Hello. In this video, we're going to be looking at some examples of images that have been made by learners taking the Fundamentals of Graphic Design Course. I'm going to be reviewing some actual submissions from learners in this course to show you what makes a successful submission for the assignment. Remember that the goal of this project is to incorporate a variety of different techniques and approaches to image making with your chosen object. By showing you a few examples, I want to show you some possibilities for your own image-making, but I also hope that my comments are going to help you with your peer reviews so that you really look closely at other learners' work, and can distinguish between submissions that show outstanding effort and those that might need a little more work. Here you can see some really great examples of different image-making techniques. The object is an orange, it's easy to recognize, and it means there's a lot of flexibility, a lot of things that can be done with that image, because no matter what technique you use, it's quite easy to see what the image is. The first thing to think about is to pick an object that is simple and recognizable, and has some characteristics that lend themselves to different kinds of media, different kinds of image-making. Here we can see in this first orange image that it's made from finger-painting. It's quite a simple technique. It doesn't involve a lot of tools, but you can see how lovely it is. It's crafted really well, the white of the paper acts as the highlight. There's a really nice texture there that relates to the image itself, the object of the orange. There's that lovely little scraped around the edge that gives it a little bit of outline that's a defining move. A little bit of nice technique there. In this second image, you can see that we already know it's an orange, and we're looking at it from a different angle now. A different way of looking at it, a different way of imaging it. We can take a slice of it and look at the inside rather than the outside. Again, there's some really nice painterly techniques. It's very loose, there's not a lot of line-work, and even though there's not a lot of information there, we know it's an orange because of the definition and the visibility of the segments, and the rind, but there's also some beautiful little flashes of color around the edge of the rind where we can see paint mixing together. So it's a great way of showing the object itself, but also a really great technique. This one is a little bit different. Obviously, this one is made on the computer so it has none of that painterly texture, but there is a digital texture there. A nice point of contrast here is the leaf, where you can see that small green star. Even though it has a very digital qualities, we can still tell that it's an orange because it has the signifiers of that object. It's round, it's orange, it has texture, and has a small green leaf. Think about choosing a simple object, and then think about the range of techniques. This is one technique that we did show in the video, where you can cut the object in half and make a print out of it. Here you can see that the object has been painted on and then had a print made out of it. It's quite lovely in terms of texture and detail, the way that the colors are mixing together. I'm guessing that this probably wasn't the very first print that this person made. You have to sometimes, especially with printing, try things two or three different times or two or three different ways to get the right result, the one that you're looking for. It's the same with this image. It's a rubbing where there's a texture, probably made with the flat end of a pencil that's been rubbed across the texture to create the oranges. It might take three or four goes playing around with different angles, different colors, different materials to get the image that you're looking for. You really use it as a chance to experiment. Maybe you have to make three or four images before you get to the one that you really like. Here you can see a different technique. There's a really nice range in this set. This one is made by putting sticker letters into the shape of the orange, and then adding a little bit of color to get the shape of the orange with a simple background painting. Again, there's that little touch of the green in the O that shows the leaf. With this image, we're back to a more painterly approach where it's much more expressive, it's a much more non-linear image, it's much more about volume and color and texture. One of the things that I really like about this image is the way that the paint itself is dripping away from the image, and it really gets it the qualities of the orange, the juiciness of the orange. So there's a nice correlation between the technique, and the object itself. In this image, you can again see an interesting mix of media but there's a clever idea behind it here. The orange is shown as a negative space and what will be the color and the texture of the orange is actually the space around the outside of the object that's defining it. There is a very clever adversion there of the two components that make up the shape of the fruit itself. It's not necessarily the most complex or detailed or accurate drawing in terms of line-work, but it's more about creating an original and interesting image. It's much more about that than creating an image that is especially refined or finessed and you can see that again here in this image where it's much more about the spirit of the illustration, it's quite loose, where the patents are very interesting but on actually things you would find in the inside of an orange, but there is enough visible about the segments to see that it's still an orange and it's a representation of the patterns within the segments of an orange but it's interpreted in this last image. There's a nice connection to some of the images we've seen earlier where it has been painted in the same way perhaps but another