Pencil Brief!!

So over the first couple of weeks back we got our first mini brief which was the essence of the pencil. At first I was stumped, but a few mind maps later I had began to come up with an idea. I looked at what a pencil meant to me, and to me the pencil is an object that opened doors to maths English etc, so I started to look into the idea of unlocking.

 At first I though of trying to make a traditional lock with the pencil acting as the key, however I decided not persuade this given the complication of actually making the lock and the time scale of the brief. I then simplified the idea down and decided I wanted to arrange a line of pencils into the shape of the pins in the lock. 

I then played about with different ideas of the background and thought how I would make the pencils stand out rather than just have a plain background. My first idea was to try and join up the pins as to how the key would look for this lock. However I thought that this distracted too much from the pencils themselves and so abandoned that idea. 

I then thought of using old past papers or textbooks as the background

I felt that these ideas definitely worked better, and then decided to go with past papers as the paper was a little brighter making the pencils stand out. I used a maths past paper as the background as I felt that this contained better imagery and also I had to use a pencil in this exam. 

To display the final piece I found an old decorative box in a second hand shop and it was the perfect size for my piece. I bought it for a couple of punds and then took the old display out, added in my pencils and background. I also tidied up the back of it a bit just to make it looker neater and cleaner.

'Unlocked'

We then had to critique our classmates work and write our questions for them on a piece of papaer. I think that this was a good idea as what came back from mine was that I maybe should have placed my sketchbook there as well to show my progression of ideas, and also explain bits of my concept a bit more. What I might do for next time is next to my artist statement have a QR code that links to a more descriptive blog post that would hopefully answer more questions they might have that I couldn't cover in the artist statement.

Anyway, that's one brief done only three more to go,
bye for now,

Róisín - x