Studio Brief 1: Live Brief

Overall, I think I could have been happier with how studio brief 1 went. I chose to answer two live briefs – the Hookworms poster brief and the socio-political poster brief.

I found the Hookworms brief quite challenging because although I liked the thought of producing a poster for a band, it was difficult to think of imagery for music. For research I looked at previous posters of theirs and listened to their music, but I didn’t want to make anything that was based too much off any of their older posters.

I think another reason I found this quite difficult was because I ended up doing most of my development on photoshop, and I am usually a lot more comfortable working in a sketchbook. I ended up producing two final posters, which were made from scanned in paintings and textures from my sketchbook and then edited on photoshop. While they’re similar images (the same hand motif in both), with the first one I tried to replicate the feel of old DIY punk gig posters, and in the second I went for something a bit more friendly, using a similar colour scheme as their new album.

This hasn’t put me off attempting a band poster again in the future, as I think it would be good practice for combining text and images anyway. However, if I do a similar brief in the future I think I will have to make sure to work more in my sketchbook because this is obviously the process that works best for me.

The other live brief I chose was the socio-political poster. I initially did a lot of research into the rise of right wing politics, because this is a topic I had a lot of interest in. However, after a tutorial I decided to save this subject for studio brief 2, and instead I decided to produce a fake newspaper front page for The Sun. I tried to make it as ridiculous as I could think of to highlight how absurd sensationalist headlines are, and how easily the public can be swayed.

I’m relatively happy with the outcome for this brief. I think I probably could have made it more compositionally interesting, and definitely registered the linoprint with the screenprint a bit better. Despite this though, I think it works quite well as an image and I really enjoyed the opportunity to combine different printing processes since this is something I’ve never done before. I especially like the really bright colours that can be achieved through printing.

From studio brief 1 I think I have learnt that I work best in a sketchbook when developing my ideas, so this is definitely something I should take forward from now on. I also want to experiment more with combining print processes in the future because I think this could give some very interesting results and give more depth to images.