Searle Award Finals

Searle Award 'Crisis' First Image preliminaries and gubbins

Working in my typically piecemeal 'my head works in Photoshop layers' way, these are some early stuff for my potential Searle Award entry on the theme 'Crisis'. I'd post some thumbnails, but it's rare anyone can understand them apart from me, like a hideously drawn secret code. None of the stuff I'm posting here is even a complete draft, as I'm working on a final component for the draft of image one. The crisis theme I chose is the recent (and potentially ongoing) financial crisis and recession. Without the central component, this is not in any way obvious, so these are most definitely just process. Basically, it's all very rough, so no judging please!

The first and second are identical apart from the left foreground figure, and I'm still adding/removing him and tweaking things

Then there's the background of the second (or third) piece of the five

They're all pen and ink, comped in Photoshop, and the waves are a simple block colour with two versions of the inked parts recoloured and offset.

Inadequate planning

Sometimes when left to my own devices I fail to plan properly, and leap into finalised or semi-finalised images, and this, of course, leads to work that is nowhere near as good as it should be. Case in point, my first draft for entering the Searle Award (an award specific to Cambridge School of Art students, started and in honour of Ronald Searle, the epic illustrator and creator of St. Trinians)

So, here it is. It doesn't get the point across, the descriptive parts of the image are too small, and just about the only half-decent bit is the composition, although my use of diagonals is a little heavy-handed. I've since scrapped this, and I'm taking elements on to my new version of this, which I'll post process work for soon. Also, thanks to advice from my tutor, it may well be a series of 5. Scary, but not due until March.