I toyed with the idea of producing hand drawn GIF's, but in the end I decided that doing it digitally would be more beneficial for my practice as photoshop is a program that I need more exposure to.
It took me a while to find a direction... it was when I started to experiment digitally on photoshop that things fell into place. Playing around with shapes and colour allowed me to arrive at the question of 'How Divas Disco?'.
I spent a lot of time making practice GIF's. This gave me time to get to grips with the timeline process. I decided to use a brown, orange, yellow and red colour scheme which I find really pleasing visually. I also find it relevant to the disco era.
I began producing ideas where there would be lots of long, extended objects that could make their way around the screen. I found that this gave way to a load of ideas.
Once I'd exhausted my drawing I moved onto Photoshop and started to play with ideas I'd produced in my sketchbook.
Around half way through this brief we had a presentation crit that was useful in providing me direction. The general consensus appeared to be that I should continue forward with the long-limbed characters and see where that takes me.
Drawing these long limbed people was an idea that I liked. I thought it would be exciting to find a way of making the limbs grow and shrink. Being conscious of the composition and fitting the character into the whole page made for quite exciting ideas.
I really liked the look and feel of quite basic shapes with bold colour moving on and across the screen, revealing new colour schemes. The changing relationship between colour and shape in these GIF's was something I found entertaining.
Here are some of the GIF's I produced whilst experimenting in photoshop:
(...Bungee Jump?)
Here are some of the GIF's I produced whilst experimenting in photoshop:
(...Bungee Jump?)
Most of these were developed ideas from my sketchbook work. I found the timeline quite difficult to get to grips with at first, and I'm sure that there was an easier way to produce the GIF's I did. However, I glad that I am beginning to understand the process more and am gaining confidence with it.
Final GIF's:
These are the final outcomes I came up with. I really enjoyed this brief and found myself producing things that I wouldn't usually create. The digital process was really rewarding, I think now I definitely see myself producing more work this way. I really like the freedom it gives me in terms of colour and shape - and movement!
I plan to muck around more on Photoshop/Illustrator in my free time from now on. I recently got the programs on my personal computer, this has made a really big difference to how involved I get with my digital work. It allows me more time to play, this has positively impacted my practice.
