Studio Brief 1 - Your Initial Brief

-following an interview with an assigned partner produce one A2 black and white image to display their personality and incorporate their initials. 

My parter for this task was Zara. During the interview I found she's very family oriented, well travelled, quite into saving the environment and likes Game of Thrones and Star Trek, among other things.

Then I fell ill so missed several sessions and had no access to A2 paper, thus I did my planning in my sketchbook.

I tried quite a lot of ideas, many of which did not work, but found and repeated some successful ones

I struggled with the task of producing a minimum of 128 ideas and found myself running out quite quickly. Although the rigorous and exhaustive nature of the challenge proved useful as I generated much more work on the subject than I thought I would and ended up with better ideas as a result. 

I decided the suitcase idea was my strongest so did a lot of testing as to where and how it would fit on the A2 page to make it appear most comfortable. I also planned the stickers I was going to put on it, which originally were just to be places she'd visited but I expanded to using symbols that described aspects of her personality. 

These are some more developed plans for my suitcase idea where I was deciding whether or not to include a body and clothes coming out of the case. I chose to keep the body because the floating arm didn't make much sense but the spilled clothing looked too cluttered along with all the stickers so I decided against that.

These are two other ideas I developed but they only include one initial. I didnt think they were as strong as the one I chose, nor did they show as many personality aspects, rather just sticking to one. 

This is my final drawing. I have conflicted feelings towards it because I'm quite happy with the line work and idea but to add some tone I used a grey crayola pen and water which didn't give me the result I expected. It looks too blobby and dark and it doesnt fit in with the rest of the elements of the drawing. Also during the crit I found many of the symbols weren't clear unless they were explained, but once I said what they meant they made sense, so I'm not sure whether this is bad. I think I could've done more with the initials, put them into a more interesting sticker perhaps; they look a bit too blunt, but I was in a rush to finish. I got two chopped tomato votes, which is more than i was expecting because I don't think I did my best work for this brief.