I now realise that we are supposed to change to a nursery rhyme for our final artwork, but I’ll upload my progress for this poem anyway since I’ve done quite a lot of exploration and I thought it would be interesting to share.

My concept

I had a lightbulb moment in the shower: I was thinking about the title- It Is Dangerous To Read Newspapers. Why is it dangerous? Margaret Atwood tells that her “passive eyes transmute everything [she] look[s] at”. Being surrounded by news of war since she was young, it has affected the way she sees the world. But for me, personally, I have been affected in a different way.

For me there are two ends of the spectrum:

• Everything you see is affected- the way you see the world is changed. You are so deeply troubled and disturbed.
• You are desensitised. You are not able to feel anything when you hear news- its just statistics and numbers to you.

Work-in-progress (using classmates’ dingbats as well!)

I created 5 compositions, and I’m not going to lie, I had quite a lot of fun doing these compositions! Even though I won’t be using these compositions at all, they were good practise anyway!

The images are based on the stanza:

“Even my/ passive eyes transmute/ everything I look at to the pocked/ black and white of a war photo/ how/ can I stop myself / It is dangerous to read newspapers”

(The slash represents the break in the lines)

So everything she sees becomes a war-like situation, even from nature. Nature is distorted. What she sees is affected by horrors of war. I used Nicholas Yoon’s lily, Eugene’s bees and Vimal’s buildings for these dingbats.

 

 

 

 

Struggles

I am a complete beginner to Photoshop, so it was quite embarrassing to say that I struggled with even the most basic things. I had to constantly refer back to video tutorials on Youtube- But I’ve learnt a lot by trial and error.

The problems I faced and how I overcame it

One of the problems I faced was when I pixelated some images, they were TOO pixelated that you could barely see any details. I kept watching tutorials and I was following everything that they said to do, but I still go the same result. (Turns out the images I was using weren’t large/ high res enough)….. -.-

 

In Part 2 of my progress I will be talking about my choice of English nursery rhyme, my concept and I will also be showing several compositions I played around with. Hopefully I’ll be able to tie in the new concept to this one!

 

Stay tuned!