Unit 1 evaluation

I believe that my favorite piece has to be my manual for creating a sketchbook. It helped me to develop and new world of skills and ideas that I now use throughout all of my graphics design work. Combining my ink work and photoshop it made me truly think about the range of processes that I could go through to achieve a professional looking piece. In general the whole unit was a big learning curve for me and although the wide range of processes we completed was demanding it was useful completing hand made and computer designed work.

To begin with i found the most useful thing to do would be to look to the work of professionals, developing skills such as use of blending modes and how they should work together was the aim. We were given artists designs to try to emulate using our photoshop skills and mainly learning the software.

  As you can see there is a lot going on in this piece, combining my new skills in blending modes and using texture overlays I created an image that has very much the same skeleton as the original work but I altered my design so i could further experiment and construct a further knowledge of photoshop. Furthermore obviously the key component of this task was to focus on the colours and texture, but I believe there was a lot to be learned in the creating of the shapes themselves, for example the small almost flower like shapes involved quite a lot of creating, rotating and reflecting.

Experimentation was key throughout the entire unit as getting to grips with a huge range of ideas and aspects of graphics. A piece that I really tried something very different, for me, has to be my no staples set of poems. Cutting out many words from news papers and trying to create an interesting poem was difficult but it did help me to create many ideas that I would never have come up with in my head. I decided to try and symbolise my poems by mounting them on images I created or selected. The idea of a no staples book as such was something I had never used or even seen before. Cleverly creating pages by only cutting a single straight line really appealed to me as it gave my work a rustic hand-made look that was on the up most importance in this piece as the text is all randomly cut then selected so nothing in the piece is exact or 'perfect' so laying out the poem in a pristine book really would just confuse the whole purpose.

My favorite of the poems that I made, 'My teammates called me Frankenstein'.

I really enjoyed making my magazine double page spread, the key to the piece had to be in the planning. In drafting and redrafting from my first basic ideas gave me overall a very clean cut and hopefully flowing piece.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

This shows all of my drafting from mood boards through sketches right up to drafts in order to complete the final piece. It was obviously important to keep the main technology aspect in mind as this was my final ideal. As I have already mentioned in the post I learned so much from creating this, not just the use of software in creating my actual pice but mainly about how much good preparation really pays off in terms of designing and developing ideas into something that you can put your name on and mainly just be proud to show it to others.

My favorite piece, I believe, has to be my manual purely because all all of the new techniques I had to master to create a flowing creative design. Taking my work through drawing and sketching, into inking and scanning and finally editing and positioning in photoshop all the aspects of my work came together to simple make a design that I am feel is the basis of all of my work.