Research

After spending many days visiting different archives and collecting visual research and information from various places, Blackpool Pleasure Beach still remained my favourite and most influential park, therefore decided this would be my starting point.  

I began with a very simplistic outlook when responding to my photographs; working with a 3B sketching pencil I began to experiment with ways in which I could translate the image in more of an abstract form. I also chose to work with just a basic palette so I wasn't influenced by anything other than the shapes and composition of the structures. As I continued to create a range of geometric based line drawings, I started to draw links from other inspirations around me and add depth to the ideas that I was forming. This led me on to research into:

-geometric designs

-the 1920s structural design of the rides

-Art Deco design

-Bauhaus movement 

Using Pinterest as part of this project has been a great experience; as I've never used it before it took a little while to initially become comfortable with the way it worked, however now I realise how useful it can be. A lot of my contextual research and inspiration has come from spending hours searching through pinterest, and I think that has so far helped to develop my ideas and explore paths that I wouldn't necessarily have considered. 

By this stage I'd started to reach a wall with where I could go next within my research stage, so it was the perfect time to be selected for our groups and meet the people I would be working alongside over the next few weeks. It was an exciting session meeting Beth, Suzie and Annah and fascinating to uncover everybody's ideas and impressions on the project. We discovered that Beth and Suzie had chosen to focus on the 'circus', whilst Annah and I had very similar ideas of looking at the rollercoaster structures and bold, geometric shapes. 

Initially, even though we noticed various similarities within the group, we were a little concerned about how we could combine all of our ideas together, as there was a massive contrast between the decorative illustrations Suzie had done, and mine and Annah's line drawings. It wasn't until we started to breakdown our work and play around with layering that we began to see how pieces worked well together. There were of course also aspects of this work that didn't work quite so well together, for example when we layered the animal motifs on top of the lines and block shapes, the overall image was too complex and lost the emphasis on the detailed motifs. It took us a while to find the things we liked and wanted to further develop, however by this point I think we were all very excited to see how we could create prints from our concept!