TedxHull; Ideas and Composition of piece

Ideas;

• The theme of the event is 'From Where I Stand'. Joe said I didn't have to incorporate this into my image but I thought the live art would work best if it fed off the themes of the talks. Whilst thinking of ideas, I thought it best to start with my own experiences. From Where I Stand is a very personal theme, and given that I would be travelling back home for this piece, I thought about doing something based around my growing up in Hull.
• I'm a strong believer in that the person and attitudes I have today are as of a result of growing up in Hull. I love my home city and I'm very proud of where I come from, given the theme of the event, I thought about my piece centralizing on personal experience.
• As for media, every time I've done a live art event previous to this I've used acrylic paint and board/ canvas. This time however I'd like to use some heavyweight paper and pens. I've been big on my linework this year and this seems like a good opportunity to really get into the crafting of an image. I spoke to Joe about whether or not we'd need easel's and boards to prop out work onto, and he assured me we;d be working against a smooth concrete wall, so as long as the pen wouldn't run through the paper, I was fine to masking tape my piece straight onto the wall. Good times. 

Research;

• I thought it'd be important to draw influences from my environment growing up in Hull, so the piece would perhaps be more relatable to the general public. 
• I chose a few key locations from both my childhood and teenage years, these were made up of a mixture of residential areas, pubs and clubs. 
• Knowing that I wouldn't be going home next until the day I was live drawing, I used google maps to gather up secondary research material and references for image-making. I also took photographs of myself as a reference for a central figurative character. Hull's a very working class city, and a lot of the residents are fans of Adidas (I think almost everyone I grew up with at home owns an Adidas jacket) so I thought it'd be a nice touch to add that detail into the character design.

Mock-Up Image;

• I wanted to make a collage 'mock-up' of what I was thinking the final piece was going to look like. This allowed me to quickly have a look at composition, scale, and whether or not the piece worked. I wanted the figure to be central to the image, with the surrounding areas branching out from that. I eventually came up with the final composition as seen in the issuu post above.