OUIL406 Initial ideas

I started off on a bit of a rough patch and didn't know what to draw as I felt that above the facts I'd learnt through brief research I didn't have any true connection or knowledge of Catherine the great other than a few bits and bobs of information. So I watched 3 bio pic films on her life and cross checked them with further online knowledge to get a better sense of Catherine as a person.

I began brainstorming all the information I had into different subject/avenues I could take the work down. I could either go more serious or humorous with the information I had.

At first I drew images in reaction to the biographical films I was watching.

I then began on the idea of showing two sides to catherine the great's legacy the idea of contrasting all the incredible and amazing things she achieved in her reign like building many schools for nobel girls to become educated, expanding russian territory even further than before and building great opera house clashing with the scandals that where made to tarnish her rule as a woman by exploiting and degrading her sexuality. Thus the initial ideas of righting her accomplishments dow on sculpted peneses was first thought up. However with the amount of time and the availability of photography studio space making these sculptures was not really the smartest thing. Also they didn't really lend themselves as concepts to further development.

Another idea was to use costume and photography. The two issues I had with this was that creating a paper dress and trying to photography someone wearing it had very similar problems to the first idea. It was time consuming and didn't  give itself up to development.

This was looking at a role reversal historical type james bond like Catherine the great but it didn't really hold much interest as a concept for me unless I fully drew and re designed catherine. and since I wanted to limit my drawing in this brief it was a no go.

This like the one above was just a quick reaction to the brief and instantly felt very time consuming and lacking the ability for quick development and adaptability needed for a brief like this.

This was my favorite idea so far, using type and images of Catherine together to create these brief inner monologues of the character of Catherine I had created. It felt playful and allowed me to create multiple different types of these images fairly quickly.

I tried a different route in the image above and below of using images of modern women and trying to use dialogue and colour to distort them into something else. Honestly these were done half heartedly and don't really and much to me working out where to go.