So unfortunatley I didn’t have as much time as I had honestly hoped to have for this project. Between starting my first personal project and the Christmas period/hand in I was struggling with a handful of issues that were really getting in the way of my work. Mostly, being stuck at my job for more or less the whole month of December and my mental health being in a fairly poor state.
Due to me being stuck at work a lot and running behind on my first personal project I ended up having about half the time that I wanted for this project, but in having said that I don’t think the actual final pieces suffered that much for it.
My research really suffered for having so little time, I had once again planned to have mood boards to show what I wanted to do and how I wanted each piece to look like and I also really wanted to have a breakdown of the poems so I could discuss how the poetry and the imagery actually connected to each other and how I’d come to have included what I had in my outcomes, but to be honest it just seemed really important to get the actual artwork done more than anything! Of course I had researched the poetry before I have started the project and looked into what the themes were and what they meant, in was in doing this research I had the idea to make the designs a mix of hetro and homosexual couples after reading multiple articles discussing whether or not Emily Dickinson was a lesbian. I also would have liked to have had more time to experiment with different materials as well but it came to a point where I was working from the second I got in from work, then working until 3/4am, getting up at 6am to go to work and coming back and doing it all again. I did do some tests with gouche paint (fuck gouache paint, by the way) but they were awful so it doesn’t feel like they were worth doing.
I drew my designs out and photocopied them, and after the paint tests didn’t work I decided to go back in and have a go with some pro marker pens, which I really liked and I thought looked really good. I added in some finer details with coloured pencils and I really really liked how they ended up looking. I will probably use this technique again soon because the results are so good, but I’m hoping not to rest on it. I still want to try and make my work quite broad and I want a varied body of outcomes for my portfolio come the end of this year.
I think the first two pieces were really really good, for the good morrow and wild nights, but I couldn’t quite get the design for the trick right. I was limited with my cool colours because I don’t have very many pro markers, I think I’ve also made it a bit of a busy scene with all the photographs and bits but fundamentally I am quite pleased overall. As I said in my other post now that I’ve made some amends with work, my mental health is in a better place I can take the negative aspects of the first semester and use them as an example of what not to do next.
References:
unknown, u. (2019). Emily Dickinson. [online] Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson [Accessed 19 Sep. 2019].
Tafarella, S. (2019). Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think. [online] Prometheus Unbound. Available at: https://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/emily-dickinson-lesbian-her-letter-to-susan-gilbert-in-june-of-1852-might-tell-us-less-than-you-think/ [Accessed 19 Sep. 2019].
Popova, M. (2019). Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry. [online] Brain Pickings. Available at: https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/12/10/emily-dickinson-love-letters-susan-gilbert/ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson [Accessed 26 Sep. 2019].
Meg Dobson-Armstrong Art 