These are my beginning thoughts on the brief for Sustainable Futures, I thought through this until I settled on the idea of the amount of unsustainable clutter humans have and how this does not follow the route to a sustainable future. One of the main reasons why I chose to work with this idea of clutter is because it fit well with my style, my collage style is naturally cluttered, my bedroom a naturally cluttered (my mum would protest) and so is my style. Therefore by looking at clutter I simply felt naturally comfortable.

To find a general feel for my ideas whilst they were still young in my mind, I turned to magazines, the easiest and closest source to me to obtain imagery concerning human clutter. I found this is my Spellbound project and used the same idea, that magazines are a physical embodiment of consumer culture and thus I found them the perfect tool to begin my demonstration of the exceeding amount of clutter humans have. I took inspiration from my previous work for Spellbound for the style of these pieces since it was clear that this messier more brutal manner was the way forward when in comes to portraying monsters in my opinion. In my cosmetic piece I dripped candle wax on the page and rubbed charcoal over the top to create these waxy lumps which looked sort of diseased or as if I had dripped some rancid black moisturiser.

I have already posted about Henrik Drescher, but I love his art, the dark side to it is what entices me. It is beautiful in its messy manner and scary in its pieces together ambiguity. But this has definitely been an influence for the darker side of my work, especially Peacock Man who you will have met in my ‘Animated shorts’ post but he will also pop up later here.

Unsure of my direction, I turned to enrich my bank of artists and inspiration for this project. Most significantly at Linder Sterling and Marjan Teeuwan to understand how use objects. In Sterling’s case, the main image of the head of a human being swapped for an inanimate object and with Teeuwan her amazing way in which she balances so much clutter in order to create installations. I also looked at the work by Superstudio as I liked the grid that they used in combination with the domestic imagery, this gave it a futuristic and a bleak feeling which is something I also wanted to bring to my work. These artists have all been vital in developing my ideas and style for the animated shorts I have done for this project.

When working out how to animate it has left me little time to sketch, however when I do, I like to pin down a phrase and use it to inspire my drawing/animation and incorporate it into the piece. I would quite like to potentially experiment with having a voice over? I enjoy using any of the mediums as shown above as I can be messy and expressive with them in different ways and this will change my style depending on the medium.

This is an idea page for my animation ‘Trash Talk’, the planning which I do for work is very minimal as I like how ideas develop whilst I am working as I believe it provides a more interesting and spontaneous outcome which is more interesting for me as well as the viewer. However there are a few anchors which I will pin down and use as solid points within a piece, I will do these before I sleep if I have any ideas. Here my favourite idea I had was where I wrote ‘dirty, fetish, dark, off’ this is something which I am interested in, something more sexual.

As I have already discussed in a previous post, this is the reason why I like the work of Otto Dix. He exposes the real side of humanity and that is something I admire, I like the gritty and the ugly.

Now onto the characters I have very briefly created during this project some I have used and some I am yet to use.

Here on the right is Box Boy, he is part of the small amount of humans left in the world, forced to live life as we have made it. A servant to the Rubbish Men we have created. The others in this picture are the Rubbish Friends who are a lower species than the Rubbish Men. I enjoy drawing in biro since it gives a clean precise line is it obvious when something is off or slightly wrong but this is an element I enjoy and welcome to my drawing by having a more childish sense to my mark making.

This is Peacock Man, he is also one of the last humans left but has been infected by Vanity, a deadly disease which contributed to the eventual demise of humanity, he has many eyes like a peacock so he can see more of himself in the mirror. From here I began to use coloured pens as on the animation software I began using colour too.

This is a typical view of the streets where the remaining mutated humans crawl through the trash at the feet of the Rubbish Men. This one seems to have been partially affected by Vanity too, but somehow it caused him to mutate, probably due to the amount of self-loathing in the ones bloodstream.

This is one of the posters which emerged when the Rubbish Men first began decimating the human population. They were put out to make humans think on their sins and not as a warning as there was nothing which could have been done.