component has been added to it, in this case, the diagonal lines. Another thing is being tried out with the image making techniques. Quite often one image making technique can lead to another, you can build on the techniques. You can see how one image technique can really lead to another. This is another set that I thought was really successful and really interesting and again, a very simple object, a pair of scissors, very recognizable, very obvious traits and once you have those obvious traits, you can play around with them. You can activate them, you can represent them in different ways and we'll still understand the object. When you zoom into this one, one of the things that I really like about this one is the level of detail. If you look at the texture and the grays and especially in the bolt that's holding the two blades together, there is really nice detail there and also in the shapes of the handle is a very loose organic feel to it, we've lots of really beautiful detail. By contrast, another image of the scissors here feels as if it has had a digital technique applied to it in the layering and the overlapping of the color. What I think is interesting about this is when you look at this image closely, it feels like it's not drawn on the computer. Again, there's a little bit of a looseness and a roughness about the line-work, especially of the handles and the way that the two images are layered though is on the computer. There's a really nice mixing of techniques there. In this image, you can see a much more singular and simple technique. It's just a simple line drawing but there's enough information there for us to know what the object is and the line-work is the thing that gives it character. It doesn't have to be super accurate. It just has to try and get the essence of the shape or of the qualities of the object that you've chosen. It doesn't have to be the best drawn pair of scissors ever, it just has to be recognizable as a pair of scissors. With this image, you can see what sometimes happens when you make prints and they don't always turn out the way that you think. Sometimes they will be lighter or darker, and sometimes you just have to roll with that process. Keep making things, keep trying things, make iterations of things, add to other techniques and eventually it'll build into an interesting image. With this image, I like the characteristics of it that is trying to get it not just what the scissors look like, but what the scissors do, how they move. It's a very simple digital effect by rotating, repeating and lightening part of the scissors blade, but it really gets at the idea of the motion of the scissors, what the scissors do. With this image, there's much less line-work and much more volume. This adds to the range and it's another technique that we hadn't seen before, what the others have been fairly vector-based and suddenly there's a nice looseness and a nice painterliness. But even though we're looking at different shapes, we can still recognize them as a pair of scissors. One of the things that I like about this image is that the learner is changing how the object is viewed, the proportions of it, the weight of it, the angle of it. Try to think about different ways of looking at your object, as well as different things that it can do and of course different image making techniques. Here you can see something that you wouldn't really expect from a pair of scissors. It's a single line drawing or a scribble drawing, but it gives the scissors a totally different texture but it still feels very controlled and finessed. One of the things I like about this image is that there's an idea of experimentation behind it. Again, it adds to the range of the set. It looks like an icon has been taken from the computer and blown up. It's using what is often seen as a negative, the idea of something being bitmapped or low resolution, and using that as an image-making technique. In this image, there is a very simple silhouette, so you can see how sometimes you don't even need a lot of information to depict your object. It's great to have that range from simplicity to complexity. One of the reasons that we have you make so many images is to try and explore different techniques and to get beyond what you would normally think of doing and to try and get to a place where you're discovering new things and you're really surprising yourself in your image-making. This set of images is based around a key, and one of the things that I liked about this set is there’s a really great range in it. This image is a strange mix of digital techniques, but what you can see is that the user is trying to identify the key visual components of the key. You can see that what's making it recognizable is the hexagonal shaped as the head of the key and you've also got a hole that is in the key, you've got the stem of the body of the key, and then the pieces at the end. No matter what technique is drawn in, as long as you have those components to the image, you're going to recognize it as a key. It can be sharp and digital, it could be a scribble drawing. As long as that visual representation is recognizable, we’ll still understand it as a key. Then what happens is, the technique really comes through and the keys start to have different personalities, so they start to feel a different way depending what the technique is. This color pencil key, for instance, feels very loose, it feels very friendly, very informal, and once you've established what the components of that visual image are, you can start to take them apart and maybe not have all of them and just look at a close-up area of the image. Here you can see just the head of the key. Is this enough of the information? Is it too little? You can push those boundaries of the communication and how much you need in order to recognize the object itself. These are my favorite ones of these keys. These are printed using the key itself and using coffee. There’s such a beautiful range of tones in them. There’s