This exercise asked me to expand on the themes and ideas I had identified in the previous exercise, relating to the word(s) I picked. I decided to go with ‘exotic’, as I felt I didn’t really get a chance to see the full potential of this word with the previous exercise, and I had a lot of ideas I wanted to convey.
I decided to complete this digitally, as I don’t have access to a lot of physical resources, and I enjoy creating digital collages. I have experience creating mood boards, as seen in Exercise 1 where I created a mood board for my Mel Baxter recreation piece. My previous mood boards, however, are very organised, and focus less on idea generation and more on collating the final ideas I actually want to work with, in order to compose a piece of work. As this is focused on idea generation, I decided to do a more eclectic collage style piece.
To start, I began collecting imagery to use in my collage. I used the following websites to find these images, as they are free for personal and commercial use.
– Flickr Commons
– British Library
– Biodiversity Heratige Museum
– Unsplash
– Pixabay
I searched ‘exotic’ to start with, and saved any images I felt connected to my previous ideas of the word. Then I started searching for specific elements I hadn’t found yet, like wealth, tigers, rainforests, and South America. I then opened a large canvas in Procreate and added all the images I had found. From there, I started cutting out the animals from their backgrounds, swatching colours, and examining textures. I created 3 new brushes, 2 from the feathers of the parrot, and one of a flower I found. I felt the feather brushes worked especially well as a texture.
I then began organising and placing the various images in a collage style, with linked ideas near each other. I had wanted to use the map and the money as overlays, rather than standalone images, however in doing this I became too focused on making this a piece of its own, rather than just ideas. I decided to leave them as they were. I finished by finding images of newspaper headlines on google, and clipping the letters to spell ‘exotic’. I wanted that realistic mood board vibe, which I feel I achieved.
The exercise says to ‘collect swatches of colour and texture or create your own to establish a palette of colours and repertoire of marks.’ Whilst this was my aim with creating custom brushes, and generally by including plenty of bold colour, I feel I could expand this and show it more clearly. The definition of the brushes is lost somewhat in the collage format, and the colour swatches blend into the background. I decided to do a slightly more ordered, straight forward mood board, closer to ones I have done in the past. I feel this would be a natural next step, regardless, as it would help form an actual final image, rather than just sporadic ideas.
I think the next step here for me would be to begin studies of the different elements, and drawing out specific shapes to get a feel for them. I would then start to compile my ideas into an illustration, and work with composition. For idea development, I thought this was incredibly useful. Creating a collage rather than going straight to the orderly mood board helped me see the possibilities for an illustration. It helped connect ideas visually and notice how these ideas engage with each other. For idea development in future, I think I will begin with a spider diagram, then a collage mood board, then finalise my ideas with a structured mood board.
Learning Log 