. This module has also forced my to reflect on how life-changing experiences will affect my practice. For example, moving out and living independently for the first time, trying to juggle uni work with house work, alone time, socializing and necessary things such as eating and sleeping. This kind of reflection made me realise what an anxious person I am and that I too often feel guilty about not doing work during every free minute I have.

Looking at other practitioners work and staying informed on the creative industry is another important thing I've learnt to do. Sometimes I definitely neglected this which I regret, but now that the work load has been vastly offloaded, I feel more inclined to discover other illustrators' work or find inspiration elsewhere.
When I have been researching other practitioners, my work has visibly improved. It encouraged me to try different processes and I am now finding production methods that I am happy working with.

Another thing that has benefited my practice is making sure that there has been some kind of synthesis between all of the modules we have worked on. For example, I made sure I was taking note of things I learnt in Visual Language and employing them elsewhere. Likewise, I was making sure that the practitioners work that I was looking at for PPP tasks was helping me form opinions on different processes and helping me define my tone of voice.

I realise that my practice will continue evolving as long as I continue to produce work but I can say with confidence that I like the work I am producing now. This was an issue for me throughout the year - perhaps I was overly critical of my own work, but it pushed me to explore line, texture and try out colour palettes that I wasn't used to. From what I have researched and explored thus far, I want to continue exploring character design, repeat pattern and improving my digital skills.

Studio Brief 3 - Creative Strategy - Presentation

I found this presentation really useful because it forced me to really evaluate how far I have come this year. It was really useful to compare the work I have produced recently with the pieces I produced back in September. It was a nice shock to see just how far my practice has evolved. I have a much clearer idea of what areas I want to develop, what needs developing or refining and which areas of illustration I would like to explore over summer and into next year. 

Studio Brief 2 - The Illustrated Self

Evaluation 

Throughout this project I feel as though I have not only improved my digital skills/confidence but also investigated a matter that I am actually quite passionate about.

I think that my main downfall for this project was the planning of the final outcome. I worked through-out on the character designs and learnt how time consuming it is for me, but I neglected any further planning. As a result,  I think my poster lacks some kind of structure. I was planning on printing it in a book format too, but I ran out of time because I spent so long doing all the initial drawings. 

It was fun to work on a brief set by myself, however I also struggled with it because of the fact that it was so open. Initially I found myself a little lost, but looking at other practitioners work and then forcing myself to respond in some way really helped.  I think with such a flexible brief, it is easy to forget to research - when I did get round to trying to find some academic research, I think my project was improved because I was much more clear on my opinion and intent.

As I am able to improve this piece of work after the submission (for the end of year show), it gives me an opportunity to either try this out in a different format or to add some kind of structure to it. I think something as simple as a border could improve it or perhaps the text needs to be larger. I was happy with the scale (A2) because it meant all the detail and textures could be seen, so if I were to change the format, then I would keep to quite a large scale. 

Study Task 3 - What is illustration? Part 2

Function

Some examples of illustrations with a function could be book/magazine covers, editorial, advertising, fashion design illustrations or product packaging. 

Content

Usually the content is influenced by the illustrators tone of voice. Some illustrators work with narrative to communicate either a story or perhaps an experience. Other illustrator's tone of voice give their work a distinctive aesthetic which makes it suitable for communicating to a particular audience. 
Political illustration, such as the 'We Can Do It!' example can help change constructs in society and address the way we think about things such as gender roles. 

Process

I am interested in the combination of analogue techniques and digital. The examples I have chosen all resonate with tools I like to work with, such as fine liners and ink. Personally, I like to finish pieces off digitally but I'm also interested in illustration that exists off paper (Vic Lee example). 

Aesthetic 

Colour palette is important when considering what kind of aesthetic you want to achieve with an illustration. Different colours, (such as the pink monochrome example) can be used to target a specific audience - as generally women will identify with the colour pink. 
I'm interested in looking at very detailed artwork but sometimes this isn't appropriate for some briefs so it is important to be able to translate information and adjust line quality to tailor it to the audience/client. 

Context

Illustration can exist almost anywhere - from zines to packaging designs and posters. Currently I am interested in how illustration can exist elsewhere though, such as an installation at a gallery, a wall at a restaurant or even a shop window. I think what is appealing about this scale is that it is very hands on and it is satisfying to spend a lot of time crafting an image. 

Practitioners

A great way to discover other practitioners is to simply Google search illustration agencies. I selected the top few and came loads of illustrators I was interested in looking at and I think it is a really good way to stay informed on the industry. 

Audience

The audience for an illustration can vary from small children to your peers in a sub culture. The content has to be appealing for the audience as well as engaging. For example, children's book illustrations need to be fairly simple and narrate the story. Editorial illustrations however, are usually aimed at adults and so the content and complexity of the image can be different depending on the seriousness of the article it accompanies. Similarly, product illustration needs to appeal to/resonate  with the target audience/market because nobody wants to spend money on a product they don't like the look of. 

Roy Lichtenstien

What I like most about Lichtenstein's work are the bold lines, and the use of pattern/dots that add a bit of texture to the otherwise flat colour. 