a really nice sense of depth, of texture, of tonality to them and it's simply from printing the object with some leftover coffee. I like that it has a sense of real experimentation there. The outcome feels like it's a complex outcome from a very simple technique. There’s a couple in this set that could maybe do with a little bit more work. Here you can see that the key is quite interesting, but you don't really need the background. It doesn't really add anything to recognizing the key. Here you can see there's a key where the photograph isn't really helping the image itself. This is quite a common theme for images that aren’t working in somebody’s set. What's interesting is this person also had a really nice photograph of a key, so clearly they can take the photograph but it's just about getting photographs of your drawings or your image-making to look good, which can sometimes be hard. One of the other things you should try and avoid is having more than one image on a page. What happens with this project is that we're really trying to isolate each technique and look at each technique in order to compare it. As soon as you have three things happening, you tend to not be able to focus so clearly on each one and not be able to see what is right and wrong about each of the images. Here there's quite a nice image in the middle, but it's a little bit hard to see. It's being canceled out by the other two. It's also being canceled out a little bit by the brown rectangle that's holding it, so try and think about how your image sits on the page as well. Having a single image is always a good idea because that's part of the brief, but also think about how your image lives on the page itself. There's a relationship there that's really important, and you can see it here where there's four images. You can't really see them individually. They appear to be a stack. Again, you can see on the bottom image where the rectangle is actually interfering with us being able to see the image itself. The other thing that you can see here that could use a little bit more work is trying to develop a little bit more of a range. All of these images feel very linear. They all feel they're at the same scale and they're at the same angle. Even though the limelight changes a little bit, all of these feel quite similar and quite flat in terms of being a set. Again, with these three, you can see that the photograph isn't really helping, the image is quite dark, the photograph's quite hard to read, so we can't really see the image. You should try and make your photographs look as legible as possible. You always want to make your work look as good as possible when you present it. Related to that, you also want to follow the rules of the brief as much as possible. In this case, this is another project that needs a little bit of help, and that's because it's not really following the brief. It's not really picking an object that's easily recognizable. It's hard to know what the object actually is. It's a cube, but we're not sure it's a cube of what. We don't actually know what the object is, we only know the shape of it. That isn't really going to help you because it's not going to have a lot of recognizable signifiers of what the object is to let you know what the object is. Therefore, play around with techniques. If you don't have that, you're spending all your time drawing an image that nobody's going to recognize. It's a little bit of a shame because there's some nice techniques in this set. Here, you can see these paper clips that had been bent around and they've had some linear crayon marks added to them. It's quite a nice technique, but it doesn't actually make anything. We can't tell what it is. The object that you choose is actually very, very important. Obviously, the technique is important, but you have to pair those two things together. Here, you can see the object becoming something. Here it becomes a Rubik's cube, but we're unsure if this is an interesting image or not because we don't know if it was a Rubik's cube in the first place or just a regular cube. There's not a lot to work with here. We can't really recognize what it is. We don't know the size, the color, the function, the texture of the cube. If it was an actual object, if we said it was, say, a marshmallow, it would have different characteristics. You'd have more to work with. Spend a little bit of time thinking about what your objective is. Spend a little bit of time really exploring a range of techniques, and that's the key thing. Try out a lot of different things. If they don't work, try them again, and again, and again, and keep working at them. Sometimes it's not about the level of detail and finesse and the amount of time that it takes, sometimes the process that you enter into and really working with the materials and reworking the materials and using a mix of different techniques in a range of things combined together, that can be the thing that makes the difference. The more you make, the better you'll get. Here you can see an image that's made from some stock photos. The more that you can make images yourself, rather than just finding things, I think the more skills that you'll gain. Rather than finding things online and just using those to represent your work, one of the things that you should do is to try and make all of your own images yourself. Just to go back to that very first orange that we saw before. It's a simple image. It's made by somebody with just some paint and their fingers, but it's really beautiful and really exceptional image, and there's a power to that that's very, very strong. If you can start to tap into that and enjoy your image making, that's a really great thing to happen. When we look at this set, for instance, it really looks like this person had fun making them. It really looks like they enjoyed making them. The more that you can get at that, the more you will enjoy and engage with your own process, and ultimately, the better your images will turn out.
