Visual Reflective Journal 26/10/10

 ‘Draw. Work by Hand.’

 Visual people think and work visually and the key is drawing. To express ideas they contain development work to sketchbooks. Drawing is about exploring, playing and thinking out loud. A wide a range of media should be experimented with, in order to challenging yourself and create new ideas. Visual Communicators express themes, ideas and development through drawing. Each image doesn’t need to be a work of art; they are just a way of illustrating your thoughts in visual form. Jill Calder takes a sketchbook wherever she goes, drawing everything that inspires her and that could develop her current ideas and project further. Here are some images of her sketchbook work. They are everyday scenes of what she has seen and become a narrative and a journey of her ideas. They are playful but also document the information she needs. The only critic of your development work is yourself, whom you need to manage in order to be able to play and explore to get your ideas out there, on the page, without the feeling that your work isn’t good enough. However, the work can’t be completely random, it is for a purpose, a concept or brief, so evaluating the work, and listening to this ‘critic’ (but only after the playful stage) is necessary to stay on track. Drawing is not limiting and can be created by cutouts, (e.g. Marion Deuchars and Peter Callesen), stitch (e.g. Lizzie Finn) sticking down, biro, paint and so on.

 

‘Cyclic Design Process.’

The Cyclic Design Process is all about iteration. You think, you plan, you do, you evaluate. Then the cycle starts again. Creative people have worked in this way for many years. It is to do with the fact that you don’t stop until you get it right. There is nothing worse that settling with something that is adequate, as in a creative profession you are always competing with others. You need to continuously interrogate your work. Can it look better? Can it be better? Thomas Edison designed over 10,000 prototypes before inventing the light bulb. An important principle is you learn by doing, and this is how the cycle comes in. This structure enables you to play first, but then step back and evaluate the outcome. Pablo Picasso produced more than 60 portraits of his lover Fernande Olivier, between the spring and fall of 1909. He used a variety of media and formats, and through his devotion to one subject the series has been described as ‘unprecedented in the history of portraiture.’ Portrait of Fernande, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909, (oil on canvas) explores cubism and expresses Picasso’s ‘radical reformulation of human physiognomy’. Other media includes watercolours in ‘Standing female nude,’ fall 1909, and black chalk for ‘Study of head of woman (Fernande)’ 1909. Some of the images are unfinished as

 Picasso has allowed himself to play freely, but through evaluation has moved on to others. A valuable quote by Picasso states ‘I never ‘finish’ a piece of work…I merely abandon it.’