A day in the life - Week 1 Evaluation and Feedback

I don’t feel anything went particularly badly this week; at the beginning of the week when I was first given the article I struggled to get an understanding of it but after reading it a few times I picked up on certain themes to explore. Pouring my ideas and thoughts out onto an A2 sheet also helped me gain an understanding of the article and started to get more thought provoking ideas flowing. 

I now understand that ‘roughs’ can be rough. In previous projects I have been too precious about the aesthetics of my roughs - this has caused me to spend a lot longer on them than I needed to and consequently given me less time to develop each idea. I feel I am more relaxed when producing roughs now which is beneficial to my thought processes. 

I feel my first ideas were quite obvious in the sense that they were clearly showing the Marshmallow Test, but I thought that watching a modern day video of this experiment being conducted gave me a good insight into the expressions and movements I needed to capture to portray a child trying desperately to control themselves. Subconsciously, I looked at each different theme I had picked out and thought about the different ways I could illustrate this. 

Working to dimensions is something I have had very little experience of but I felt it really pushed my compositions because I was more consciously thinking about how I could use the space for the image to be most effective. 

Feedback

My feedback was generally positive which is always nice to hear but I was also happy to get some constructive criticism which I can really work with and build on next week. I found this feedback really useful because I could be going along with an idea that I think works really well but other people might not even understand why it links to the article. Some of my temptation imagery didn't get the response i’d thought; the image of the witch and her beckoning hand wasn't understood. I totally agree with the idea that using an image relating to smoking could be giving a false idea of what the article is about. People could be put off reading the article if they feel that it is not relevant to them. 

200mm x 200mm (Square)
Although my rough of the brain as a boxer was in a landscape composition, there was quite a lot of unnecessary detail in this frame and the people in my crit suggested this could work better as a square image. 

105mm x 200mm (Portrait)
The rough I am taking forward to develop this week is the full body image of a puppeteer controlling himself. I am pleased one of my drawings conveying this idea was selected because it feel it was one of my strongest ways of showing self control. 

290mm x 105mm (Landscape)

They thought the composition of my drawing of the boy doing the marshmallow test with the snail on the other side of the frame was really effective in showing time moving slowly. It was suggested that I looked at my other drawings of children doing the marshmallow test as the positions and expressions shown in these were more successful in conveying the feeling of resisting temptation.