Curated Dialogues

Today was started the Curated Dialogues workshop which is an intensive 2 week collaborative workshop task to help us share, review and develop our ideas for BA7. It will be a platform for discussion and dialogue and help us to identify connections between the subject and content of our studio project and research report work. The outcome will reflect the critical dialogue I have had with my partner and the ideas we have explored.

My partner Nancy and I are both wanting to explore narrative illustration and so we have decided to explore what makes a good narrative for our discussion. We decided the key points for a good narrative are as follows:

• Character development: characters the reader can connect to, characters that contrast and compliment each other. different viewpoints of character to build a profile
• Structure: Journey to follow characters, plot twist/ climax, snippets of information revealed as we go on to build story and draw reader in, end that brings all loose ties together to complete story, linear or non-linear timeline
• Setting: Imaginative, complete world with time period and place, sense of escapism
• Sense of escapism
• "Orientation, complication, resolution"

Postcard project, Harriet Russell

We then went on to think about how we could portray and document out discussion and we did a mind-map and both decided that postcards were the most innovative idea we had. Postcards allow us to illustrate out discussion on one side and have recorded text on the other. We had to create a final summary of our idea for  the rest of the group to see:

"We want to discuss what makes a good narrative, looking at things such as character representation, scene building, viewpoint, structure and imaginative settings. We shall record out discussion using these narrative techniques on postcards in both a chronological and non-chronological way with illustration that build the story of our conversation through character, setting and subject development, The other side will; be accompanying text recording our conversation in inventive ways, such as in 1st person then 3rd person."

I am enjoying working with Nancy as everything has been straight forward; we seem interested in the same subjects and have agreed on the direction we want to go in easily. I'm looking forward to creating artwork together as I enjoy the spontaneity and unexpected outcomes of collaboration work and we both have quite different illustrative styles.