Arts Portfolio

Its 7.58 am on a Saturday. Normally I like to have a lie in on a Saturday to get some rest for the week ahead. But today, like yesterday I am up before 7 as I am waiting for a delivery. I hate waiting for things, but above all I really hate waiting for deliveries. You see the postal service around here is crazy! They just pop round when they feel like it, and you can guarantee they will try to deliver your parcel the moment you walk away from the front door as you need to go to the toilet or get a drink. It’s as if they know.

Ok, I am in full on moan mode. Its something I have to do now and then to let off some steam (many members from the Voodoochilli forum will know this). But there is a reason I am moaning here and writing it down. When I studied illustration often we were set specific projects to illustrate, for example they might have said we had to do a 3 piece triptych based on communicating an idea taken from a topical piece of news. These sorts of projects were relatively easy to get your head around and were reserved mostly for the first and second years of study. The third year however was based on self directed study, meaning that we would have to find our own subjects and inspiration to work on. I happened to be interested in outsider art and mental illness and it made great material to work with, and nearly everyone picked subjects that somehow related to their own interests. We essentially illustrated ourselves.

Sometimes though, it was difficult to think of fresh ideas. We used many techniques to come up with new source material, for example some of us used pure serendipity, and they would just pick something at random. This could be done by opening a dictionary and pointing at a word. Others picked more emotive or political subjects and some people worked from lists.

Lists are a great way to help inspire a series of illustrations. For example when I think of my evil postman, I imagine him sneaking about with my parcel and I feel stupidly angry about it, even though I know the reality of it is that he is not really evil, he is just doing his job. If I was to do a series of illustrations based on “Pet Hates”, this is what I would have:

1. Waiting for mail
2. George Bush
3. Door to door sales men
4. Telesales calls
5. Little dogs with funny names
6. 80’s Jazz
7. The word “Dude”
8. Buzzwords like “Touch base” and “Outside the box”
9. People that walk away from an argument
10. The “How much is a website/long is a piece of string” question

The very process of writing these things down is therapeutic for me, but more importantly it gets the creative juices flowing. Just trying to think of the next item in the list makes my mind jump from thought to thought. Number 8, buzzwords was thought up because for number 7 was based on another word. In reality I have hundreds of pet hates, but that is not important. It’s the process that is important.

When writing lists you are exercising the left size of your brain, doing what is called sequential processing. The right side of your brain is also exercised as your mind jumps from idea to idea in what is called random processing. Doing little exercises like this are important, and not something that many people have time for, but just like a muscle, your brain works best when you exercise it.

And best of all, its taken me nearly an hour to write this (most of it spent trying to think of things for my list). The good thing about that? My parcel has finally arrived. Yippee!