i really enjoyed the drawing class with paul kindersley today, as he strongly encouraged improvisation and fluidity within it, which i like to try because its a technique i really want to improve on. initially, i wasnt used to free hand drawing on a2 paper, as it felt too large, but through the fast paced activities and light hearted nature of it, it was smooth to get into. when approaching more detailed drawings, i could start off with a quickly put together base, but then compose it with smaller details. i found it interesting with how we incorporated paint and collaging with our drawings, and i was impressed with how much something as simple as that can add such a mood or convey some sort of message.

there were drawings that i liked more than others, and i think this will help me decide on what sort of drawing techniques i would like to repeat in the future. my favourite was blind drawings with the electric shock movement, as it quickly creates a unique silhouette of a body, but you can still detail into the areas such as hands, feet and the face. each time, i found that this technique created a powerful message and mood, due to its bold nature of drawing lines across your page, something that i would usually find intimidating.

on the day of our photoshoot, we essentially free-styled with no strong concepts or visions, and mainly focused on surface level aesthetics. we took the photos on a film camera, resulting in interesting old fashioned pictures. however, the images didnt consist of any solid material that reflected a concept within gender, so instead i chose to focus on aesthetic image, rather than concepts. i was able to find surface level stories based from the images, and chose to implement these into the series. i did this on my own after the group work. i chose to focus on a theme of 'dress up', and briefly explored what this phrase means, in what situations its normalised depending on who is adressed and the context in which someone could be told, negative or positive. 

i found that this related to our pictures quite well because we dolled up our models and had them in seemingly childish poses initially, but then flipped this around and played on the roles of the assumptions of how little girls should act, and bringing this into more working life roles, hence the office background that we created. the use of two models was interesting because we could create a story between the two themselves, going past a surface level image. i chose to digitally draw over our final images to make a story clear, although it would have been subtly fine without it, i felt that i wanted to create an almost child-like story telling set of photos, so i animatedly drew on top of them. this is something that i found worked really well, and i hope to create work in the future that enhances this technique. due to time constraints, it was quite a quick solution, but also really effective.

with this project starting off in a group, we tried to collaborate in order to create a concept for a final series of photos. our initial concept was switching feminine and masculine clothing between a male and female, but i felt that this just reinforced gender stereotypes in a directly mirrored way. so our next few concepts were quite unclear and the group wasn't efficiently collaborating to create one strong concept and because of this, i didn't enjoy the collaboration for this project. we practiced makeup and costume before the day of our photoshoot, and i thought this worked well as we got a feel for what sort of materials and articles of clothing made statements around breaking gender stereotypes.