Find The Elephant

Project Title: Find The Elephant.

I was looking forward to this project. I enjoy roaming around.

Elephant & Castle is an interesting place to have a good look around, especially when you are armed with your sketchbook and camera.

Most of the roaming took place for an hour or two after class. It's surprising what you can find when you're not tied to a schedule or looking for something in particular. You notice things for the first time that you pass on a day-to-day basis.

This was a drawing project so I had to draw the final outcome to my research on the Elephant & Castle area. I most definitely am not a drawings person. My drawing ability is rather basic. I get by.

My research led me to the conclusion that Elephant & Castle is quite a dirty place that's always busy. I took this and created images that were busy and dirty. I took my surroundings and tried to put them down on paper. The outcome to this was a blotchy, stripy, messy, dirty image of the new Strata building.

I loved this image. It was a perfect representation of how Elephant & Castle might feel to others. I took this image as a template and continued with this style on other images of the area.

Tourism brochures always portray an area as a place you should visit. After looking at these I decided to create contrasting images to my dirty elephant pictures. I would then have a series of images that are totally different. A series of very messy and dirty images a series of clean and tidy images.

After re-reading the brief I thought I better start drawing. I love fine-liner drawings. This is why I choose to create my clean images using a fine-liner. I created images of the Elephant & Castle area using simple clean lines. 

As this was a drawing project I decided to further develop my fine-liner drawings to create a full series of drawings. I ditched the dirty images. This was a drawing project after all.

This may have been a bad move. I liked the final outcome, a series of twenty drawings from around Elephant and Castle. I positioned the images to create a story. The project title was "find the elephant" so my final piece was a series of images of the area that lead to an image of the elephant & castle statue outside the shopping centre. I took a literal approach to 'find' the elephant. Even though it was not the most adventurous conclusion to the brief, I liked it.