Week Two - Class Four 10.03.16

VISUAL LANGUAGE, STYLE AND AESTHETIC

Making, Ideate, Critique, Understand, Define

I found this class really useful because it helped me to clarify my ideas. Caroline Campbell had a look at my visual matrix and mood boards and we identified that there are two distinct Japanese styles (soft, watercolour style/ strong, bold colours) and she told me that the strong, bold colours would work better for me. This is because Japanese style is very simplistic and refined, and that is not my style of painting, hence this is a challenge for me. She told me that limiting the colours and materials I use, such as using paper cut outs, would help with this. I then went on to test this, making paper cut-outs of sushi. My previous research and experimentation helped a lot because I knew which colours and types of sushi would best reflect each place. When it came to arranging these cut-outs, I went back to the activity we did in Screen last year, where I chose a key word for each location (quick, cool and classy) and did iterations of these words using circles.

I think this worked really well, a lot better than the other styles I had tried out. It is simple, but still conveys a Japanese style, the sushi, and the colours and positioning convey the 'vibe'. It also is the closest thing I have made that reflects the style of Tokyo Cult Recipes that I was originally inspired from.

After class, I went to the library to look at books which had used Japanese styled design, and I found a magazine called novum, which had used a similar style to what I created today, except in a more abstracted form. The article about the image was in German, however there was one sentence in English - "Like all things around us, food is essentially a collection of basic shapes and colours".

Before next lesson, my aim is to finalise these designs digitally and try out different ways of creating them and which works best. I will continue to draw inspiration from artist models and keep going back to the locations themselves to make sure I am remaining true to them. I will also ask people who do not know my locations what they read into each design, to test the success of each