Persons of Note - Miriam Makeba

First port of call - research. I did a bit of internet searching to learn the basics of Miriam Makeba, then I found the documentary Mama Africa on Youtube. Following on from the drawing from intuition playbook task I decided to draw along whilst I watched this. I think this was the most valuable thing I did during this project, without this as a starting point I would have been very lost  and may not have created outcomes which showed her life as truthfully. I even used some of these initial rough sketches ideas in my final poster.

sketching to the documentary

When I moved from researching into creating work I felt pretty overwhelmed, this woman was so vibrant, complex and inspiring I was daunted at where to begin. Part of this problem was that I had too many little scrappy ideas floating around my head. I began doing some pattern painting, landscape collages and gouache sketchy paintings. I found a beautiful photograph of Soweto market on National Geographic and decided to paint this, maybe as a breather and break from all these floating ideas.

- probably favourite thing I created in this project

- unintentionally "Hungry Caterpillar"-y ?

- vibrant / texture / playful

- really helped me as basis of where to take this work

- love this mixed way of working

- inspired the whole mural type route I took

Did more experiments with instruments - didn't think these showed her legacy enough - I was merely illustrating her band using musical imagery, her life was more than this -- culture / colour / sound. I wanted to include a musical element, but only as an element, not the whole poster/ postcard etc.

Researched into Apartheid, good book from the library called "Impressions from South Africa 1965 - Now", lots of lino cut. Looking into Paul Peter Pietsch and anti-apartheid posters I created my own lino print.

 - enjoyed lino

-like the hand motif and pattern

- didn't take lino forward to my final outcomes - I wanted to include colour and vibrancy

TRUMPET GOUACHE PAINTING

- inspired by the colours of anti-apartheid posters and graphic album covers from jazz music

- liked the white border around the image, got positive crit on this too

- pleased with this image in itself, but didn't fit with my growing vision of a busy mural based scene.

I was moving towards the idea of a mural type busy mixed media poster so I could create a celebration of her life using different imagery and colours.

MOLLY MARTIN - NEW BORN ANIMALS ALBUM COVER

- really inspired by this image

- love the different aspects and sizes, see new things depending what distance you look at it from

- overlapping, crossing over, hidden

At this point I was pretty bogged down trying to get my exact design realised in my head, I was toying with the idea of having a mural within a shape (headdress, map etc) but I think was part of the reason I was feeling stressed and confused. After talking to Matt he helped me decide to ditch this idea and simply focus on filling the A2 with imagery, one big piece.

trying to make sense of the jumble in my head into scruffy composition plans

At first this poster was really difficult to tackle, deciding how to fit all of the elements together so that it flowed was really tricky, it took me a very long time, but it got easier after I put the main larger parts down. I used a lot of tracing paper to jiggle around elements.

FINISHED POSTER

annotated to describe the meaning behind each part

Possibly a bad decision as my poster took me way longer than usual, however I decided to complete my postcards and stamps after I had finished my poster as I wanted to take elements and ideas from it so that all of my outcomes flowed together.

POSTCARDS

- I took my two favourite sections from the A2 poster - fruit stall and the tree

- really pleased with these, probably my favourite outcome of the 3 deliverables

- someone mentioned in the crit how the negative space described her exile from her home country and how Africa was missing from her life, which I thought was a beautiful interpretation

STAMPS

- again I decided to take my favourite elements from my poster to use within my stamps.

- I really like the patterened backgrounds but in retrospect I think using the headdress silhouette as the ''Queens head'' was possibly too cliche and a rushed idea

- a disadvantage of doing this project all analogue was that those bananas were SO BLOOMING FIDDLY 

STRENGTHS:

- Research. My research at the beginning of this project really helped me throughout, I understood her life and legacy properly and it gave me loads of ideas for imagery and content.

- Ideas: I had a lot of different ideas for illustrations to create during this project

- Gouache: all hail the mighty gouache. Really had my back

- Craft: I'm proud of the labour I put into this project, the poster especially took a really long time but I'm happy I persevered

- Showing her life: I think I did successfully illustrate Miriam Makeba's life and legacy (maybe too busy though)

WORK ON:

- Time: maybe it was because this project was 2 weeks longer than the others we've done, but I became quite unmotivated and bogged down around the mid way mark, I was struggling with visualising my ideas and making sense of what was in my head

- Chaotic: I am happy with my final poster but I think it's too busy, I'm not sure if the different elements flow well, too chaotic and overwhelming?

- Underestimating how long things will take me. ALWAYS DO THIS

- I need to become more confident using digital media, I always do everything analogue