Dialogue Ignites Change (A Self Evaluation)

As part of my 'Dialogue Ignites Change' project I decided to work with Age UK where I would make an illustration based on the memories of an elderly person who may have dementia. I chose this because it's quite simply a personal reason to me, and I feel the best work in life is done with such reasons.

(Above: A man by the name of Pete was one of the few I spoken to, he shared a memory of this place that I took a photo of this week, it's a place where 'Rag and Bone' men would roam by and Pram Races set, so I'm thinking that's how this place should be illustrated, as if it were a set, or a stage of memory).

The most difficult part of this was coming to terms with my sense of efficiency, it takes a lot of patience to have a conversation with a dementia sufferer and although I can be a patient person I was in a situation where I only had a moment to talk and it dawned on me there that it is important to have compromise, stringing a coherent sentence out of them was far and foremost the most difficult thing to do with these people but what I learned was that a little persistence isn't bad if you keep reminding yourself what you want, if I couldn't get what I wanted after going round in circles with the person I had to respectfully walk away and look elsewhere. It's a philosophy I seriously need to apply to how I work.

(Below: Now known as The Queen's Head, this place would have been remembered under the name Turners Vaults by Pete, this photo was found through a search of an online archive, looking at how the world use to look by browsing these archives gives me an undescribable sense of discovery and pleasure)

From the work I've shown there wasn't a lot of feedback, which is good because people know what my goal is with this image. It's only a bad thing because there's hardly anything to comment on.

The project was a challenge due to my bad time keeping (still haven't slept since yesterday morning) however when I think about the opportunity I have had in this one breif I sense a profound resonance. For a moment I was lost in another person's world that use to be somebody else's at one time and I hope my work creates that feeling for another.

Quentin Blake

I found this really meaty interview from the very succesful british illustrator, Quentin Blake. He's been busy promoting himself like this since he started working for the NHS making murals for children's wards and showing off his visual world. Blake believes that the young illustrator should do their very best to draw as much as they can in order to be succesful. The interview is on The Guardian's website here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/sep/28/art.booksforchildrenandteenagers

There's another link from that page to this: http://www.campaignfordrawing.org/home/index.aspx

An Eye for Character and a Love for Batman

Everything seems to be going by in a blur recently and I really got to keep up with these blogs, Since I've been spending most of last week just being outside in the wintery cold and soaking up some things whilst preparing for my essay I decided to show some character designs I made a good while back. I'm a Batman fan, not so much a fan of movies and videogames but in the fact that I love to draw Batman, it may seem unusual to some but I never draw the comic book hero as most others.

I find the characters endearing in that it's easily open to reinterpretation, If you think about why Batman has so sucessful a legacy it is because he is actually easy to draw in a archetypal sense, I suppose the same goes for the villians The Joker and The Catwoman. So far I only started to do full colour studies of two of his villians that I deem worthy enough to show off. I've been busy so these studies always take second place above my college work.

Collaboration and Completion of the Wellspring Leaflets

My collaboration project for designing leaflets/flyers for the Wellspring center in Stockport gained a succesful mark. The experience has taught me to have trust in others and to be more lenient about work processes, creating these was very much a gamble and in retrospect there was no real way to change that so it very much demands adaptability, just like Darwin's ideas, strength lies in the power to adapt.

The next step of this is to refine the illustrations, since I wasn't aware of how they would look finished, such as the hatching looking bad when you blow up the image, things like that need to be changed. Five more leaflets have to be made around other topics and the idea that was recenlty given to me has to be explored. The idea was that the back of the leaflets can have an alternate version of the illustration instead of the same on the otherside. something like one illustration conveys the problem and on the back is the solution.