'Make your Mark' Brief: Habits/Independent Study.

At the beginning of the week, we spent the day focusing on one possible theme. From my mind map I decided to start looking at the idea of my habits, specifically the rather bad habit of cracking my fingers and wrists. I started off doing some observational drawings and A3 pieces (using varied drawing techniques and media) focusing on my hands in pushed and strange positions. I also began experimenting with type, referencing the sounds my wrists/fingers make when I crack them: 'snap' 'pop' 'crack' 'click'. My initial experiments were okay but needed more research and exploration, they looked a little messy. I liked the idea of incorporating type though!

After this, we made our own paper to work on out of different pieces left over, or from the collage box. I tried to keep the colour really quiet with a few bits of print. However, not all my materials worked, as one of them had a resistant layer so I couldn't use ink over it properly! I finished all three pieces and they didn't look quite right, they were too busy. Our tutor suggested using block/negative space areas to quieten down the busier areas. This really helped, and I'm pretty pleased with how these turned out.

After this, I looked into more areas of type, I went through magazines and cut out appropriate letters in many different styles, settling on a few that I liked. For our first day of independent study we were to round up our work on this theme. I tried using the scanner and bypass printing to overlap my hands. It worked once, but the colour was too dark and I was wasting ink, so I used the failed ones for collage material.

To finish off this theme, I kept trying things out with the scanner and bypass printing, using my previous work to create new pieces. I wanted to refine and simplify what I'd done and create some more graphic spreads. My first one was more simple, I quite like it but I'm not sure it properly works as a spread. I'm still unsure about how busy it is! 

I prefer my second one, for this I scanned some elements of type over the previous work, and also included some bold block shapes, and more white space to calm it down a little. I think the colours flow better, and it's generally nicer to look at! I really enjoyed exploring this theme, I need to stop focusing so much on hands though, time to move on to another few ideas. It was nice to start having a go with type too, as I've not really done that yet. I'm pleased with my outcomes, however I think I should try something a little different for my next theme.