HiFest 2016
Brief: Produce an animation, zine or placemat to be featured as part of Hi Fest, along side getting involved with variable opportunities offered.
In its third year running Hastings Illustration Festival gathers together an array of creatives for a weekend of workshops, talks, exhibits and selling of work; this year offered a chance to get involved with Hi Fest through a variety of avenues. Possible opportunities to engage with, ranged from submitting or producing a new piece of work, creating a window mural, working as a volunteer and manning a stall space. I was very interested in helping run the stall space, as it would offer interaction with the public and other creatives, in turn allowing opportunities to build contacts and gain an insight into the professional world.
In preparation for Hi Fest I was keen to produce some new work to exhibit and possibly sell. To start with I thought about creating a new short animation, however time didn't prevail; so I focused on making a zine alongside a series of illustrative prints. Initial concepts for the zine and prints circulated around ideas I had come up with in my spare time, and Hi Fest was a great chance to explore and develop them further.
One of those ideas was called Trump Travels, a zine based upon Donald Trump going on holiday, this thought evolved from Trumps controversial election campaign and even more questionable presidency victory. The narrative focuses on Trump taking a rest from his campaign and going on holiday to his favourite destinations, yet the zine plays with the political and personal ideologies that Trump provokes; for example each different location has relevance to Trump and a subtle allude, wether it is Trump soaking up the culture at the Great Wall in China or partying with a mariachi band in Mexico. After exploring and establishing a narrative, I drafted a storyboard and began playing with the design, layout and style. From my rough character and story sketches, I was going to produce finalised illustrations; however I really liked the initial abrasive and D.I.Y feel that my rough samples depicted, so I scanned them straight into Ps. After cropping and converting my illustrations with a black fill, I went into Id to produce the zine ready for print.
I wanted to accompany the Trump Travels zine with a set of illustrative prints. To begin with I speculated to create a series of prints related to the zine, perhaps capturing certain scenes from the narrative, and converting them into singular pieces. Alternatively I thought about generating prints unrelated to the zine, instead exploring another idea; I decided to go with the latter and produce a run of ten prints taken from a series of illustrations capturing ten different musicians and rappers. Likewise with Trump Travels this idea formed from spare time drawing, I took the ten different rapper illustrations from pages out of my sketchbook and scanned them into Ps. I scanned them in black and white with the intention of playing with colour on the computer at a later stage, however within the scanner settings I notice I could experiment with the threshold levels, resulting in a scan that resembles a screen or linocut print. After scaling each drawing to A3 size, I simply printed them out; I decided to leave the image alone from the scan file because I felt the darkness of the black alongside the threshold textures fools the eye into seeing a screen or linocut print, resulting in a powerful and depth full final image.
In company with my zine and prints, Hi Fest offered a great opportunity to launch Club Creative. CC is a student led creative group housing our two courses, Illustration for Screen Arts and Graphic Design for Digital media, dedicated to producing new and exciting works, exhibitions, shows, and workshops. We set up the stall space available at Hi Fest under CC, showcasing a variety of outcomes from our two courses and also personal works.
The opportunities offered from Hi Fest 2016, I grasped and believe were successful. I thoroughly enjoyed manning the CC stall, I gained and learnt a better understanding of the creative world both professionally and independently, through talking to fellow professional artist and designers but ultimately through engaging with the public; talking about works and ideas. Through including my own works, I developed my visual experimental and exploration skills, but overall realised the potential opportunities you can make for yourself. My involvement in Hi Fest opened my eyes to a glimpse of what becoming a professional, artist, designer, illustrator or filmmaker is about, from producing the work to engaging with the public and allowing your work to communicate to a real audience.