Unit Evaluation

In this unit our brief was very open. We were able to choose what we wanted to make as an end product and then we had to do all sorts of research related to our chosen subject. I chose to look at zines and also a little bit of small press, so I planned everything out and began looking at hundreds of examples of other peoples work and then started trying different techniques that I liked from different artists. When I had a few techniques I was happy with I started looking at whole pieces by artists who caught my eye and creating various copies and emulations to show how I can replicate their techniques and hopefully be influenced by their work for my final piece. Finally I started bringing everything together and coming towards a final piece which I tried to make as interesting as possible. I did this by using many of the different styles of drawing and ways of working that I had researched and composing them in a ziney, small press kind of way.

A piece which I really enjoyed emulating was was James Gulliver Hancock's 'all the scooters in rome'. I researched how he actually produced the piece and every scooter in the piece is an actual scooter that he saw on his holiday in rome. So I gathered together a load of old photographs of cars and began sketching them and arranging them in a similar position to james' piece. I think the outcome shared a great likeness to the original and I was so pleased with how it went that I used this style of working in my final piece. I obviously put my own ideas into it also but the piece as a whole is heavily influenced by the work which I looked at.

In order to make my piece interesting I needed to experiment with different processes also. There was always some kind of helpful workshop going on in our lessons at this stage in the course but one which really caught my eye was a do it yourself CMYK printing exercise. Here we had to ink over the different tonal areas in some photographs we had chosen, in all there was three layers to represent each colour used in this type of printing, cyan magenta and yellow. Once all three layers were inked we layered them up in photoshop and turned multiply on so that any areas which we had overlapped the produced a new colour. I found this exercise very valuable in terms of experimenting and I love how much of a risk you take with the outcomes because you never truly know what all three layers will look like when put together until you actually put them together at the end. I again used this technique in my final piece but swapped the colours for something which would fit with my colour scheme.








It is also important when experimenting with artists work and techniques, to go back and tweak and refine things so that you end up with the best piece you possibly can achieve. I tried to do this to some extent with every piece I produced. But one piece which really put some work into was the Model T Ford which I produced using spray tools. I initially cut out stencils for my spraying but before I sprayed I scanned these in to see what they would look like and already they were looking promising. After i went ahead and did the spray work I assembled the layers in much the same way but it just didn't look finished on its own. So I went back and added a very loose, grungy kind of background to contrast with the elegance of a Model T and bring it into the 21st century. After this I started adding more elaborate elements to the background but you won't see this on my blog because nothing seemed to look as effective as the piece as it is. But you have to try these things else you never know what will look best.



In my final piece I have used and included many of the skills I have learnt throughout this unit and I am very pleased with how it has turned out. I have completely used my own un-influenced work on the covers but inside is a different story. I have included articles similar to this in the magazines I have looked at, A piece heavily influenced by James Hancock and another which was entirely based on one of the techniques I learned through my experiments. One thing I want to mention which is not so much of a change rather than an alternative is that if this was going to be a zine, I would of left it as the black and white dummy book because this can then be printed at a much lower cost and mass produced for free distribution. But as it stands I only needed to make a couple so I went for the far more striking, full colour option.