Invisible Cities: Personal Reflective Statement

For my Invisible City, I decided to adapt Moriana for my project. This is because out of all the other cities, I was mostly drawn to the contrasting faces of Moriana, as well as the description of columns, pediments and the mountains of which the viewer has been trekking through, which I felt gave the city a very mysterious yet aesthetic quality, with its descriptions of alabaster and serpentine entwined within the features, while the hidden face of the city lurked around behind it. I at first, wanted to try and present the city like a fantasy city, emerging through the woods and mountain to see an isolated, cream coloured city with a large temple/ building as a display of the cities power. However, upon receiving feedback from my OGR, I decided to change this idea, as instead the hidden face of the city could be read as allegory, so insinuating its hidden features, and also to try and draw inspiration instead from Art Nouveau and the ocean to try and present the city instead with a story to tell, so the hidden face would appear gradually within the city and contrast the cities cream colouring like the deep ocean. To present this I decided to look at using coral and placing it within the shadows of the frame, gradually emerging out with each image, allowing the viewer to get a closer look at it, while not making as much of an obvious contrast as my previous idea would of have. The Art Nouveau moment allowed me to explore and consider new architecture, as for a previous idea I planned to contract the cities with the pastel, more popular work from the movement, such as Alphonse Mucha’s bright, feminine pieces against the more gothic angle for the hidden face, however I decided against this idea as I felt the contrast was too obvious and that it would of have made the pieces its feel like to similar and overly complicated.

as for myself, I personally struggled a lot with the project, especially with time management, and the brief itself. This is mostly due to the fact that I felt I was over thinking a lot of my compositions early on in the project and I was slow when composing my thumbnails digitally, but upon discussion I decided to use pencil and paper which helped me a lot better, which it something I will defiantly take on when composing my next project. Another issue was that because of my poor time management skills, I realised that I had picked the wrong city, as when I received my GLR feedback I felt that I should of have picked my second choice Isura, as the competition and description to me felt a lot more interesting and loose to compose, so to carry onto my next project, I will try and produce my work a lot faster and get feedback on my work to find an idea that will suit me better, as Moriana didn’t end up being the city that I thought it wasps which I also feel contributed to my struggle with it. Overall I feel I have learned through this that I don’t need to over think my designs and that I can produce thumbnails digitally, especially now that I have implemented the usage of the different brushes into my three designs that will help me compose ideas loosely, which turn out to be more interesting then the final design. I feel that I also need to take breaks and risks with my work, as my overall final pieces ended up being too safe and simplistic, so taking risk and doing more research should help me feel more confident about what I am doing in the future.