final version (digital)
Personal Reflection
During a period this summer my uncle was in Whitechapel hospital for a few weeks, and whilst he was there I went to see him over and decided to track my mood over a 48 period and use that information to create my Mind Map.
As I was making the exact same journey for those 2 days, and my mood fluctuating due to the situation, I wanted to take in what was around and see how that had a direct affect on my mood.
To track how I was feeling I followed a simple, that for the 48 hours I was awake I would make a note each hour, taking down the time, a word that related to my surroundings and my mood. I would also make a tiny sketch of something to remember where I was.I used a screen print to create the head shape and when scanned in I used my small sketches as keys for the map. They are positioned in relation to the actual journey I had taken.
I decided to go for this approach as I felt I was over complicating the outcome for my idea in my head. Earlier in the project I spent a lot of time turning my outcomes into something that was more fine art based, but wanted to create something with an easy graphic visual language to follow. I feel that I have created, as a mood is something that is hard to capture, I felt that keys would be the best thing, even though the keys themselves are still some what abstract it felt important to have an element of that in the outcome as someones mood is something so personal.
the above image is the first layer of the outline of the head that I would go on to use in my Mind Map. I first sketched out the image and made a screen print copy of it. The image above is it after being scanned out and cleaned out. I eventually had to make a second layer over the top on illustrator, as the colour wasn't strong enough.
for the key elements of the map I wanted to use found imagary and also make some of my own to showcase the mood. I went for a very speficic mood of imagary as I felt that it reflected the overall mood that I was showcasing as the time.
The keys themselves relate to the moods that I was feeling or something that was insight when I made the note.
as today was our session for unit 4, we began by testing out and getting used to registering and presenting data. our first task was to revisit our journey into class, starting from the canal.
we were ask to create a map of the journey for someone else and to come up with a way of presenting what our emotions were during this walk. below is my attempt;
for the original map sketch, I tried using Keys to show what the person should see whilst walking and also the time and distance it will be. I wanted to use traditional mapping methods like keys to highlight the mood, as I thought it would be interesting to try and use them in a slightly different way.
I also thought that would be important to track where the person is going, but in a kind of abstract way. this is because as I will asking people to draw something every 30 or so, then their location will have an direct correlation to the mood they are currently going through.
due to work commitments I only had a couple of days to think of my idea and put it into practice. I decided I wanted to carry on with the idea of using keys to convoy the mood and include a picture of the were the person was but done in a abstract and surrealist way.
1/ this is the set of instructions and the list of 'mood's I wanted my partner to use when testing out ideas on each other. I asked my partner to record her journey using a simple line drawing made from memory and at every 15 steps to use one of the mood keys to track how she was feeling and her journey. as I we were only doing short journeys around the college I had to make it 15 steps, but I would like to test it out on a bigger scale eventually
2/ this is the outcome that my partner produced from my instructions. unfortunately as we were only taking small walks around the university the mood keys were not relevant, but what I found really interesting was my partners interpretation of the journey she made.
I felt that the line illustration looked really intriguing and didn't need the mood keys. It felt as if the way that she drew the lines helped to show her mood, as the curve in the lines help show that her journey was very easy, relaxed and her mood stayed that way through out the duration.
3/ I wanted to explore the idea from above further, so on my way home I re-draw my partners and also mapped out my journey home, but with without the mood keys. I wanted the drawing of the map itself to show the mood in the journey, whilst also making it look interesting and done in an abstract way.
although the outcome of each drawings are not the prettiest it helped me decide a new direction for my eventual outcome. from my own drawing of my journey home, I also thought that when drawing the map it would only include things that effected my mood. unfortunately I was just sat on the train home so the outcome wasn't interesting, but its something I feel can work.
^ from the outcomes that came from the mapping project we did in class, I was led into an outcome of more abstract line drawings so I wanted to explore that idea a bit more and so I did some research.
Kandinsky was one of the first artists I remember and when looking back at some of his work I thought it was really interesting how some of the lines he used resembled my earlier outcomes. I wanted to use his sense of line drawings, particularly the black ones.
A book that I found interesting was one called The Book of Fine Arts, unfortunately in Japanese so I couldn't read, but had lots of very beautiful small drawings inside. I liked how the illustrations in the book, espically the lines, were slightly brushed and imperfect, I felt this gave more of a personal feel to them, which is something I would look to use in my outcomes, as I feel the idea of being shown someones mood is very personal, as no 2 persons share the same mood.