The left side represents official culture - the mainstream values and the widely popular trends - London West End, the greatly liked Royal couple, Margaret Thatcher (the first female prime minister), the BT logo which represents denationalisation for society, and widely popular music such as Bowie and Culture Club. On the other side I have included groups which appeared to rebel against the Thatcherite Zeitgeist - mod's with the targets on their Parker jackets, the punk collection, the protests against the poll tax which Thatcher put in place, and Monty Python's Life of Brian which was definitely anti-establishment as it contradicted with the morals of society and was regarded by the British as blasphemy. ​

For my psychological horror book cover, I used inspiration from Charles Keeping, who has quite a strange and creepy style using mainly inks and watercolour. It became clear that he uses a relatively shiny surface which causes the watercolours to leave a certain effect, and the inks to shine. I tried out various materials to achieve this, and did my final piece of foam board as I found this was the most suitable. I really enjoyed this style and would like to develop this further, however with my final piece I think I should have had the tree more in the piece, looking at the golden ratio, having it fill more of a third than it has. Regarding the font I used for the text, it's clear that I definitely rushed this as the font doesn't go well with a psychological horror so that is definitely one of my downfalls. I experimented using complementary colours for this as well as I thought this would give more of a psychedelic approach which I think works well. ​

Finally for my science fiction cover I used influence from Brad Holland who uses acrylic paint with a dry brush technique. I found his technique difficult and time consuming but after getting the hang of it I quite enjoyed it - he tends to scrub the paint into the canvas (which has been covered in one colour) with hardly any paint on the brush, and this makes blending the colours a lot easier. For the canvas I got some MDF from woodwork and stuck fabric to it using PVA and then coated it in white paint to achieve the same idea as a canvas. It became evident that he likes to play with surrealism and particularly scale, so I tried to include this within my experiments. I think the font I used is alright but I probably could have been more adventurous. I like how the final piece turned out, but one improvement would be to scrub bits of all the colours through the piece like the way Brad Holland does.  ​

​I really enjoyed this week's challenges. I definitely found it challenging, but I enjoyed getting to grips with the various techniques by all the artists, and I liked the idea of producing book covers for different genres - kept me entertained and didn't get bored!
The third week's task involved producing a 12 page book which narrates a nursery rhyme. We had the choice of 6 and I chose 'The Grand Old Duke of York'. After producing various thumbnails playing around with colour, composition and material, I produced 2 mock up books which helped me figure out how I was going to narrate the book and helped me plan out the words and the illustrations to fill the pages appropriately. Whilst doing this I found that, since the nursery rhyme is very repetitive, my illustrations were quite repetitive also. To overcome this, I decided to have each of my pages cut out to reveal a green background (a hill), which I found helped me with the narration as I then had a constant theme to work from for each page. I really like how this turned out, however to develop it further I would probably experiment using different cut outs for each page, rather than having each page the same (although I do think this works well). I think with the style I've used, I could have looked into Tom Gauld, and possibly given some of the soldiers more character - drawing attention to the elements which aren't supposed to draw attention the way Gauld does., and this would have added a further element of curiosity/interest. Overall, I found the task challenging and interesting, I like how my final piece turned out but I would probably experiment with more thumbnails to support my final outcomes further. 

​Overall, I was happy with my outcome of this brief. I had to push myself quite hard to keep going and generate different poster designs which I did struggle with quite a lot at about the halfway point. However, I kept experimenting with different compositions and used a variety of media to help further. I definitely learned a lot about idea generation so overall I'm happy with the outcome.

​Born in 1908, Max Bill was a Swiss artist and designer who specialised in combining maths and geometry into his art practise. As an ex student of the Bauhaus, he later co-founded the HfG in Ulm where he was the head through the 1950s. He specialised in architecture and product design during his time at HfG, however his work fell into many categories including painting, sculpture and graphic design. Max Bill later resigned from HfG due to conflict regarding how the school should progress. There was no doubt that he was an outstanding artist/designer, but the school needed to focus more on industrialisation and manufacturing to gain income, rather than the art aspects, and Bill struggled with this concept.