Being in lockdown has made it quite difficult for me to maintain a good level of motivation for a longer period of time, especially when it comes to when I am trying to think of a good idea for a big piece or poster. I find it really hard to get started to force myself to think of ideas. During a lull, I decided to order a small sketchbook to start creating little doodles/drawings that I didn’t really have to think about too much in order to maintain a certain level of creativity and thinking towards my project. I could then look back at the different drawings I’d done and see any themes that I could translate into my main project. here are some of the drawings I have been doing;

Even if this doodles didn’t translate into something a bit more major, it was still useful for me to feel like I’d been productive. I think even drawing one or two little things a day got me feeling really inspired which was useful when I started to think about more ideas for my FMP. Since doing this I have noticed an improvement tin my drawing, and also that I seem like like my work a lot over all. I then started creating this style of drawing on a bit of a bigger scale.

I tried to take inspiration from everything around me, whether it related to my project directly or not; here are some things that I created. I liked some of these drawings alone, I liked the idea that a lot of these drawings tell a story of my day without that being directly obvious. I took some inspiration from an artists I have been researching and decided to create a storyboard type piece, compiling these illustrations together.

I chose to present one day during lockdown in a piece, I took a lot of experimenting with layouts and colour ways to create something I was really happy with. So in this piece I have included, the shirt my boyfriend was wearing on Friday 10th April, which was the 18th day of lockdown, along with what I was wearing. A tea tin that I bought from a charity shop that I was trying to create a piece about, along with a stylised version of my view from this day. I personally think this is my best piece so far, it uses a combination of illustration and layouts which I think are my two main strengths.

This format also has a lot of possibilities to how it can translate to the objects and garments I have been looking at. From this piece I have had the idea to communicate a backstory for the objects I have been looking at- this might be fictional or factual depending on how much I know about each piece. I think this gives me a lot for possibilities of the range of things I can draw which will keep the project interesting for me, whilst still adhering to my project.

My next stage is to thing about the different objects I want to represent, I am aiming to create works about 8 different things. I have asked family members to send in some different objects or garments they have that tell a story to them- but that wouldn’t be considered special to someone else. I then want to look through my own wardrobe/ belongings to see what things I have that are pre-owned and to imagine the story that these things carry. I want to communicate these stories to try to express that clothes and objects should be treasured much more than they are. I still feel like this is creating a homage to these pieces just in a different way.