Part 4 - Tutor Feedback

 Overall Comments:

This part of the course focused on the sketchbook as a repository to instigate ideas and develop these into short sequential narratives. Overall your response has been good and well engaged with the course. You could experiment more with materials and composition, and how your images can integrate with textual narrative. Your learning log shows good reflective notes. Spend more time developing drawings from different viewpoints to create variety.

Adding in narrative with my sketches was a really enjoyable part of the course for me. I found Brandon J Wallace's film and tv scenes fascinating and when I attempted this for exercise 4.2 I realised how challenging it was for me. It took a lot of concentration but I learnt a lot about how scenes are filmed in a way to convey so much information to the viewer in terms of lighting, clothing colours, viewpoints etc. As a viewer I had never really appreciated how much goes into each scene and this exercise really opened my eyes.

It looked like you really enjoyed this exercise and the comments you added were great, adding an extra dimension, a story behind the images. The two that you re-worked both work well. It’s good that you tried a variety of placement for the text. Personally, I prefer the thought bubble for the second image. It makes her seem more isolated to me, that she’s just thinking to herself. You make an interesting and valid point though about her looking down at the words, it’s interesting how the same image can speak differently to different people. You also created a nice atmospheric image for the last part of the exercise.

I really enjoyed adding narrative to my previous sketches, thinking up what my characters were thinking and going on to use different media to create a new drawing. Narrative seems to be something I enjoy a lot and I'm looking forward to seeing how I can use it in my work going forward.

Assignment 4 Feedback:

Having decided on your structure, you could have spent more time developing your character and your compositions. With such a simple narrative, think about how you could have used more dynamic compositions to give the story more impact. If you look back at the Brandon Wallace exercise and the effect of a dynamic composition on the flow of a story you will see what I mean. If you had developed your images further at the thumbnail stage, there would have been more variety in your illustrations. As it is, all of them show Edith from the waist up and most are from the same viewpoint. Also there are only six images and not eight in your 8 point narrative. Colour-wise, the idea of starting with muted tones and adding more colour as you moved through the story was a good one. Perhaps you could have emphasised this by starting in black and white or just grey tones and working through to colour as Edith becomes happier. As for the narrative, I’m left wondering why the stranger buys her coffee. At the moment, it looks like the assistant buys the coffee, it might have been nice to have the stranger in the background of the image with their own thoughts about why they made the gesture. 

I wasn't very pleased with my foldy zine in the end, I definitely rushed it due to time constraints and that was reflected in the lack of quality and lack of development overall. Given more time I would have tried to think more about what I was trying to communicate and how I could have shown my character 'Edith' in different angles and viewpoints to enrich the illustrations. It definitely needed a lot more time and thought put into it but I did like the overall concept. 

The same areas keep popping up for me in terms of perspective, composition and viewpoints and this is something I am gradually working to improve my understanding and application of.