Principles
- Over coming mindsets
- Restating problems
Over coming mindsets
This is basically routine, where if you are used to working in a particular medium then you will continue to do so for a very long while, and even though your work may be magnificent you are not keeping your mind fresh and opening your self up to new ideas. These ideas could very well change the way you work forever and give you even greater success in this world as a designer. There are manny ways in keeping your mind fresh but i will name but a few that i use, the most important one is defiantly the environment that you work in, if you work in an environment that has no pictures or creative things in it you will not be able to find that inspiration you are looking for. This is a picture of my work space for example,
it might not be the biggest but it has everything i need plus the things i collect and pieces of either my work or artists i find interesting i stick on my wall. Another way of course is by looking at other artists work that have been in the same situation and find out how they overcome it by looking at their blogs.
Restating problems
As an artist you'l find yourself stuck at certain times, this could be because your not giving yourself enough options, enough room to play around as it were. They say whoever
THEY are that any artist should have up to 50-70 different ideas about the design there working on, now personally i rarely have 20 so dont worry about having too manny ideas just try expanding the one you already have, or you could of course if your really stuck adapt another artists work to fit the criteria of your design such as, "Yuko shimizu's" work she took the idea of the great wave of kanagawa by "Hokusai" and just adapted it to make it her own.
However if you feel that this is plagiarism then you could just doodle like i do and this i feel helps me really get into what my subconscious mind is doing and allow my childish side to play.
Take the notes that i was going in this lecture today, my notes are always like this and they might not look clear but to me they are but its the doodles that i did when i wasn't really paying attention that matters and i could easily turn into a pretty decent design if i kept working onto them.
This lecture has pretty much been on keeping your mind fresh and my one piece of advice i could offer is to always be creative maybe invest in a sketchbook that you just carry around with you and doodle in.
Yes its another update on my skills sketchbook, lately ive been swamped with uni work so i havnt had much chance to do some designs in my own time but just before i thought id be able to have time to do one another project from uni arives, so once again im swamped and more than usual this time because ive got to create an artist book, which is kinda what my skills sketchbook is but it dosnt really relate to birmingham so i doubt il be able to use it. Anyway recently ive been looking at "David Shrigleys" work if your not familiar with it il put a link in at the bottom, but if you are youl know that his work is alot of badly drawn line drawings, but the thing that i love about it is the fact that his work is so funny, this i thought would be an amazing chance to learn something from his work so, here we have my latest piece called "Calm down".
I was asked to choose 5 words that i feel describe Birmingham and then just to pick one and create a piece about it, using type but not just any type my own typeface. After using acrylic copolymer on a sheet of perspex and stenciling out my typeface i then wanted to somehow bring light and shadow into this project, so i chose the words "only at night" because i feel that Birmingham's dark side really comes out at night and also this gave me a chance to bring my "grungy" way of working into it. So i began to set up lights and suspended my perspex from some invisible thread to make my photos look even more interesting when i took them. After a bit of editing in photoshop to make it look like id taken the photos in a subway at night my final piece was ready.
This was a book by"Laura wilson" one of "Richard avendons" assistants, now his work was not self explanatory and he only took black and white photos in this book. The book was about "drifters" and how he just took pictures of them, now this is all well and good but the people have no story to them, its really just a blank canvas now text could change this and give you a lot more information but he chose not to do this, and its a crying shame because in my opinion it really ruins these beautiful crisp black and white photos.
Now a photo of a murder scene is just a photo if we didn't know that the picture we were looking at was a murder scene, but put a bit of text underneath the picture explaining that manny innocent people died in that very spot would make you think a lot more about that photo. Well this is exactly what one photographer did, unfortunately i canot find any photos at this moment of his work. However i can tell you about photos take from the victims of the "Cambodian killing fields" this was when there was a lot of Communism in that area and anybody who failed to comply with the raceme were taken for "correction" by this they were horribly assaulted and then killed. These photos did have text in the book where it explained all this but without the text you would have thought that they were just drifters like the photos above. 
