I’d like to begin this post by explaining why I’ve called this ‘Against the flow.’ This phrase encapsulates my process and thoughts in retaliation to the Modul and Briefs. The kind of open ended and conceptual design is something I’ve always struggled to respond to and honestly enjoy. I work better with fixed rules, and deadlines. I accept this as a fault in my creative process and for this Modul I decided to approach each brief in a way that I wouldn’t normally do or have ever done. Therefore, I derived the name ‘against the flow’ as I was going against what I perceive as the flow of my creative process.

A link to the visual tour of my sketchbook: https://vimeo.com/299451527

Blind Drawings

The blind drawings were one of the exercises that I struggled to respond to. Restricted by media, sight and method. I decided to try and force myself to enjoy this, it had to obvious benefits of helping to create confidence using line, but I also seen it as an opportunity to learn how to gain enjoyment and find the ‘silver lining’ so to speak. The drawings as a whole didn’t turn well but towards the end of the first day I began to see the fun side of the task, I began to care less about the quality of the drawing in a sense but managed to see it as a way to loosen up my mind into thinking more conceptually. It’s something that I wouldn’t seek out to do again but will definitely attempt more continuous line drawings in the future.

https://vimeo.com/299451527#t=5s (Begins at part spoken about)

Quick Interview & Portrait

Portraiture is something I’ve done very little exploration in before, the idea of creating a quick portrait of someone is almost Alien. Any previous attempts to draw a person even remotely life like has resulted in a cartoonish mess but for this I decided to embrace this. Coupled with the results of the quick interview I carried out on my Model, Ciaran, this style seemed to reflect his personality. The result isn’t the best of drawings, but I found it to be a fun exploration of my skills.

The task of trying to bring the results of my interview into the drawing is something I found more difficult. I found it hard to stray away from what I perceived as a ‘standard’ portrait. However, the interview itself is something that I thoroughly enjoyed, a part of design that I love is learning about people their life’s and problems in order to gain insight into them in order aid the design process. This aspect I was comfortable with but did at points struggle to think of questions that I felt were relevant to the task, however I felt that when it came to the drawing I had plenty to work with, but I struggled to bring it all together coherently.

https://vimeo.com/299451527#t=43s (Begins at part spoken about)

Conductive Ink/ Circuit Drawings

Conductive Ink is something I’ve wanted to ‘Play’ with for well over a year now even since I scrolled by a badly edited video on Facebook about it. It seemed like a fun way to explore the implementation of electronics in art and to prototype ideas, unfortunately it didn’t live up to my expectations. In practice uses of the Ink it didn’t work as well as advertised. My original idea to incorporate an LED light in to my portrait of, this time, Michael was to run the Conductive Ink up the seam of his jacket and up into the eye of the crow on his shoulder with a thick black coat of feathers to hopefully cover up the legs of the LED. However, after practicing with the Ink I still wanted to get the effect in the Crows eye so I pushed the LED though the back of the drawing and crudely connected it to the battery. I feel like I would have learned more from this Project if I could get the Ink to work but it did highlight to me that there is a variety of Materials that we can use to experiment with its not always the most obvious thing available to hand.

https://vimeo.com/299451527#t=54s (Begins at part spoken about)

Visual Personality profile

This project is where I really tried to go against my usual working style. I usually gather all my research then systematically begin to form my final outcome in steps but for this project I decided to Begin various drawings and create Ideas all at the same time. I tried to adopt the open ended and conceptual nature of the brief and let that guide me to my final design.

After carrying out my Interview on Harris is got from him that he was an emotional person that doesn’t struggle to show this. And that each emotion he conveys shows a different side to Harris’ personality. I wanted to focus on this instead of the typical stuff that I found out – i.e. pets, favourite colour etc. I began by taking Images of Harris, I then began trying to sketch single elements of his profile of different pages with different media. I then put the pictures into photoshop and played around with them, used image trace, highlighted separate colours relating to emotion. I began to draw the ideas together, from this I decided to create a full image of Harris with various colours doing a line trace drawing. I then traced separate elements of Harris with colours on different sheets of tracing paper so that when it came together it would create a full image of him. Each layer representing a different layer to his personality and emotion.

https://vimeo.com/299451527#t=65s (Begins at part spoken about)

Reading Week Tasks

For the Reading week tasks, I decided to approach them as a chance to reflect on my day. The drawing represented my day overall as well as the singular task or object, represented through style, quality and the obvious visuals. I didn’t find this Brief particularly enjoying but it did inspire me to think creatively especially when I feel fatigued and ‘all out of ideas’ It helped me gain insight into how to force yourself to think creatively as part of a career situation, it’s when you need to do it. Not necessarily when you want to.

https://vimeo.com/299451527#t=123s (Begins at part spoken about)

Visual CV

Once again, this project was a good chance to use drawing and creativity to have a moment of self-reflection, of where I’ve been and where I want to go. I enjoyed this and found thinking about these aspects of my life beneficial. I thought that I would try and form the basis of my Visual CV/ Journey Map around something personal to me – Music. I decided to create the scene of a Record store, with the wall of records being my past experiences. Going through school to college (Represented by a broken record, as I see it as a personal hiccup/setback), the current record playing is to represent DJCAD and the soon to be released (hopefully) records representing my future ambitions.

https://vimeo.com/299451527#t=161s (Begins at part spoken about)

Arduino Character

I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the project. I’ve always enjoyed coding and have worked with Arduinos before and seen this as a chance to bring together my enjoyment of design and coding together.

When it came to the character and story board I decided to flip my usual thought process on its head.  For this project it would make sense to plan the character and Story at the same time so that they work coherently together. But instead I decided to work on each element solely. For this I first created my character/object and a back story for it. My object became a tunnel with a light show. With the back story being a new tunnel built in-between two community’s and at night it has a pulsating light show and when two people meet in the middle and press buttons at the same time it becomes Red and Blue to represent the two separate community’s (all light carried out by the Arduino in the model) and them coming together to change the lights in the tunnel.

After I had created this back story I created and finalised my model so that it was set in stone. This forced me to think creatively when it came to create the story board. I sat for a while trying to think of a genuine and serous story around the tunnel but every idea I had were all either stupid or comical. So I decided to try and develop one of these ideas further and that’s how I got to the idea of a character named after myself confusing the opening of the new tunnel as aliens Invading.

https://vimeo.com/299451527#t=175s (Begins at part spoken about)