June 10th - 2022: EVALUATION

Out of all the projects which I have done over the course of Foundation Art and Design, I would have to say that this project has been the hardest and the most challenging, but that does not mean that I did not enjoy it. From the very beginning, writing the proposal for this project, up until the displaying of my artwork, every moment, action, error, and choices that happened, even if not for the better overall, still taught me so much about the project, its subject matter, and myself.

The Final Major Project, when compared to the other projects I have done over the past educational year, has been the one to develop me the most as a creative practitioner. Taking everything new that I had and focusing on what I have shone in, I knew that I wanted to push myself to my limits with these new skills in hand. I feel that even more so now that the Final Major Project has pushed these skills to new heights, new levels of understanding in my chosen creative practices, truly finding the creative persona that is me and want to continue working in for many years to come. It has opened my eyes as to what I can become in the future.

But that does not mean that this project did not come with its downfalls. I know that over the course of this project I overworked myself too much. I had set out a very well-structured plan, weekly plans even and a full project calendar to help keep everything in check and on time so that it would finish when I wanted to, and that nothing would overrun, yet one crucial aspect of this was forgotten. With all this time that I had set out, there was still some extra time left over after the scheduled working hours, which are always great to use when working on something large scale, but not so great as to when you use this kind of time, all the time.

Yes, being a creative practitioner is what I will hopefully be doing for the rest of my life, but that does not mean that it will become my life. I put my work before myself with this project, without even realising, and it was the worst thing to happen in the Final Major Project. I forgot to make time available for myself, proper time for myself, and I will have to say that this affected me a lot, as well as the project itself, leaving things out here and there, having to rush to fix issues that slipped past me, trying to use print presses with a body that is still half asleep. Even though my planning had improved substantially with this project, I left the important part of my wellbeing behind, and caused me emotional and physical distress. In the end these plans helped to keep the project in flow and create a successful outcome, but regardless, the balance between me and my work needs to be improved.

Regarding the plans, each stage of the project was very clearly laid out and organized, allowing me a fair amount of time with each stage so that, in a straightforward way of putting it, none of them all felt left out, but all still made truly relevant and important. Now the first stage of the project was the research and contextualizing stage, finding out what I wanted this whole project to be about.

More than anything else, I knew that I wanted to create something that would tell a story, and not just in the way of lots of elements in one piece, but a series of pieces that when looked at one from to the next, a narrative would be told. I could say that it was somewhat timely in the first stage of this project, as I had been applying to university to study illustration, which was the perfect foundation element for this project, the base for which I could base my project. With that now solidified, I just had to find my subject matter, what was my narrative going to be about?

At first, the main idea of the subject matter of the project was to do something comic based, be it a short or long comic, I wanted to do something along those lines as I want to make comic books as a living/career, since I fell in love with the story telling and artistic format over the Covid-19 Lockdowns. After doing some research into current and popular comic titles and themes, I began to write and plan a comic based around two major aspects: mental health, and fantasy. The fantasy aspect of the comic narrative faded away in a short amount of time, this is because as I began to work on my creative development, testing, and trialling different forms of printmaking to find which one would work best with my style and be realistic with my time frame, the fantasy aspect was not going to be possible, due to the original level of ideas I was having and what I was hoping to create was not going to be possible with the level of drawing skill that I was at. I would say that I was over ambitious in the first stage of the project, but that was mainly because of how excited I was and absorbed in the idea of what I was going to be creating. For now, I shall put that idea to one side and come back to it in the future.

Onwards from that, I moved forward with just the mental health aspect in mind and focus, talking to friends about the subject matter, doing research on the internet (videos and articles) and thinking about my own issues. In the end, even though being a darker topic, I decided I wanted to talk about suicide and general depression, in a light manner but not in way that I was going to be rude or inappropriate to the subject matter as it is a serious issue among young adults currently. This brings up ethical questions about the work I was going to create, and it took some serious thought as to how I was going to present my comic, especially with the imagery and the text that I used. It took a while to find the right combination to use to create the comic, which ended up using black and white imagery, to represent the negative and positive energy in which I felt while dealing with said mental health issues, and the text was a simple conversation between two characters, which had the subject matter hidden within it. Along with the ethical questions that came with the comic subject matter, more surfaced later in the project after the major turning point of the project.

Just after the halfway point of the project, I noticed how much I was thinking about my grandfather, as he had been a real inspiration to me to tell stories, as he was a man full of tall tales to tell, always encouraging me to entertain and make people laugh. And so, like a train hitting at high speed, an epiphany hit me, sort of. In my eyes, there are two ways in which illustrations are conducted, and they are in my own words: the commissioning, and the original idea.

The comic book would be classed as ‘the original idea’, as both the story and the imagery have come from my own imagination, each creating one from the other, then back again, almost like a clock face’s hands spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise against each other, and upon alignment, success is struck. The commissioning is where I would be given a description or sample of text and must create artwork from, regardless of how specific it is or complex, must be created to the commissioners wishes or in my own interpretation. This project became a perfect opportunity to have a crack at both of these ways in which illustrations are conducted in the business world, and what better subject to do illustrations on, than my own grandfather.

