Emotion In Art

Emotions In Media Amy Claxton Studio Practice 6 BA Hons Fine Art, Year3

I had always been interested in media and how it can effect the viewer but also how people including myself are able to loose themselves within a film or how a song can effect moods and actions. I personally feel the reason I enjoy movies and music so much is mostly because they give me the platform to live another life, to feel someone else's pain or happiness instead of my own. I use them as an escape from my reality.

I first began by collecting interesting imagery, movie posters and adverts for inspiration.

Looking at at posters for movies such as “Lovelace” and “Monsters University” both of which have fonts they could be recognized for, font belonging to that movie. I found this idea interesting in that a film could be instantly recognizable by the font the title uses so then I researched into other movies with fonts specific to that movie such as “101 Dalmatians” red outline with dalmatian spotted lettering and “Bugs Life” which has bug shapes within the holes in the letters.

Out of this research I did some basic paintings of the fonts taken away from the rest of the writing and images, by isolating a few letters it was intriguing how people still knew the film.

The next step I took was to see whether a films poster was still recognizable if the pieces of the poster were cut up and moved around or even mixed with other medias, doing this reminded me of when I am driving somewhere and I drive past a massive billboard which has had poster after poster glued onto it, the layers of posters all succumbed to weather and the result is a collage of sections of torn posters creating an image completely different to what they each once were. This idea led me to create collages of my own using film posters and adverts mostly, I found this extremely enjoyable to do and the outcomes I felt were visually pleasing but some of the detail became hidden so I decided to scan some of the collages into photoshop to sharpen lines and brighten the colours.

With my collages scanned into photoshop I started exploring repetition, cropping ands other photoshop explorations to improve the images. My “About Time” collage stood out the most to me and I originally planned to use this as my final piece, printed almost billboard sized to be displayed in public spaces such as underpasses and run down areas to express to the public all the media information we are bombarded with everyday but following a helpful tutorial I had a change of direction.

It was suggested I explore my collages as prints so I began creating drypoint etchings of my collages which I found to be successful because it completely flattened the chaos of the image which enhanced the layers but also fit them together. Although the prints worked well it was noticed that my work had not conveyed its intended depth in meaning so I then tried to make sense of what my work was depicting and I decided the meaning I wanted to capture was how I

feel about media, the reason I am so interested in media is because I can be someone else when I am viewing it, I can forget my life and absorb the characters and there feelings. With adverts they show the lives we could have, the things we could own and make us feel that we need these things to make us happy. I like being able to change how I am feeling by using media.

For my final pieces I decided to focus on the faces and the text within my prints because those aspects are what stood out most to be and what contained the most human interaction and emotion. I chose two prints and layered repeated phrases of text over them which said “Live Like The Movies” and “Another World” I chose these phrases because they explain the emotions and effects the particular medias has on myself and others. I am pleased with my final prints, I did not want the prints to look completely perfect because I wanted the text to stand out the most with the definition in the lines so that the viewer knows the text is the most important aspect. If I was to do this project again I would improve by exploring other printing techniques to see if another technique would convey my ideas more clearly.

Emotion In Art Amy Claxton Studio Practice 3 BA Hons Fine Art, Year2