Reflective
Questions
Reflection
Looking at your outcomes, please highlight a couple of examples where you needed to make ‘appropriate creative decisions’ (for example - changes in layout / story structure / use of colour etc)
Application
You, presumably, used a range of media in the evolution of your outcomes - what knowledge and new skills were gained through this research and experimentation?
Problem Solving
Can you provide any example how media experimentation helped you find a solution to a visual communication problem? What is the value of experimenting with different types of media?
Visual Analysis
Whether directly or indirectly, your outcomes are aimed at a target audience. The visual elements employed by you aren’t there by accident - how have you used the separate visual elements (layout / speech balloons / colour etc) to enhance the perception of your work?
During this semester I had to make some creative decisions for the sake of legibility or flow. For instance when I needed to decide whether or not to have my one-page comic for Jason be made so it could be read top to bottom or go with the more pleasant but less intuitive idea of having it be read bottom to top. I ended up deciding on it being read bottom to top because it added to the story and also I think a person reading it would be lead upwards by the staircases and might actually be confused by the 'safer' layout.
For the Apartment Comic, I had considered making the comic in the exact same medium as the apartment itself, namely, paint with a small amount of pen in a mostly lineless style. I decided against it because I worried it being lineless would make it harder to read when I wasn't yet precise with my brushwork and because a digital medium would make it easier to hand it in rather than needing to scan a painted comic and colour correct it.
Over the course of this semester, I have been taught Metalwork, Woodwork, Lino Printing, how to make a 3d apartment, how to use a lazercutter, linocutting and I have been experimenting with gouache paints.
It's been really interesting to learn these skills since the woodwork could be used in future to make things for stalls and having use of the lazercutter and knwing how lino prints work have both given me ideas for how to make buisness cards and prints in the future that I'm very excited to try out.
I've also gradually been improving with paint over the semester and while I'm not perfect yet my confidence has been growing which I hope means I'll be able to use it for more personal projecs at some point.
Another media we've focoused on is, of course, animation. I knew how to animate a little at the start of the semester but I have since gotten to use three new programs to animate and it's been good to experiment and grow my confidence with animating since I'm now much faster at making gifs and know more methods I could use to get results in the future.
One example I can give of problem solving via media experimentation is the animated comic. One problem with having only four pages to tell a portion of story is you can only get across so much information and dialogue in a single image. Tne benefit of animation is you don't have to have the speech bubble clogging up the page the whole time and entire actions can take place inside a single panel. Combined with the fact that, if we had been able to make the final edit, I could have had each panel get a close up on screen means the whole thing would have had a flow and each panel would have been big enough that details that may have been hard to see on a single, static comic page, would have been wholly clear to the viewer.
Over the course of this semester, I have tried to focus on lettering and style to help connect with my target audience and make my work both easier to consume and to fit it's own style better. I chose a formal and simple font for the four-page comic to reflect the person I was writing about, my grandmother, since she tends to do things via brute force and often has simple goals she can't be stopped from pursuing. I used my own handwriting for the 3d comic because it's informal which reflected the party atmosphere and I used a more delicate font for the animated comic to try and make it feel like a fairytale while still being simple and child friendly enough that it can be read easily. I also made the choice on more than one occasion to write with white text on black speech bubbles or panels in order to make the text integrate into darker colour schemes since I thought a white speech bubble in a nighttime scene would take too much attention away from the things happening in the panels.
Colour is something I always enjoy focusing on and this semester I did my best to use a variety. In the animated comic, I was inspired by an old film and classical paintings for the colour choices I made which I think gave a unique feeling to the comic hat grounded it well in its time period. For the 3d comic, I referenced the real event the comic was about for my colours although I also added some blue in the end because I thought it'd be easier to read what was happening with an extra colour since I wanted them all to be bright and stand out from the black skull. For the apartment project, I wanted o experiment with an orange and blue clour scheme to go outside my comfort zone a little while still keeping the bright cheerful feeling I like my art to have.