The Creative Process
At the end of week 2 we did 'the creative process in a day' workshop, to give us a basic understanding of how the creative process works and so that we can begin to develop our own creative processes. We learnt about how the process can be split up into 2 diamonds, each with the 4 units in (research, ideas development, materials and methods and evaluation and reflection), as well as what all of the units include, which is all in my learning journal.
After the introduction, we were given the brief that we had to follow for that day. The first part was to do 3 bits of research; primary, secondary and also a piece of completely random lateral research. For my primary research I did the following studies of an apple that I happened to have in my bag, using watercolour and pen. In some of them I let the material do the work by allowing the ink to flow in any direction without trying to control it which produced some interesting results.
For my secondary research I chose to look at street signs just because I like the way that they are only a piece of metal and yet some of them are incredibly easily recognised and mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I collected some images that stood out to me and made them into a mood bard in my sketchbook, as a form of visual inspiration.
For my lateral research I asked everyone who was working on my table to put their hand on my piece of paper and I drew round it, overlapping them to create some interesting shapes. I then filled them in different colours. I think that some of the negative shapes are quite exciting.
After completing the 3 pieces of research, I decided that I wanted to produce a 'piece of conceptual art work' so I used a mind map to get ideas down at a fast pace, starting with the research that I had done. I tried to do this quite quickly so that I could generate a lot of ideas without thinking too much about an end result, which I hoped would be more creative and rely a bit more on chance, and attempting to think laterally. I used the words 'apple', 'street sign' and 'hands' to start. After completely the mind map, I drew up very rough sketches of some of the ideas that I had come up with so that I could experiment with different compositions.
I chose the idea that I liked the best out of my ideas and rough sketches, which was a depiction of someone throwing away the core of an apple, and then beneath there would be a group of children's hands trying to grab it. This is an attempt at a representation of the inequality in the world.
I then experimented with the placement of the sign over the art, to see which composition worked the best. In the end I decided on the image in the top left, as this creates a nice flow of images from the hand to the apple to the sign, which guides the viewers eyes in quite a satisfying way across the page.
The more I worked on it, the more I thought that this could actually be used as a book cover, with the title being 'How is this fair?' which are the words that I chose for the street sign.
Overall I really enjoyed the creative process in a day as I feel that it gave me a general idea on what a creative process typically looks like which I can add to the knowledge I had from a level Art and a level product design, which both had quite different creative processes, with one being design based and one art based. I feel that after today I will be able to apply this to the coming projects in the foundation, and I'm looking forward to starting the next one.