Week 9 Blog Entry: w/c 16th November 2020 - Creative Enterprise

This week, I had a one-to-one with my lecturer, where I showed her the experiments I had been doing over the half-term. I showed her my some of my favourite photos including the abstract Christmas tree, the bokeh and the Christmas tree decoration. I also showed her the sewing technique I did where I had sewed through the card. She really like the photos I had taken and then advised me to start looking into doing something more with my ideas. This has prompted me to look into other ways of adding something extra to my abstract idea.

I started this week with another shoot, but I used exactly the same techniques as last time, but with different colours. For example, I set up the black backdrop and masking taped the tinsel to it, but this time, I tried alternating colours. This was in response to the feedback of creating two seperate collections so that I could go around asking people what they think would be the best colour scheme to use - neon colours or primary colours. I used the same lighting as last time as well, which is a single softbox. I took some more photos of the tinsel Christmas tree, but instead of using silver and green tinsel, I used green and orange, green and pink and then orange and pink. I struggled a little bit more with the orange and pink tinsel, because the pink tinsel was a lot darker than the others. I fixed this issue by moving the softbox the other side of the backdrop so it shone the light on the pink tinsel. I did struggle a little bit when I adjusted the settings on my camera, because the black background then became very obvious if I decreased the shutter speed too much. I resolved this by moving the light a lot closer to the backdrop. I was really pleased with these outcomes and I'll be showing these to my peers to see which photo they prefer and think would sell better.

I took some more photos of the bokeh just so I had some more shots to work with. I tried zooming in and out to create some smaller and bigger bokeh circles. I also tried some camera shake techniques with the bokeh and this created some really nice results. Depending on what people decide is the better colour scheme to go for, I may show them these outcomes too. Another technique I tried was with another Christmas tree decoration, but this time, it lit up and had its own light show. As it was changing, I took a photo and ended up with a variety of different colours. Because the decoration was made up of fibre optics, so it looked as though the decoration was floating in a black space. I really like this simplistic photo as I think it's a nice contrast to the two very abstract photos. It might be a good way of seeing if the abstract or a more simplistic photo will sell better. This would allow me to see what I should be focusing on for my own products when I come to setting up my own business.

I tried using some gilding flakes to create some text on the front of my card. These are very thin, delicate pieces of foil that included colours like gold, silver and orange/red. In order to make this outcome, I looked up how to use gilding flakes. I used YouTube as my resource, as I wanted to see someone actually doing the process so that I could follow along. I have recently bought some multi-purpose glue from Hobbycraft for £3.50, which is a strong adhesive that's good for delicate pieces of foil. I started by printing out the fonts that I used for the sewing technique (if I find a technique I like, I'll use Dafont and use a font from there) and used the glue to trace each of the letters. I then placed the gliding flakes down on the glue and waited for it to dry. I then used a brush to sweep away all of the excess flakes to reuse another time. My first attempt ended badly, as I tried brushing the flakes away before the glue had dried. My second attempt failed because the brush I used to clear away the excess foil was too harsh on the foil that was stuck down and created holes in the foil. For the third attempt I placed glue on the paper in the formation of some of the abstract images I had created last week. I let the glue dry this time, but I put too much foil on the glue so it added a lot more texture than I wanted. For my fourth attempt I used the nozzle of the glue to glue around the outline of a letter. I then placed the foil sparingly on the glue and allowed it to dry. I then used a makeup brush (a lot less harsh with softer bristles) to brush away the excess foil. This worked a lot better and the foil left a really nice effect, as it was properly flattened down to the paper. For my fifth and final attempt, I spread the glue around a larger surface area to practise placing the foil and flattening it down. This worked really well and if I had more time, I would experiment with this technique a lot more and make sure I could actually pull off this technique. I'm now waiting for a 'Merry Christmas' stamp I've bought for £4.50 from Etsy. When I get this stamp, I'll be experimenting with the foil again and seeing if I can create some foil text that looks a lot neater and much more professional. I might do this next week.

Something else I tried this week was using gold card. Initially, I added a star on top of the Christmas tree in Photoshop after downloading some brushes from Brusheezy and whilst these are good to use for normal cards, I wanted to try something else that would add something extra to my work. At the same time as buying my glue, I also accidentally bought some gold card thinking it was foil, but I decided to use it anyway. It cost me £4.50. I created my mock-up cards and decided to use one of the images to do this. I drew a star at the top of one of my Christmas tree images and then used a craft knife to carefully cut around the shape. Here, I made sure that I kept my fingers out of the way and used a metal ruler and a cutting mat. I cut around the shape of the star and then glued the image to the gold card, so that the gold shone through the cut-out shape. I ended up really liking this outcome and it could possibly be something that I consider doing for my final pieces, depending on the response I get from the class. I think it adds a little bit extra to the card that I can use as a USP.

I was advised by my lecturer during my one-to-one that I should mock-up some of my imagery and split them into two collections - one which focuses on primary colours and another which focuses more on neon colours. I have printed out six photos and used three pieces of card to stick the photos to. This is so when I present them in front of the class, we can easily flip the cards over to decide which would be best for sale. I really like the neon colours, as they deviate from the traditional colours of Christmas and add some new to the festive season. I think it's important to have contemporary art anywhere at the moment, as it keeps the medium fresh, new and interesting, especially during the festive period when there's a lot of cliches and art and photography that's already been done before.

I decided to put a questionnaire on Instagram to find out what types of cards people would buy. I asked four main questions: would you prefer to buy traditional or contemporary imagery on a Christmas cards, which colour scheme do you prefer (neon or primary), how much would you spend on a card and would you buy a single card or a pack? The results where surprisingly close to 50/50 for each question. For traditional vs contemporary, there were six votes to seven, for primary vs neon, there were seven votes to six. For the price question, most seemed to want to spend between £1 and £5 and for pack vs single, there were five votes to seven.

This was a really interesting poll to do, as I found out from my target audience what they are more likely to buy when it comes to Christmas cards. I was surprised at the how even the results were, but it's interesting for me to find out as I can plan for the future. I was able to pick the neon colour scheme for my final images, as either way it wouldn't have really mattered and I preferred the neon scheme anyway. I think it adds a more contemporary look to the market and it's something different to what's already out there and the fact that contemporary art got seven votes is really promising for the future with me doing the photography I do. This has been very helpful in allowing me to decide what I should make and it'll be useful to do something like this every year to see what my target market's opinions are on certain colour schemes or theme.