A Day in the Life: Development

Going backwards a little bit on Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th whilst ill I managed to do some development work. I began by looking at the lists of objects, people and places associated with my chosen words created on Monday the 21st and highlighted those that stood out as potential areas to develop: http://t-roberts1316sp.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/a-day-in-life-briefing.html.

(Words highlighted for concept stage)

I created a total of 48 concept images from these words and chose three of those to push forward into a developmental stage.

(Concept images)

These pieces whilst still very conceptual in design were used to help further my ideas.

(First concept images)

I then went and developed more images. However I was struggling to decide which to push further; the office workers at the water cooler, the cracked iPhone or Wifi symbol with the phone incorporated into it. I would have liked to use all three but there wasn't a strong enough common trend between the three other than a smartphone being present.

(Later development images)

I knew that I wanted to include an image of a smart phone somewhere in my final pieces so I experimented with different line weights and mediums. I'm currently in love with using my brush pen but felt that the results were too thick and blotchy to accentuate the style of a smartphone. So I decided to use fine liners of differing weights to represent this. Now, I've been trying to move away from fine liners and use a wider range of tools, however for this brief I feel they are the best to use.

(Experimentation with inks)

The next day at College I realised that the formats of the pieces were important to my design work also http://t-roberts1316sp.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/a-day-in-life-format-experimentation.html. Whilst we completed the small activity mentioned in the link, I settled on using a smart phone as the singular item in all three images.  I would create just one image of a phone and focus on a specific part of it for each of the three deliverable final pieces.

On Wednesday 30th I went about creating my image by blowing up a photocopy of my iPhone onto A3 before tracing it with a pencil using one of the light boxes in the studio. I then inked it with fine liners of varying weights. I chose to use a 0.1 tip for the screen as it would create a tighter, sharper image when downsized back down to A4.

(Experimentation with enlargement)

After this I found a stock image of an iPhone lock screen on the internet and printed it off on A4. Using the small tracing process I created a time, battery symbol and lock message for my design. Finally I found an example on the internet of a cracked iPhone screen and used that as a reference point to copy.

(Creating additional parts of the image)

The images were then cleaned up, resized and layered all together in Photoshop having been scanned. I then filled in the black of the phone colour using the fill tool. However, although my image looked completed I still felt something was missing. I then remembered what was said in my Photoshop workshop about using actual photographed textures in my work http://t-roberts1316sp.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/photoshop-workshop-week-2.html. So on the way home that day I took a photo of a rather shiny bollard at the train station in York to use for my phone.

(Bollard surface)

I copied this into Photoshop then printed off several test images of the broken down iPhone.

(Photoshop printouts)

With four potential images, I was in two minds about which to lose going into the final stages of development. The 50% enlarged battery symbol looked good and basic, however it lost some of its association with the other two images. After a small critique with Adam, Orlaith, Holly and Hannah it was suggested that the 50% enlarged battery was the less effective.

After the weekend I went to the Digital Print studio and printed off the three images onto Red, Orange and Green stock. I chose these colours as they can be associated with the different stages of a battery's life. Full, low and critically low.

However, when I came to show others it was suggested that colour didn't work best and having a black image on white stock may be for the best so I went back and printed them onto white.