Self Initiated Brief

After looking at some of the artists I intended, I started to respond, creating drawings in a reflective manner. After working on the Adamley drawings, taking time and capturing detail, it felt strange, yet refreshing to be free and have an energetic movement about my work. From all of my drawings I started to scan in some of the mark I liked, translating them into motifs and brush marks on Photoshop in order to start producing digital designs. I wanted to produce abstract designs, and whilst playing around in Photoshop I found that using the ‘Liquidify’ tool allowed me to blend and warp my images. It started to develop my designs into what looked like stirred blobs of paint, I feel like they held a similar feel to Yago Hortal’s work, a similar vibrant, fluid motion. 

Whilst I liked these I feel like my designs were too cluttered and complex as my intentions at this point are to keep my designs simply focused on colour. Also this is the project I hope to progress with into Unit X, so I didn’t want things getting to complex yet, I wanted to explore every level in more detail. Something which I feel I skipped through fairly quickly in the live briefs due to the limit of time. So with this in mind I decided want to take a step back and simplify. 

With my interest in photography I decided to try a new approach to capturing loose fluid marks of colour. I took a set of photographs using ink in water, something inspired by photographer Alberto Seveso, using a macro lens to capture the close up movement of the ink dispersing in the water. These images really inspired me in terms of shape and colour and just the idea of fluidity and movement. However I figured that these images would be fairly difficult to convert into designs, with such unusual, bold shapes I still wanted to simplify further. 

So I progressed on with my photography based work, using a slow shutter speed on my camera I decided to take photographs of various colourful things whilst moving the camera in a linear motion. I chose to make a linear motion to mimic the brush strokes I previously made within my painting, I wanted to capture the same simplistic sensation.

I then went back to Photoshop and started experimenting with the ‘Motion Blur’ tool, using some of my previous designs and transforming them into designs which had the same qualities as my images, which has then developed into my final collection for this unit. Whilst I know this is not my finishing point for this project I feel like I came to a nice rest stop, producing a simple vibrant collection that focuses simply on just colour and motion. I am excited to develop this further for my final unit, bringing in more techniques and exploring ideas for the context of this work.