ONLINE JOURNAL - PROCESS

1/10/19 - I’m not quite sure which process to chose. My first thought was colouring but I’m not sure it’s really a process. I’m thinking what I could link with kids. Maybe learning how to walk or talk? That could make nice visuals for the first stage of the project.

3/10/19 - After giving it more thought, I decided to choose “how to solve a jigsaw puzzle”. I absolutely love puzzles, they are so fun and calming. So today I went to some charity shops in Pimlico in search of a nice jigsaw puzzle. I found this one, 1000 pieces, hopefully it won’t take too long!

6/10/19 - Update, this puzzle is hell. In a way it’s exactly what I needed for this project because it’s making me question everything I thought I knew about puzzles. The pieces in this puzzle aren’t all normal, some of them are rounded and have no little arm to interlock. I am beyond confused but will persevere and finish it.

7/10/19 - I’m wondering if I should turn some of the shapes of the puzzle into something for my project? Something to keep in mind…

Puzzle solving is going slowly, I am going through many emotions while solving it. At first I’m excited, then I’m very focused, sometimes patient, sometimes I’m very frustrated… I will see if I can make the project about the different stages of emotions we go through when solving a puzzle.

15/10/19 - The tutor told me this is a good idea to keep in mind, but maybe for the second stage of the project. For the first stage I only need to do an infographic of how to solve a puzzle.

25/10/19 - I feel like for my second stage I would like to focus on the topic of patience. I’m not quite sure how just yet but I feel like it’s a really interesting subject to explore.

Thinking about the topic of patience reminded me of the conceptual artist Roman Opalka. His most known work is “1965/ 1- ∞”. From 1965 until his death, he painted in white ink all the numbers from 1 to infinity. He started on a black canvas, and every one million, he would add one percent of white paint into the black background. Towards the end he was writing in white on a white background. To someone seeing only the last canvas it might seem like just a white canvas, but it actually took Opalka all his life to achieve this canvas. I really admire his work, and the patience behind the concept and realisation of such a piece

5/11/19 - Ok so I had to produce something in a rush cause I was running out of time and idea. I’m making an alphabet inspired by the puzzle pieces, we will see how it turns out…

8/11/19 - Not the biggest fan of my letters, I’ve added some gradient inside them so it’s making everything slightly more interesting but it’s still not great. But I’m honestly not in the right state of mind to make it better right now, so I will just leave it as it is and try to come up with something else when I’ll have more time and inspiration..

10/02/20 - Little update about this project. I don’t know why in retrospect I did those letters when I had the initial idea to make a graph of the emotions. So I had a bit of free time lately to change that project around and I made this new version of my second phase. It’s still not perfect and not as focused on the topic of patience but it’s better than my letters!

20/03/20 - I had left this project aside for a while, being busy with other things, but I knew I wanted to come back to it eventually. I wasn’t happy with my outcome, but at the time I didn’t have any inspiration for anything else. Or whatever ideas I had, I didn’t have enough time to execute them properly. So now, being confined at home, I’ve got nothing but time. Because I wasn’t passionate about this project like I could have been for the others, I kind of felt a lack of imagination when it came to the final outcome. I’m quite happy about my first phase but that’s about it… I’ve always loved the idea of patience, and I wanted to make my second phase outcome on that theme. But I couldn’t bring myself to find an exciting idea around that subject. Because I was also restricted by time, I couldn’t think as big as I wanted. So now that I’m going over this project again, with no constraints, I feel a lot more excited about it. I think I’ve finally got an idea. I don’t want my outcome to be just a visual on patience, instead I want the whole conception of it to be about patience. I’ll need patience to make it. I think it’s even more appropriate now to do it while I’m confined at home, cause it adds another level of patience.

All to say this is my idea currently: I want to create a complex illustration representing a big family portrait (of my family). This will be a great opportunity for me to practice my illustration skills, and especially complexe scenes. This step alone will take a lot of time and patience to make. Then I could turn this illustration into a puzzle, and the outcome would be a physical object: the jigsaw puzzle, and you’d have to actually solve it to see the final result, once again requiring patience.

I think this project will be good for many reasons:

it will be about patience, the topic I wanted to explore from the start
it will also allow me to improve and practice my illustration skills
it’s more about the concept than the outcome, and that shows my interest in conceptual art.
the end product will be something special because I’ll get to share it with my family. It’s going to make me happy to produce it, and it’ll be a joy I can share with others.
having my final outcome as a jigsaw puzzle is also a way to keep my practice playful and revolving around kids, as puzzles are an activity they enjoy.
I like the idea of having a physical final outcome.

01/06/20 - FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m very sad this project didn’t turn out the way it could have. I wasn’t happy with my letters and honestly wasn’t feeling very creative for this whole project. But it’s ok we can’t always love everything we work on! I’m happy I reworked on it later in the year and came out with the new graph of the emotions, I feel like it works quite well and it answers the brief. But I also would have loved to have more time to focus on my last idea, the family portrait made into a puzzle. I’ve always loved this subject of patience in this project and I feel like I didn’t do it justice which is why I’m a bit disappointed. But I know I still did my best. And I’m happy that felt more creative about the project towards the end, even if it was too late to do much about it given the circumstances. All in all I might not be really pleased with my work but I know I did my best, and still persevered when I wasn’t feeling creative and ended up finding an idea that I really liked and will probably try to work on in the future.