Final Major Project: Statement of Intent

Last summer I was lucky enough to work with birds of prey and decided back then that this is what I wanted to base my FMP on. I worked there mainly with the owls, and not only was I able to get the chance to do some amazing life drawings but I was also lucky enough to see and study the birds up close, which would benefit any future drawings I do for this project. 

However, owls are currently in fashion so I think it will be difficult for me to create anything completely unique. I have therefore decided to base my project on birds in general. My idea is to create a collection of cuddly toy birds for children, but that will also educate children about certain breeds of birds at the same time through decorative illustrations and text on the toys. 

I was originally thinking of maybe including the seven deadly sins in this project. However, when I was getting my assessment feedback for the previous project, Jonny said to think about other groups of seven I could involve. After a lot of brainstorming, I have decided to use the seven continents in my work, and aim to design and hopefully create a soft toy of a unique bird that is native to and represents each of the seven continents. 

Who Am I?

I'm Dannee Loosley, a 21 year old student studying Illustration at Southampton Solent University and I am a crazy bird lady.

All things pink and fluffy influence me, as well as rainbows, bunnies, and unicorns. Overall, I think we can safely say I'm pretty girly.

On a more serious note, I am heavily influenced by music. Especially ambient music or classical music, music that doesn't have lyrics so my drawings depend on the mood of the song. A particular music artist that I love is M83. I'm also influenced a lot by my friends and by animals.

One of my favourite illustrators is Michael Foreman as I love his traditional styled drawings, and have grown up reading his books as a child.

I've also recently come across Kira Nichols and her blog. She makes colourful crafty bits and pieces, a lot of them based on birds as well. I think I will be easily influenced by her creations. You can see her stuff at http://www.oopsicraftmypants.com.

I like working with fabrics, and also sewing and stitching. I feel my work in this media is normally my strongest. I also like painting, sketching, line drawing and collage. 

About the Presentation Document

Today we had our project launch for our Final Major Project which is the last unit in our degree. To accompany our FMP I am creating this blog to help document my ideas and opinions, which will help to explain in detail my thoughts and reasons behind my work which may not have been made completely clear in my sketchbook.

Even though I could personally made a diary to write my progress in, I have wanted to get a blog up and running for a while now and this presentation document has given me a reason to.

Reflection on last project:

For my negotiated study project I was originally illustrating the song Raconte - Moi Une Histoire by M83. 

The song can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ3flcWcwmI

I was originally planning on doing a series of children's illustrations for it, but I was being naive and didn't realise straight away the song was about drugs. Pete pointed this out to me in our first tutorial but by this point I had already done a fair amount of work and didn't want it to go to waste so I only altered my idea slightly. 

The song talks a lot about frogs and cupcakes, so I already had a lot of sketches involving the two. I did some rethinking and decided to write my own story involving a frog that comes across a human picnic. His Mum tells him not to eat all the food as sugary food should only be eaten occasionally as a treat. However, the little frog doesn't listen and goes and eats everything, leaving him feeling very poorly and wishing he had listened to his Mum. 

I came up with this idea when flicking through Michael Foreman's book War and Peas. 

I love how his book heavily involves food and wanted too incorporate that idea into my own work. 

I aimed to have a dummy book and four completed double paged spreads at the end of the project, and was planning to sew and stuff the final pieces and then stitch into them. However, I decided to make the whole dummy book out of felt as the cost of material would have been too much, and it would have also been very time consuming.

When I had a tutorial with Jonny we agreed that the felt actually looked quite good, so I ended up making all the pieces for my book illustrations individually out of felt, scanned them in and put them together in photoshop. I also made the font out of felt.

Overall I was really pleased with this project. I thought it was some of my strongest work so far. My assessment and feedback went quite well, and I agreed with everything Pete and Jonny said in my feedback. Pete said he thought my work hadn't been developed sufficiently which it hadn't, the point of perspective was the same throughout my dummy book, and I found that the illustrations ended up being repetitive in parts. However, I am still pleased with the outcomes and found that working with felt actually looked quite good. I have learnt that for my final major project I need to develop my work more, work in the studios more often and have more tutorials.