Studio Brief 2 - Individual Practice, Community Gardening

I found studio brief 2 more difficult than I first thought I would. In my practice, writing my own briefs works well for me and is something which excites me the most about illustration. I love undertaking projects which call for me to visit a new place, talk to new people and seek out the stories they offer to make work about. However, I think this particular project was a bit of a wake up call in the challenges this kind of work poses, and also in my lack of experience with them. I started off fairly confident with my idea of community gardening, and had the locations to visit to make work from, but having a three week break over easter away from Leeds and these locations was a massive spanner in the works, meaning I made no relevant work over this time which not only set me back but also knocked my confidence. This was fuelled by a few very unfruitful trips to the locations, where none of my drawings worked or turned out how I had hoped, and I disregarded recording the stories I was hearing about and the potential source material that was around me. I struggled with juggling meeting the people, engaging with them and what they were doing, whilst simultaneously making work and recording everything I experienced. This is purely down to inexperience in this kind of work, and will take time to build up a practice which allows a successful balance to ensure I come away with plenty of work and material whilst also having engaged with the subjects.

Another potential difficulty with reportage work is the final illustrations. The very nature of the practice demands observational drawings, which can often end up as scribbles when the people being drawn are constantly moving and life is happening around you. I find this offers a charm to the drawings, and an exciting challenge when creating them. The race of capturing what is seen before it moves makes for very dynamic and exciting images, where the movement and energy of the subject is captured and recorded through multiple lines and versions of the same subject. However, due to their scribbled nature, these drawings do not always lend themselves to final illustrations. The challenge then becomes how to take these drawings and make them final, whether that involves editing them, redrawing them, simplifying them etc whilst maintaining their sensitivity and energetic charm. Through this process the story can get stripped from the images as they become more flat and less energetic, which I think is what happened to the people in my final illustrations. 

Something I really wish to develop more in my observational reportage work is omitting the elements of a scene which are not important. I have a tendency to try and capture everything I can see, which not only takes the fun and flow out of drawing, but also wastes time and causes the images to often appear cluttered and without focus or aim. Again this requires more experience and practice to achieve this successfully.