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Fiction Project - Summer Research, Starting 2nd Year and Crit

2nd year has started already, and it was great to see everyone and finally get access to our new studio! I found seeing everyone's summer work for the Fiction project really interesting, as everyone had taken a different approach, and because everyone comes from different places, everyone's work looked completely different. 

I chose The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. I enjoyed reading the story, and could imagine the characters and the setting fairly well as the story was so descriptive. I also liked the atmosphere in the story, and the use of colour, light and symbolism to help tell the story and convey the feeling and atmosphere. 

I enjoyed drawing the objects from the story. This was because I had easy access to quite a lot of them, meaning that I could spend a bit longer drawing them. I think that some of the objects in the story help to convey the emotion of the story, and are actually just as important as the characters. For example the acorn that Miss Amelia has, is important because she picked it up the day her father died and has kept it ever since. This shows that she is still attached to the past, maybe without realising. 

The crit we had was fairly positive. People said that I had explored a lot of different parts of the story, and they particularly liked my choice of landscapes to draw as they fit the story well. Luke said that he liked some of the objects I had drawn, such as the table and chairs and the table and stalls. He said that these can show the emotion of the story, such as loneliness. He also gave me the idea to consider the placement of the objects, for example if there are two chairs at a table and one is knocked over, this can suggest a fight. This gave me the idea to think more about the objects, and how by changing them slightly they can tell the story even without the presence of the characters in an illustration. For example an acorn in different states (growing on the tree, off the tree, broken/on the floor, brown) can symbolise different feelings in the story. This could also work for the peaches on the peach tree, as in the story the peach trees are used to show the passing of time. I could also use the fan with the coloured streamers for this, as when the cafe is open they are bright and flowing in the breeze, however once the cafe is shut they are frayed and tangled, the fan no longer working. 










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