OUIL406 Visual Communication - Think, Draw, Repeat

One of the main things I picked up on in the briefing was the need to draw exhaustively. Usually I draw one thing, decide I like it, refine it a little and then I'm done with it. I'm trying to push myself to just draw and draw and draw until I can draw no more. I think this will help me develop existing ideas, refine my practice a bit more and also allow me to expand my work. Sometimes I end up limiting myself and later on in a brief I'll be thinking 'Oh shit, if I could've done this instead' or 'why didn't I experiment with more media?!'. I'm definitely going to push myself to explore more options, more ways of image-making and more ways of developing my images in this brief. 

5 Feelings:  
- tired 
- calm 
- worried 
- annoyed
- bored

5 Actions: 
- jump
- dance
- sing
- cry
- laugh 

5 Objects:
- plant
- cigarette
- beer
- mug
- pencil

I actually really enjoyed this little exercise I set myself. I wanted to look at different expressions and emotions that can be achieved using really basic lines and dots. I was loving experimenting with each face, finding myself amused by some of the funny looking blocks I was creating. I think this works well in terms of how simple it is. These little block characters are easy to relate too because they have no other features, they have no hairstyle or clothing that starts to make them more individual, you can look at characters like these and see bit of yourself in them and I think thats what makes them so effective. 

I wanted to see what the little faces I'd developed previously would look like if I added them to a more fluid shape rather than just a standard curved rectangle. I quite enjoyed filling pages of my sketchbook with colour and then adding a face to each of them, giving the individual shapes their own little piece of personality and as a whole creating pages full of bright colourful characters. I think some of these worked more than others, I tried to think about where I was placing the facial features to make sure the expression fit each shape well. This work best when I was putting sadder looking faces on shapes, I kept them towards the bottom of the shape, trying to keep to the idea that most of the time when people are sad, they hang their heads as a pose to people that are happier or more confident holding their heads up high. 

As much as I enjoyed this starting task I was getting a bit bored of it towards the end. I felt like the characters are pretty effective in communicating emotion but I want to create something a bit more human with more personality and more identity. I think these really simple faces could work well on some of the words I'd chosen, especially in terms of the list of objects I thought of, it'd be quite interesting to stick some eyes, eyebrows and mouths on some different objects and see what that'd look like. I also want to try and develop some more human looking characters, look at body form and see how I can create images the focus around my chosen words.