Category: Year 1

Beginning the week, we started by exploring different sounds in our surroundings, both inside and outside, and seeing how they could be translated into drawings. I explored showing individual sounds as well as soundscapes, through words and artistically. I also took recordings of a few sounds that I came across.

After beginning to work with sounds, we had to create three 10 second soundscapes, with accompanying imagery. The first, I wanted to create a theme of a supermarket, so I worked with different sound recordings of people chatting in a shop, a rhythmic scanner beep, and a metronome. Second, I made an outdoor scape of rain at a bus stop, using rain sounds, and the noise of a bus stopping. I also experimented with using whale noises and a previous recording of a siren, to bring a more musical quality. The accompanying animation was inspired by the sound itself, featuring a man who turns into a whale to board a mysterious portal-like bus. The third soundscape was of a cooking scene. I experimented with different sections of a long recording of myself cooking, including chopping, frying, and boiling sounds. Overall I think the second one was the most successful as I experimented with it the most, and spent the most time dedicated to the visual accompaniment. I would like to have had more time to work with the others.

Reflecting on my location drawing, I found it interesting to work with different perspectives and angles of the same area, both indoors and outdoors. After sketching outside and at the Tate with my class, I went to a café to try and focus more on people in my drawings. I was not used to including people/characters in my location sketches, so found giving them character quite challenging. I feel like I got better at this over time, though still have a tendency to draw the area around the character as the main focus. 

When drawing the ‘narrative story’ I wanted to use a very simple idea – a woman getting a text from a loved one. I knew I would find drawing the same character multiple times to be difficult, as it means maintaining the proportions and shapes of the character, so I chose to focus on the expressions and keeping continuity, rather than making the ‘plot’ too dramatic. I do think I managed to show clearly what is happening in the scene through expressions, though I would like to push them further at my next opportunity.