#there are multiple reasons why i've felt creatively stuck for a long long time

[yepthatsacowalright]

"Like everyone else in the modern world, large parts of my life have become increasingly digital, sometimes against my will. The result is a very mixed bag. Some things have improved, and others have definitely degraded. I constantly wrestle with the balance of these changes, and I try to be mindful about them. But this is the hardest to do where it intersects with my work.

I’ll start with streaming. I did not come up on streaming. I’m in my 40s, so by the time I was buying music of my own it was the early 90s and I had cassette tapes. Then came the CD, then mp3 players, then streaming and cell phones. The last change has affected how I interact with music the most. Since streaming became the norm, I listen to music a lot less. I know my age is a factor here, but streaming has killed a lot of my desire to explore. I still love to hear new music, but I’m basically 100% recommendation based at this point. I never browse platforms like Spotify. In theory, having all of recorded music available at once, for a monthly fee that’s less than what a single album cost 30 years ago, would be a feeling of abundance, of infinite possibilities. But the actual result is just being overwhelmed. Sifting through hundreds of thousands of tracks that aren’t quite doing it for me just sounds exhausting. So I don’t use it very much. I can’t remember the last time I actively searched for new music on it. And passive things like algorithmic suggestions and playlists have not filled the gap.

I also work in music, so I’m always suspicious of how much that colors my opinion. But I feel the same way about film these days. I used to really stay on top of movies and shows. Since the streaming model has taken over, I have that same overwhelmed, agitated feeling I get from the music platforms. Scrolling through all those films and shows, with their auto-playing trailers and automated recommendations, just makes me turn the tv off. So I rely entirely on recommendations here, too, and I have no desire to explore.

It’s been strange watching former hobbies and sources of joy turn into chores, or even things I actively avoid. I realize that a lot of people will feel the exact opposite here, though. I don’t think this is unanimous by any means. But this is how it has turned out for me, and it has made what I do for a living feel really strange. Because I no longer enjoy these platforms very much as a user, releasing work has become increasingly dissonant. How do you make things for platforms you don’t personally enjoy? I’ve never had this issue before now. I liked buying albums. I liked going to record stores, where they had curated selections, and hunting for something that I wanted to take home with my very limited funds. So the idea of creating something that would be packaged as an album, that someone else might discover in a shop and decide to take home, was really motivating. It served as a mental model. And while I liked going to shows sometimes, they weren’t what made me want to write songs. I was all about records and the process of finding them. I cherished my tiny little collection, and the idea of being a part of someone else’s was really cool to me.

Watching a number occasionally go up on an app I personally try to avoid isn’t quite the same." - Ben Cooper/Radical Face's blog entry Investment Strategies [x]

[jess-readallaboutit]

Evaluation

Throughout the past few months, I have researched many artists to inspire me for my work and use similar processes they have gone through to create many artistic pieces. For me one of the most impactful artists I have researched would be David Carson, this is because from looking at his work I have been able to improve my collages digitally and have been inspired by how he has used the tools on Photoshop to create amazing posters/postcards. I have learnt how to use Photoshop efficiently and become comfortable with the program. I loved how David Carson involved images and type into his digital designs and I took some of his techniques and added them to my own work, I felt that I could be more experimentative with my work because of this and I am overall very happy with how my designs turned out.

I spent overall 40 hours per week completing all my work and I worked on the dining room table shown below.

The second artist would be Linda Zacks, her work is very meaningful and I really loved researching her and finding her artwork. She motivated me because of the way she portrays deep and personal messages in her work, this was very helpful because our project theme is ‘Messages’ and her artwork helped me to think of how I could tell a story through my work. I also really like how colourful her work is and how messy it looks.

The final artist that was impactful is Peter Bankov, I liked his work because he used pop of colour against black and white in a lot of his work, I found this technique very effective for my work as I used it for my ‘mental health’ postcard and I ended up really loving the outcome. By adding the pop of colour, Peter Bankov didn’t really need to fill the whole poster with images and words, he made his designs more minimal and often had some empty spaces. He uses paint brush strokes in his designs as well and I also added some in a few of my postcards.

For my project I chose 6 different articles to base my final outcomes on, I chose topics that happened throughout the year because this year there were many good topics I could use (it was a bad year). These 6 topics were the BLM movement, Covid 19/confusion over masks, damaged economy, mental health (in lockdown), Kobe Bryant’s death and starvation in Lebanon. Another reason as to why I chose these articles was because they are all very big topics and also because some of them link together (Mental Health in lockdown, Covid 19, damaged economy, starvation in Lebanon and BLM with Kobe Bryant because the black community looked up to him a lot and saw him as an inspiration). I also knew a lot about these topics already as they happened recently and you hear a lot about them on the news and social media so I already had ideas.

One of the main processes we done was collaging, which we completed throughout our Monday sessions. I had collaged photos before but not in the way I learnt in the sessions so it was something interesting and new to experiment with. I learnt to pick out photos and words relating to my topics from newspapers and magazines and I researched many artists that gave me ideas for my collages. The collages were the first stage of getting the message of the articles across through my work, as I had to find relevant images and words to succeed in this, I also added some of my own drawings to my collages.

Once I completed those in the Monday sessions, we then went on to experimenting with type. I done research on the History of type and learnt about the many different popular typefaces, after learning about this we then went onto thinking about how we can use symbols/images in the titles of our articles.

