Josh Norris OCA logbook

Exercise: Turning words into pictures This exercise started with a breakdown of how the brain works, the left side of the brain is your verbal and rational side, It reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters and words and thinks serially. The right side is your non-verbal and intuitive brain. It thinks in patterns or pictures. The aim of this exercise was to suggest a new way of brainstorming, I've recently just completed an exercise based around written spider diagrams and this exercise challenges that. Drawing on the right side of the brain is a book published by Betty Edwards in 1979, she believed that drawing helps to reach beyond what may be reached through investigation. In my opinion, this is a more one method isn't superior than the other, when I look back at my previous sketchbook pages, I use a mixture of both small quick drawings and written words. I think these two methods work best together in harmony. It went over the idea that the first part of any b...

Exercise: Spider Diagrams This exercise is designed to help me generate ideas more successfully by creating a spider diagram for a series of words, those words were.   - Seaside   - Childhood   - Angry   - Festival I had to remember my own experiences with those words to help list certain: colours, adjectives, textures and subjects associated with those particular words. This is most of the time my go too first move when creating something so I was happy to learn and to polish those skills. I went through and understood and highlighted the information given to me inside the project. From experience, I think its definitely really important to rip apart an idea and really challenge it, what can happen is that you improve the idea or realise it wasn't as good as what you first thought. Usually, for me, I build upon that original idea by fixing objections. These could be things that wouldn't work physically, perhaps with materials or could b...

Exercise: Writing a Brief  For this exercise I had to identify a piece of artwork to which I share a connection with, and write the brief for the one you chose. The brief you write must guide the illustrator so they can create the image. The first thing I did was to read through the text included within the project and highlight bits to focus on whilst understanding it all. Just the same way you need to read through and understand a brief so this step fits in perfectly. I highlighted bits of the text in which I thought was most important, I think its important to always ask for clarification on briefs, I can imagine it can feel stressful to receive a brief and not completely understand it, but you avoid saying anything because you want to seem like you know what to do.   When creating any piece of artwork for someone else I think its vital to capture what they want to achieve with that piece and always keep that in the back of your mind when illustrating. Howev...

Assignment 1: Say Hello This is the first assignment of illustration 1. It is all about telling my tutor about me with a greetings card. I had to include my: interests, inspirations, the materials I'm comfortable with and like to use and the things I want to get out of this course. I began how I start every exercise and assignment. In my sketchbook. With this assignment, in particular, I created a spider diagram of everything about me. I was quite loose with it initially but then took everything and made a concise list. Things like my general interests were relatively easy and came to me quite quickly. What took slightly longer was my inspiration, I feel that with things that inspire us we don't necessarily recognise them straight away. Spider Diagram I have quite a few interests in my day to day life, I love food, and eating is one of my favourite past times, I also love technology, I'm really interested in computers and software and watch quite a lot of videos ...