Visual Narratives - One Week Map

Working collaboratively is very difficult, for me personally, but also I reckon for the majority of people, especially when the groups are decided for you. It is a necessary challenge however, and collaboration is something that I understand to be fairly essential in the world of a practicing illustrator. 

Whilst the day out, walking around Leeds looking for inspiration, was pretty enjoyable and I got some drawings and photographs etc. which I was happy with as starting points, the main issue was really to do with developing the ideas. It wasn't a case of creative differences or arguments, it was pretty much the opposite. When a group of people who don't know each other particularly well have create work together, everyone becomes terribly polite (in much the same way as when a large group of people must settle the bill for a meal out in a restaurant) and there is a total lack of criticism and everyone sort of fannies about without suggesting or creating anything concrete. The result is, in my opinion, that the work suffers from a lack of commitment. I'm not really too bothered in this instance as it was only a short project, designed predominantly to induct us into the screen printing (which I have never done before) facilities at college, so as a means to an end it wasn't too bad. I wasn't very happy with the outcome though, for the record.

As far as screen printing goes, I do really like the idea of trying it out, and i no doubt will, but do find it rather daunting as a process. I struggle with creating work through time consuming processes, and processes which require careful planning in the execution of work. I usually prefer to work in a much more instinctual, spontaneous way, so I have no doubt that screen printing will prove a bit of a challenge for me when I do try it in my own work.      

We decided, in the end, that one layer would be an angular line, roughly describing the route we took around Leeds, and that the other layer would have on it symbols to represent certain things we witnessed en route, my contributions being some fallen cups, the original drawings in my sketchbooks I quite like, a crude interpretation of the John Lewis logo (which I filmed overlapping itself briefly every time the automatic doors opened as that looked quite interesting) and an abstracted depiction of a crab, after I saw several live ones (one trying to escape) at a fish mongers -

Cups

Crab

Original layers for screen prints

        

To summarise, despite having some fairly interesting starting points, to many compromises and lack of investment from most of us (myself included) lead to a rather lackluster outcome.