FMP Thoughts and Ideas

And the FMP begins, the final push of my 3 year course.

For this project I wanted to try and combine everything I've learnt on my course into one project. At the end of second year, we were given a project to do a book based on one of 5 titles given to us. I can't remember all 5 of them... but the one I chose was VESSEL. After doing extensive research and getting incredibly stuck, I was starting to give up when one of my friends suggested ship disasters and so I landed on an interesting true event about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis which also had a great controversy behind it as the captain committed suicide after being accused of captain error,causing the sinking, which was found to be incorrect after his death. Having wasted a large chunk of time going back and fourth on ideas I finally stuck to this and produced a 24 page A3 concertina book using screen printed pages of text alongside pages with a lino cut print on. I also made screen printed hard back book ends. I loved getting stuck into this and was really happy with the final outcome considering how lost I had been. Here are a few photos of my book

screen print front page

screen print back page

screen print text

finished book

From this project, I am going to take the 'disaster' idea, looking straight away at mankind disasters where failures to follow through on correct procedures in investigations have caused even more destruction. I am going to make sure I get the research done thoroughly and quickly in order to land on a final subject with plenty of time to create and develop images. I also loved making a standing concertina book so would love to create another one as part of my FMP.

The next project I'm taking inspiration from was at the beginning of second year, called 'Fairytale and Folklore'. We were asked to create 2 posters based on one of the short stories given to us using only symbolic imagery. I chose to illustrate BLUE BEARD, a story about a man who murdered his wives but in the end was killed by his last wife. With help from an incredibly useful reverse symbolism dictionary. I started thinking about what the book was about and what bluebeard, the main character's, personality was like. I then listed any words that came to mind, looked them up in the dictionary, and wrote what symbols there were for each one. For example, death - skull, black, skeleton etc. I then created two screen printed images using only these symbols. Here are the two images.

more successful screen print

Less successful screen print

Bringing the disaster and the bluebeard murderess character together, I have decided that a real serial killer from the past would be interesting to look at. As I feel doing another disaster similar to a sinking ship, such as a plane crash would be too repetitive and easy. I want to look for a story which I can illustrate from different perspectives, so I can produce several different things rather than just one. I also feel it is quite a different topic for me to illustrate, therefore a bit more of a challenge, which will cause me to really think about how to produce the final outcomes.

And finally, although the topic is completely opposite, I would like to take inspiration from my most recent project 'Negotiated Study' (the project in my first post of this blog). This was obviously a much happier, cheery topic, but I loved making several items all fitting nicely into something. So would like to try and have a chest/some sort of container of objects, perhaps an item or image for each victim. The chest to symbolise the secrets that a serial killer hides. As the container would be a lot bigger than the box I used in negotiated study, I would really like to try some 3-D work, as I think this would be a big challenge, as well as being new and exciting.

So... to sum up:

I would like to find a true story of a serial killer in the past, which has controversy and failures to follow correct procedures leading to more destruction. I would like to create a concertina book, one or more symbolic big posters, and some sort of big container filled with objects and items for each victim. 

So now to start the research!