The aesthetic of Lichtenstein's work was influenced by comic strips and a lot of his content was quite tongue in cheek. This aesthetic is very different to the one I have been developing in my own practice but of late, I feel as though I have neglected my sketchbook and traded it in for digital methods. 

In response to Lichtenstein's work I wanted to explore methods to create similar linework. I began using a brush and ink which I then scanned and coloured using photoshop. 

I wasn't really happy with the quality of my lines using a brush. I need to practice controlling the line thickness more and in some places I think I put down too much detail.

Later, I decided to try the image trace function in Illustrator. The results aren't that different from a distance, but overall the line-work is much cleaner and consistent. 

As I have been experimenting with line work in Illustrator a lot recently, I'm really pleased I've found a method I'm very comfortable with and isn't too time consuming. I think I can improve my line quality by experimenting with different tools and I'm especially keen to try this out using a brush pen. 

Studio Brief 2 - The Illustrated Self

 Captain Falcon

When I was sketching out Captain Falcon, I noticed how muscular the character was. I thought that I should try and replicate this on a female body, so I did some quick sketches using references to familiarize myself with the different muscle groups.

This character was the easiest to do so far. I'm not sure whether it was because the male version had a slightly younger/almost girly body, or whether it's because I am simply becoming more practiced at this. I have noticed I am getting much better at drawing foreshortening limbs just from having to draw them so much recently. 

I think my character designs could be improved if I had more time to spend on each one - I dedicated the better part of a day to each one. There are areas I'd like to tweak, such as hands and possibly angled facial features.

I am still unsure whether or not to present the characters as a poster or in a small booklet/zine. I feel as though the poster needs more structure but I'm not sure how to go about this. I am tempted to print both and see which I prefer when it's in front of me. 

Studio Brief 2 - The Illustrated Self

Research

I have come to a part in my project where I feel as though I should educate myself more on the topic of female gender roles in video games. 

The first article I came across was called, 'Shirts vs. Skins: Clothing as an Indicator of GenderRole Stereotyping in Video Games' - however I wasn't able to access the main article because I didn't have a subscription to the site. I was however, able to read the abstract. I picked out some quotes I thought were relevant:

1. "We suggest that video games, similar to other media forms, are sources of information that children and young adults may use to determine what behaviors and attitudes are considered appropriately masculine and feminine"
2. "This analysis revealed a significant sex bias in the number of male versus female characters found in the games and among the way in which the male and female characters were dressed."
3. "Of the 597 characters coded, only 82 (13.74%) were women. The Nintendo 64 games had the fewest number of female characters, and the majority of the female characters wore clothing that exposed more skin than the male characters."

I'm really glad I came across these points because they all support my project in a way.  I am particularly interested in the last quote because I was focusing on Nintendo characters to begin and this was a good confirmation that I was on point. 

Another article I was really interested in reading but couldn't because of expensive subscriptions was, 'The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games'. Once again I could read the abstract, so I picked out these quotes:

1. "A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population."
2. "The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly."
3. "Overall, the results are similar to those found in television research. The implications for identity, cognitive models, cultivation and game research are discussed."

This Wiki article on gender representation was also quite informative. I found some interesting quotes from various sections about female roles:

1. "The vast majority of female characters have been found to be non-playable, meaning they cannot be played by the gamer. This suggests a female secondary status in video games"
2. "According to data gathered by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR), few video games have exclusively female heroes. This is in part because, according to EEDAR, "there's a sense in the industry that games with female heroes won’t sell", whichPenny Arcade attributed in part to these games receiving much smaller marketing budgets than games with male heroes"
3. "a sample of 669 action, shooter, and role-playing games selected by EEDAR in 2012, only 24 (4%) had an exclusively female protagonist, and 300 (45%) provided the option of selecting one"
4. "female player characters remain something of an exception. In 2013, for instance, Epic Games was lauded for the inclusion and portrayal of Anya and Samantha Byrne in Gears of War 3, the series' first playable female characters.^[12] Despite the positive response from female players who found her empowering, Epic Games believes that the video game market would not support a Gears of War title with women as the central protagonists"
5. "A number of games feature a female character as an ally or sidekick to the male hero. "
6. "female characters are often cast in the role of the damsel in distress, with their rescue being the objective of the game."

After reading about this subject, it really confirmed to me that I wanted to portray females as the heroes - especially in games where there was no option but to play as a male character. I am going to continue swapping the gender of popular game heroes and disregard what is considered feminine by society or the gaming industry because I believe women can be the hero without being scantily clad. 

Studio Brief 2 - The Illustrated Self

I used the character sheets/designs to further develop female versions of video game characters.

When I was doing the initial sketches I wasn't sure whether or not to include the villains from the games. I decided not to because I wanted to focus on how the 'Hero' is most often portrayed as male, whereas females take the assumed role of a damsel in distress.  

Currently I plan to put all these character designs onto a poster. I still have at least five more to draw, which is proving tough because each one is taking longer than I expected. 

I'm also going to change the title of the poster - I want to encourage the viewer to question the roles of gender in media - especially media that is directed at children. 

'What if the heroes were girls?'

- Would this be  more effective as a zine?