The last topic for the Monday sessions was screen printing. I had never done screen printing before so it was a good change to learn the processes and techniques. At first, I was unsure whether I’d like it or not because it’s quite messy but when I started cutting out stencils and experimenting with many different colours of ink, I enjoyed it a lot more and produced outcomes that I was pleased with.

For Tuesday sessions we were developing our digital postcards, I work digitally a lot at home and have used Photoshop before however I hadn’t bought it and hadn’t used all the tools before, so it was fun to learn how to develop my designs with all the new tools. I learnt how to threshold an image, use the overlays efficiently, download fonts, use selection tools and transform images, I already understood the layers and shortcut keys before because I do digital art. I researched a few artists that inspired me for my work and used techniques that they had used in their work, for example, Peter Bankov uses pop of colour and I also done this in my work. I had never used a Mac before but I found it easy to understand and from learning all these new skills I felt confident in experimenting and creating my outcomes digitally. I also learnt how to scan my hand made compositions in on the scanner and adjust the quality and lighting of the images. The very last task was making a GIF and I also learnt how to use the timeline and add frames by changing something new every frame.

During the Thursday drawing sessions, I have learnt many new processes and skills with different materials. The first task was creating 4 experimental drawings based on McCollum and Simons ‘Actual Photos’, and we created abstract talking heads. I experimented with coloured ink, oil pastels, pencils, stencils and sharpies. I used oil pastel to cover the back of an image and then used a pen to draw the outline of the figure and put pressure so that the oil pastel would print onto the A2 paper. I then used ink to fill in backgrounds of the figures, I had never used ink before but I liked how the colours stood out on my artwork. I used the stencils to write words and cut out words from magazines.  

The next process I learnt was the ‘abstract messages’ and how I created these by writing words down on a piece of paper, I then cut them up vertically so that they were no longer words and weaved them together. These created a hidden message as you can no longer read the words, however only I can know what they say.  

Finally, the last processes and skills I learnt were collage and stitch combined. I hadn’t stitched before and had never included it in my artwork so I was new to learning it, however it was very simple to do and I managed to create my geometric stitch pieces without a problem. I then used the photocopier and learnt how to print different versions of my compositions, for example, red, negative, mirrored, the original colours and black and white. With these different versions I was able to add different parts from each version, so I used the red version and cut out sections from it and then stuck sections onto the original colour version. Overall, for the Thursday drawing sessions I learnt many skills and processes, however I also learnt how to be more experimental because of these skills and I don’t feel as resistant to try out new things because I might actually like how it turns out.

One of the most impactful pieces I’ve made would be my stitch, collage and illustration outcomes, I was very pleased with how it turned out and I also learnt many new things like stitch, light and dark on the face for the illustration and photocopying new versions of my outcomes. I also enjoyed it the most and I felt that I experimented a lot with it and had many ideas. The handmade version and the illustration turned out very good and then I later coloured my illustration and developed it further. I also really loved the meaning of them and how the portraits connected together through the stitch.

My initial ideas for my outcomes had changed multiple times as I completed more work and learnt new things. I think if I had gone straight into my final outcomes without experimenting lots with new materials throughout the past few months then my final outcomes wouldn’t be to the standard that they are today, I found that experimenting with things I was unsure about at first was very useful and helpful for my creativity and as I was learning new skills in my digital sessions, I started enjoying it a lot because I understood the aims and experimented with tools to see if they worked well in my work. When it came to the end of finishing off my final digital outcomes, I was pleased with how I had looked at other artist’s work and taken inspiration from it and also put some of their techniques into my own, also by using work from the other sessions that I had scanned in had allowed me to combine the work and experiment further with those and even improve them. Overall, I am very pleased with my final outcomes because of the experimental process and inspiration from more well-known artists and also because I feel that I have done well in getting the message of the articles across throughout my own independent work.

If I had to display my work somewhere and I could choose anywhere it would be in South Korea, Seoul. I listen to K-pop most of the time and this is why I've wanted to visit for a while, the music got me interested in the culture. I’ve always wanted to visit Seoul because the city looks very beautiful and I want to try the food, also because the culture is very different and therefore, I could use my work to inspire and motivate different ideas.

If I had to choose 10 words to describe my outcome, I would choose:

Change

Society

Damaging

Emergency

Existential

Unpredictive

Emotional

Historic

Struggle

Catastrophe

The song I would choose to go with my outcomes would be Spring Day by BTS. In this song they use ‘spring’ as happiness and ‘winter’ as sadness, the song is called Spring Day to represent happy days. The lyrics talk about how they miss someone and they are longing to meet with them again after winter ends (after the hard times pass), I think this links well to my outcomes because lockdown prevented us from meeting up with loved ones and we may miss seeing them. Lockdown has also affected many people and we have gone through difficult times during the pandemic, so this is why I chose Spring Day because we are experiencing winter (hard times) and we are waiting for the winter to end and Spring day to arrive. This song could also represent a loved one that has passed away because in the music video they hang shoes on a tree, this represents death and many loved ones have died from corona virus.

Before starting this project, I could not create a digital poster with confidence, along the way I have learnt many skills that enabled me with the knowledge to make postcards up to a high standard. I feel that I am now more experimental because of the amount of experimenting with different materials we done throughout the project and I now know what I enjoy and didn’t enjoy so much and can include some of the techniques I've learnt into other work. I also now know how to create screen prints because before I had never used the equipment. I’ve learnt how to use Photoshop properly and the tools, also I had never used a Mac before so I also got used to using them as they are quite different from Windows.

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