For the next two or so weeks, whilst I continued to trial printmaking methods and begin to plan the comic, I reached out to family members to see if they had any stories which they were willing to share and for me to publish artwork alongside once I had written it up. This was interesting process, but at lovely one too, since it was hard to listen to some of the things which my grandfather had done in his life, some which sounded crazy and other hard to understand as it was different time which he lived in and where the stories came from. Then came the ethical part of it, which was cutting out the parts that were just not appropriate to share, and parts which most people wouldn’t understand as it would be a family thing. In the end, with much difficulty, I narrowed down to three stories to illustrate and write up.

I would have to say that the key development areas of the project were the writing up of the stories and creating the art pieces (comic and grandfather illustrations), as I got to push myself further with my digital and traditional drawing skills, trying out new styles of artwork such as half-toning, as well as my printmaking, going back over personal favourite types of printmaking processes, to find the best one to use to create my artwork, along with trying out colour and different tones. It was fun and engaging again to go back and try the printmaking processes again, seeing how far I had come with each of them since the start of the educational year, and finding the one that is my favourite and most proficient in. It was enjoyable, time consuming, but what isn’t when printmaking? After having done all that, I sat down and thought about how long each of the processes took to make, design, print and be physically demanding. In the end, I chose to use intaglio as my printmaking method for the project, as it was the most unique and most rewarding, with the gorgeous blemishes and rough yet solid look of the ink after it had been printed. Yet, it was going to be more physically demanding, but I made sure to take that into account and plan the future weeks ahead with it, setting entire days aside to only do printmaking as it is also time and energy draining to set up and clear away the printmaking equipment.

From the development part of the project and the creation aspect of the project, I feel that I have found a unique and personal creative practice/method, the combined use of traditional methods and modern mediums. From that, I have found that there were three major steps to creating my artwork, that now make up my personal creative practice/method. The digital creation phase (creating artwork in a digital medium while using primary sourced imagery as a reference), followed by the laser cutter stage (bringing the digital images into reality through burning and cutting the digital images in reverse onto varnished grey-board to create intaglio boards), and then completed with the printing stage (inking the lasered intaglio boards and putting them through a print press with damp paper). In the end, after doing some numbers, each of the comic pages took three hours to complete all three stages, an hour each at times. Would ai do this again with such a long creation and process time? Yes, absolutely, but not straight away.

The other major aspect of the creation and development stages of this project was how I was going to be displaying and showing the work, and not in an exhibition way. I have been using a blog to continuously show the progression and development of the project, but from the get-go of wanting to create a comic for this project, I knew that I had to get this published in some way. Previously in the year I had been taught how to sew and bind a book, which was an option, but after a couple of attempts a few months ago, I knew that was out of the question.

The second option was to find a publisher, and by chance, a lecturer showed me an online publisher called Blurb. After some research into the site, I decided to immediately go with them, as I had left this part of the project a little late as I had forgotten about it (planning needs to be improved here) and looked as to what book format and sizes they had. After some consideration, I picked one I was comfortable with, size and price wise, and used that as the foundation for creating the layouts of my book pages, as well as the comic pages.

This is one of the most crucial developments and problem-solving aspects of the project, as I first toyed around with a couple of the different book sizes and formats on Blurb in Adobe InDesign, to see how they would look, and knew that once the main creation phase began, I would not be able to go back as everything was now built around the dimensions of the book. It took a good week or so testing before I finally chose my book size and went forward with every future creation step of the project with those dimensions in mind, set in stone.

Now, have I done what I set out to do? I believe I have so, even more so in some areas. “The concept for this project is to create an original short comic book/graphic novel” is the opening line for the Project Concept section of my Final Major Project proposal form, and I believed that I have done that so, even to the point of that I had set out for the comic to be “10-15 pages long (or more)” as the comic ended up being 21 pages long in total, using a mixture of double page spreads, single page images and mixed panel layouts. In the research aspect of the project proposal, I would have to say that I have lacked in finding artists that I had originally mentioned, but instead found different artists which have helped to influence and inform my own creative practice, rather than just trying to replicate images of my own in another artist's style. This goes for the narrative theory too, as I had also stepped away from basic narrative theory at the beginning of project had looks at other narrative-based artists, those who have made more abstract and unique styles and presentations of narratives in their artwork, Alex Vede and Simon Stalenhag for example. What I had researched may seem lacking at first in my opinion, became more and more apparent and influential for me, literally not judging a book by its cover, not judging my book by its cover.

In the end, I believe I have created a successful project, reaching the minimum requirements of what I had set out to do in the first place, creating as unique and personal exhibition to display my work, its story both in the imagery and where it all came from originally, and then excelling higher in other areas, mainly my skill and confidence in my own creative practice, eventually hitting my own “creative puberty”, if you will, it just becomes a part of life, became a part of my life now, hooked on creating and telling stories, still scared of moving forward, but more willing to try and be brave with future and more ambitious projects.