The Final Pieces

My phrase for the Olio project is 'Distorting Time'. This blog shows my thought process and how I got to my final pieces.

The Final Pieces on Indesign

Visual Reference and research

The first thing I thought of was different ways in which time can be distorted. Fast forward, rewind, stopped and I tried to think of ways to portray this. It also made me think of things that are effected by time, which is pretty much everything, but it mainly made me think of living things aging or decaying. So my first sketch was of a young girl and a kitten playing in a rose garden, which had no real direction but I planned to work on it more and study the skeleton of a living animal such as a cat.

Rose Bush

Cat Skeleton

Original idea for young girl and kitten. To show time passing older girl and cat in second image.

New idea, with cat skeleton to emphasise how in the end we all become skeletons. With time distorted the cat is already a skeleton.

Overall finished sketch.

When researching other artists work regarding 'distorting time' it was hard to find anything that wasn't very surreal. Which I liked the idea of but I fund a lot of distorted clocks and wanted to come up with something a bit different to just a clock or hourglass that was distorted as I felt this was too obvious. I like the way the numbers on the clock are hovering above it in the image below. Like time is literally falling away.

Art by Hipy666 on DeviantArt

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  An artist I looked at regarding style is an illustrator and artist Joanna Henly aka 'Miss Led'. Her work involves clean lines and I like the 'prettyness' of her work and the use of colour. She is influenced by fashion photography and 90s street art. Which is not really something I am aiming my work towards but I love the style and wanted it to influence my work for Olio.

I got this image from the Miss Led Facebook page. The Alice in Wonderland Illustration on the bottom left is relevant to my olio work.

Thought process

Next I took a step back and roughly doodled some broader ideas.

Idea generation. 'Distorting Time

Falling in reverse idea. Rewinding time.

Same idea done in a different way.

Some other ideas

I took a couple of those ideas and took them to the next stage. It was a good experiment but I decided against them as I didn't like how they turned out. I still want to use and hourglass in my final piece but not as the main focus.I also want to move away from watercolour for a change.

Girl trapped in hourglass trying to stop the sand falling, therefore 'distorting time'. I felt this idea was too obvious.

'Falling in reverse/rewinding time' idea. Watercolour.

More Ideas

For this idea I decided to use a dip pen and ink. I like the effect but it doesn't have that 'prettyness' that I am after. For the Olio project I want to have something that is nice/pretty to look at, even if there is an eerie element to it. This is because I feel it might be more memorable this way.

This idea involves literally showing time periods distorted. With a Victorian horse and cart in a futuristic environment. Dip Pen and Ink.

I quite liked this idea but struggled to think of a second image and wanted to do something even more surreal.

Dip Pen, Ink and Water colour. I used quite vibrant colours to try to make it more eye catching and surreal.

The final idea

I was going to stick to my idea of mixing different time periods but went back to my original idea about how time makes things decay and also how living things become skeletons when everything is stripped away. I wanted to try an idea that was quite surreal but also make it quite obvious that 'distorting time' was my phrase. I decided to use an hourglass still but have it breaking. Therefore making the viewer think about what that might represent. The roses being in mod air is supposed to show time standing still as they are flung into the air. The girl, being half normal and half skeleton, is supposed to symbolise the passage of time. How she would inevitabely end up as a skeleton in time but this illustration also shows her as a living human as well. The cat is quite a random addition. As I had drawn a cat skeleton in the first illustration (was originally a kitten, to show the passage of time) I thought I'd add a cat (another living thing) to show the passage of time again. The little girl in the other image is supposed to be the same girl as in this image, but younger. Even if this is not obvious to the viewer, hopefully the age difference will ,make the viewer think about the passage of time.

Original sketch for one of the final pieces.

I had never really used Photoshop before, so decided to challenge myself by editing my final pieces on Photoshop.

The outcomes

I decided to use my previous sketch of the little girl with the cat and produce another illustration that works with it. Putting the one with the older girl first to emphasise 'distorting time' even more. If in the first image there is an older girl and in the second a younger one, I thought that if one where to try and look at them as sequential art the aging process would be reversed. Therefore distorted. Once I had finished sketching the pieces I decided to keep them as sketches and scan them in. Then, using Photoshop, I edited the images as a personal challenge and to try something new.

Once I had scanned my final sketches in I decided to use Photoshop to play around with them. Instead of doing what I usually do and using watercolour.

I experimented with a lot of different possibilities.

In the end I decided on quite simple effects. I used the clone stamp to neaten up the images, then experimented with the colours and effects.

I liked the bluey/greeny tones for this image. I lightened the areas I wanted to be lit up by moonlight and got rid of the sun. The original idea was to have a sun and moon at the same time (distorting time) but I felt that it looked better with just the moon.