Josh Norris OCA logbook

Exercise: Abstract Illustration This exercise did excite me, It had me create abstract marks whilst listening to classical music. The exercise wanted me to convey my interpretation of the essence of the piece. The track I chose to listen to was "Lullaby for String Quartet" by George Gershwin. This track started out quite slow, it had a gentle flow unlike some more intense classical pieces. It felt like it was the calm sea air drifting through a town. I began just inside my sketchbook with a pencil. I created basic pencil lines just freely and random as I listened, I had no pre empted thoughts or ideas of what I would draw, I just drew.  From listening to this track for the 1st time I felt like there was a small sense of mystery with the track, there was never any danger. The song didn't want to create suspense but rather adventure. I love how the song felt like it was climbing to something which plays into the adventure theme. I think it is fitting given the ti...

Exercise: Image Development This exercise is all to do with taking the content of an image and altering it by cropping the image. This can often result in hugely different perspectives of the image and can offer different interpretations.  For my image, I chose to take an illustration from the concept art of Civil War. This marvel film has a whole host of different characters all on screen and I thought would be perfect for this exercise as it has tons of content and opportunities to present in different ways. The original image has a lot of action going on in all areas with the main focus being Captain America and Iron Man in the centre. They are at the centre of this conflict so it makes sense that they're at the centre of the illustration. When you look at the illustration as a whole this connects everything together. It defines the teams. What is said in the project text is that Hot colours demand focus. From this image you can see the bright red of Iron Man's s...

Exercise: Reading an image This exercise is all about analysing an image and gathering interpretations from it. The first thing I noticed when looking at the image is the colour, red and orange are powerful colours that provide for a threatening and dangerous foundation for the illustration. In terms of colour psychology red is considered the colour of danger given its real world connections to blood. If the dragon was bright yellow it would not be as scary. One thing I really like is the contrast of the lightning, the cave is dark and empty however we then have the light beaming from the child’s torch, this works really well at enhancing the danger, the sharp contrast exaggerates the darkness, especially for a child darkness is scary, it is where we think monsters are going to get us. However the artist has chosen to use a dark blue instead of black which I think was a decision to keep the illustration child friendly. Brighter colours are often used in children’s art because the...

Exercise: Illustrating visual space This exercise was all about composition and creating it by altering the: scale, position, and space of images. To begin with, I went through the project text and highlighted a lot of the important info. I then went onto sourcing the images and beginning to arrange my compositions. Throughout the images I created, I also wanted to focus on the visual aspects of the image as well and producing something with visual interest. 1  For image one I played on the idea of the Lauren Child illustration on the page. In this illustration, there is a classroom full of children and they are all aligned horizontally. There is then another child leaning into the classroom. By doing this there is a sense of visual hierarchy, we look at the boy first because he is the most dynamic, it then leads into the building and the tree. 2 For this image, I wanted to play around with scale and visual hierarchy. I have placed the tree in the foregro...

Exercise: Choosing content I began this exercise by thoroughly reading through the extract, for me often it takes a while for me to read something and really imagine it. Unless it's obvious then I just need to process it. This extract particularly was quite 'wordy' and highly descriptive, even if it wasn't obvious descriptions for example facial features, this gives me a huge idea about how the man looks and gives me a lot of creative control. For example the fact this gentleman has been working on the same case for 15 years and its continuing to anger and frustrate him shows not only is he an older gentleman but I can picture him to be quite solemn looking and hardened. I highlighted a few more key elements of the extract to help me to process it and not forget details. I also highlighted parts of the extract that helped me to envision and build the scene around him, such as where the light entered the room and how the room was completely empty and lifeless. ...

Exercise: Objective and subjective drawings For these next exercise I had to draw something objectively. Researching into objective drawing and what it was I instantly knew it would be out of my comfort zone. Whenever I have drawn anything, the finer details I feel have been missed. If I'm drawing something from real life and some details don't quite line up, or an element is closer than it should I would just dust over it and continue. Ultimately at the end what I had drawn would look fine but it did lack finer details. This has a lot to do with my patience levels and often I would get frustrated. Doing this exercise pushed my patience and at times I just wanted to leave it and move on but I kept at it and forced my self to resist the easy route. I have to say though, I could not have done this without my eraser. I chose to draw my Fossil Hybrid watch, it is round and has a lot of smaller details within the face. I positioned the watch on top of my white diary, I thought t...

Assignment 2: Point of sale display This assignment stood out to me as its all to do with branding which is an area of design that I'm very interested and excited about. When I read through the brief I had a lot of instant ideas, these were all very generic routes to head down with this Assignment. I could picture in my mind a lot of watercolour drawn pieces of fruit and veg. Now I'm not saying that that cant be a successful approach however I like to be outside of the box more. That can be a generic phrase but I like to push myself to think of something different instead of going with something that is convenient. I think these ideas come to me when I'm brainstorming ideas seem to bounce off each other then occasionally I'll get a whole new idea. What I first started by doing is highlighting the brief and really thinking about what it is asking of me. At the bottom of the brief, it said to focus on the food in the image, this is an illustration course after a...