Persuasions Stage One

The first stage of this project involved identifying my key day-to-day needs. I explored this through use of line drawings, and developed drawings in inks. I looked at my physical needs that enabled me to function day to day, things such as; sleep, eating, smoking, showing and socialising.

As initial drawings I am happy with these pieces, however felt more materials and media could have been explored. From this process I was then to identify my five key needs, with use of the hierarchy of needs, and create a series of flash cards that represented these needs. 

One side of the cards represented a conceptual representation of the needs. 

The other side showed representational drawings of these needs.

I was happy with this final product, however feel the cards could have benefited from a printing process, either with digital enhancement or physical relief prints. From these cards I made a map which was representative of all of my needs and how they coincide with one another. I decided to take a chronological approach to this task, documenting my needs as a journey as opposed to thinking of it as a physical place. I used a similar style to my initial drawings and flash cards, using bold black line and colour. Given more time, I would have liked to have developed this into print, pushing away from relying on the heavy black line. It would have also have been interesting to imagine my needs as a physical place and create a more conceptual map which documented them in this way. 

The next stage of this project required me to create a hybrid creature which has adapted to my key needs. Wanting to stray from the style I am more comfortable in I decided to research other artists whose work features hybrid creatures. Initially I looked at medieval art, which features an abundance of imagery surrounding hybrid creatures, both human and animal. I then looked at more modern artists, such as Leonara Carrington, who creates surrealist hybrids based on a heavy influence from Medieval art. This research was useful in searching for inspiration to create a creature that did not represent the human figure. Although, I would have found it useful to research further to look at the working methods and media of these artists. 

I liked my initial drawings, originally as line drawings, developed into paintings and pastel drawings, because I felt they seemed colourful and fun, however, given more time I would have liked to experiment with scale and different painting media. 

My creature, Norman, is able to multitask with his multiple arms in order to complete multiple needs at once. One of his arms is a paintbrush, enabling him to complete his key need of creativity whilst also doing other things. Norman's trunk allows him to constantly be able to drink tea, achieving his need for comfort. His flamed tail allows him to light a cigarette without using harmful substances, achieving his need for sustainability, while also his need to smoke. Norman's key desire is to be happy and at peace with his own devices, although he also desires communication. While we were to imagine our character's world we had to choose a key word, I felt Normal aligned with Peaceful, mainly because of his desires to find inner peace, but his other desires such as sustainability and caring for the earth around him. 

In groups we began to exchange ideas of the lives and worlds our creatures live in, and extract similarities from this. My group decided we would be an ecosystem, due to the fact we all had very different types of creature; plants, animals and microbes. We thought the existence of the ecosystem would allow each of our characters to live in peace, while also achieving our desire to communicate. We decided our creatures would live in a forest, and began to identify shared needs that would be most important for our creatures to reach a feeling of Peace. Our key needs included; creativity, food, safety, comfort, companionship, and autonomy. We each went away with one of these key needs and began to work on key imagery and materials that would resent our need. I explored creativity, working with bold colours and different media to express this. 

With the brief to make a manifesto representative of our community, our group came back together to combine ideas and imagery of each need we had explored. We found that each of our styles were unique and different, and decided the best way to represent each group member would be to collage imagery from each of our ideas, with overlaying imagery that further represented it.Our initial designs were bold and bright in colour, however we felt this was too chaotic for something that was supposed to represent peace. We therefore decided that for the final manifesto, which was to be presented as a PDF in Illustrator, we would choose only one colour. We chose the colour green to coincide with out ideas of nature, and overlaid text representative of our needs.

Overall I enjoyed the first part of this project, it was a great opportunity to work as part of groups and explore a range of styles and approaches I haven't before. Through the help of my peers I was able to learn how to scan in documents, and how to digitally enhance these. I thought our final manifesto looked bold and effective, although I would have liked to keep some of the original colours from our designs.