Unit 3 Evaluation

For my unit 3 project, I wanted to create a piece of work that I would enjoy working on and wanted to refer to a hobby of mine into my project activities. I like to go ‘train spotting’ and watch the buses at Shrewsbury in my spare time and am interested in other types of transport. I also wanted to relate my project to my hobbies because I am building a railway model, and I like to use authentic pieces to merge with the realistic environment of my fictional layout.

I began with research into liveries and decided to not only focus on the obvious to me, train and buses, but to look further afield to ships, racing cars, trams, taxis and basically all things to do with transport.  My search then went even further afield to even more artistic designs such as those for a fairground, circus and narrow boats. After completing my research, I was advised that maybe there would not be enough content in this particular area to give me enough work for a year long course.

I then decided to look at Travel Posters and so began researching posters from old and compared them to modern examples. I looked at the work of designers such as AM Cassandre, Edward McKnight Kauffer, and Tom Purvis. Whilst researching Edward Kauffer, the name Harry Beck cropped up, as Beck had designed the first easy to use London Underground map, based on a circuit board. Their work was of great interest to me and it was interesting to see the various styles they used. I then went on to look at the work of David Kirk and looked at the artists that influenced him.  I liked his work, though this is surprising really; his work is very simple and lacks great detail. However I think that it appeals to me because the scenes are prominent and almost dreamlike. They have an innocent look to them and are reminiscent of the illustrations you would see in a children’s book. He specialises in beach scenes and cityscape scenes and these remind me of images of the travel posters from past times when they advertised a trip to the coast and holidays away for the family.

My mind made up, I decided I would work towards creating a travel poster. I created a mind map, thumbnail drawing and collected together images of subject matter.   I was then able to begin my experiments by using a screenshot of footage taken of my very own model railway. I put this image into Photoshop and started work on taking out the messy background and using the ‘Posterise’ effect to adjust the levels and take away some of the detail in the picture. I experimented with the background colour and some of the other colours and settled on a sky blue for the background and yellow/green for the area around the tracks. I think that I was already seeing my work go in the direction of David Kirk as I was trying to produce a piece of work  that looked simple and not bogged down with too much detail.  Although to really produce work of a similar style, I had to tone down the colours and give my work a more childlike simplicity. As part of my experimentation I produced the picture in black and white, evidence of these experiments can be seen on my blog. I continued my experimentation with further images of trains and buses and using Photoshop as I stripped the image back and tried to present it in a more simplistic form. Looking back through my work I can see that as I progressed with my experimentation, I was finding it easier and easier to produce images in a more simplified way.  I am very particular on fine detail when replicating anything and so this approach to working was very different and sometimes challenging for me.  It was very tempting for me to start adding detail rather than taking it away!  With regard to font type for a poster, my research showed me that the font is always very clear and easy to read, so I looked at different font types that I could possibly use for my poster.  After visiting Powys Castle in Wales I decided to emulate a David Kirk poster.  I chose an image of the castle that I felt had a David Kirk style to it; the castle is situated to the left of the image and there are large conifers in the forefront. The examples of his work on my blog, all appear to show quite a large area of the sky and this is also the case in the photograph I have taken of Powys Castle.  I tried to limit the colour palette to only a few colours as this is a distinguishing feature of the work of David Kirk. I then progressed to vector experimentations by creating an outline of an image which is the outline that I used as a base for future images, this can be noticed in the two experimentations of firstly London Midland, and then ‘Thomson Connect’ trains. After exporting this to a PNG, I then opened it in Adobe Photoshop and began to add the colour and sketched a straight dimensional path to look like a station platform. I was quite pleased with this piece of work however the text choice and text colour looks unprofessional and is something that I thought about more in my final piece. I experimented with a number of posters by changing the colours, view of the train etc. The ‘visit Norwich’ poster  was an idea that I created one evening and I decided that I would simplify further still and play around with perspective. I have created straight lines as I think that this gives the impression of a speeding train shooting off the poster. Again I have used a limited colour palette and given the image a night-time feel. The train livery could almost look like the lights in a train compartment as it speeds along the tracks.

For my final pieces, I decided to create a set of posters that all followed a similar style and theme. I searched the internet and my own photographs for images that I felt I could work with. I followed the limited colour palette for each and the same font was used.  All the images were produced using Photoshop and I have learnt new skills such as creating a colour swatch from an existing image. I am definitely more confident using the iMac and its software and my skills have improved considerably.