Category: Musings

The Ambiguity Project: Layer Three

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We are now 3/4 of the way through the journey that is the Ambiguity Project. Thanks so much for getting involved, it’s been great to have so many people interested in helping out and I really hope you’ve been enjoying the results.

Another question asked, another layer formed, the collages and (as a result) the characters are really taking shape now, so here’s what we have so far:

I asked you, WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST PRIORITY?

W: Positive Extrovert. Their priorities are to have fun and enjoy the moment, burying their head in the sand to some extent when faced with problems.
W: Positive Extrovert. Their priorities are to have fun and enjoy the moment, burying their head in the sand to some extent when faced with problems. Small term goals, like keeping their feet warm are fine, but larger questions remain ignored.
X: A positive Introvert. Their priorities are to work towards achieving love and happiness. Reflective and self questioning they're not afraid to make changes to get to their goals.
X: A positive Introvert. Their priorities are to work towards achieving love, fun and happiness. Reflective and self questioning they’re not afraid to make changes to get to their goals.
Y: Negative introvert. They prioritise happiness and making an impact on the world but suffer low confidence. They worry life will pass them by having not achieved their goals.
Y: Negative introvert. They prioritise happiness and making an impact on the world but suffer low confidence. They worry life will pass them by having not achieved their goals.
Z: Negative extrovert. They prioritise their family and the welfare of others yet begrudge this fact. They feel held back by their sense of responsibility yet do nothing to change their scenario.
Z: Negative extrovert. They prioritise their family and the welfare of others yet begrudge this fact. They feel held back by their sense of responsibility yet do nothing to change their scenario.

So, for our final concluding layer, I would like to put it to you people to answer ONE of the following two questions:

DEFINE YOUR PERSONAL SUCCESS?

DEFINE YOUR PERSONAL FAILURE?

The Ambiguity Project Layer TWO!

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Okay so the project is underway and the collages are beginning to evolve. For those a wee bit lost, a full description is here.

So far, here’s how we’re looking:

W
W: Positive Extrovert; Would change: Taking life at home for granted; having more time; their blinds; their bum and better coffee made at Uni
X
X: Positive Introvert; Would Change: Last Night, would make people nicer to each other; would make others smile more; being a sloth.
Y
Y: Negative introvert; Would Change: Their future, Time to pass slower, more hours in the day, The speed of passing time, How long it took to decide what they wanted to do.
Z
Z: Negative Extrovert; Would change: The frequency other people think of others; summer all year round, their wardrobe, finance, change narcissism to compassion

Most of the answers worked pretty well together as a lot of them were about time and the passing of it. What was fun, was making these similar answers fit with the positive, negative character types as defined previously.

CROP
“I’d like more time.”
"I'd like more hours in the day and for time to pass slower" "I regret how long it took me to decide what I wanted to do"
“I’d like more hours in the day and for time to pass slower”
“I regret how long it took me to decide what I wanted to do”

A thousand thank you’s to all of you getting into the spirit and lending your answers.

So, the next question that will form the next stage:

WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST PRIORITY?

I look forward to getting your answers, either on here, twitter or direct to me at bagley.becky@gmail.com

The Ambiguity Project

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I’ve started a thing.

I asked a control group of people (mainly third year university students at the University of Bath Spa…go figure…) three simple yet remarkably ambiguous questions for them to answer as they wished.

1. WHAT DO YOU GET UP FOR IN THE MORNING?

2. WHAT ARE YOUR LIMITATIONS?

3. WHAT IS YOUR GOAL

 

I received a lot, a lot of varied answers. These results have now formed the first stage of a set of four collaged images to represent a set of character sheets.

So Far our cast consists of W,X,Y and Z: An extrovert positive character, and introvert positive character, and introvert negative character and an extrovert negative character; each one captured in an abstract collage.

They look like this:

W: Positive Extrovert
W: Positive Extrovert
X: Positive Introvert
X: Positive Introvert
Y: Negative introvert
Y: Negative introvert
Z: Negative Extrovert
Z: Negative Extrovert

Every day or so I’ll be asking a new, ambiguous question. Each answer I receive will be randomly attributed to each character and represented on their collage, forming further details and fleshing out the set until they become formed characters in the form of abstract collages.

The idea is, my control over the growth of these characters and development of the images is diminished and YOUR (yes, that’s right, YOU) will directly influence the artwork. Each stage will be posted right here so you can keep an eye on your handywork.

So, the Next question is:

WHAT ONE THING WOULD YOU CHANGE?

Submit answers either in the comments box, or email me at bagley.becky@gmail.com.

You can also tell me via twitter, all answers are welcome.

Let’s get this show on the road!

B

 

 

 

 

Well…it’s only fair…

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Okay so those of you that remember this one, will remember my sister went and got old in August. What you may not know, is that I also have a big brother who decided to be awkward and go and level up too, just afterwards in September. You think they’d have spread it out a bit more right? Some of us have the decency to have birthdays in January. Sheesh.

Anyway, he’s something of a creative bugger too and is currently heading into the world of indie video games following a masters in Games Design and Development. So I decided to be a good sister and put him together a package of goodies, one of which was, of course a little drawing I thought I’d share with the world. ‘Cause that’s what I do.

We grew up with Nintendo characters. And when I say that, I don’t mean it lightly. I mean we GREW UP WITH NINTENDO CHARACTERS. Seriously. How none of us have ended up following a career in becoming a plumber and/or italian is beyond me. I had my own ocarina.

Anyway I thought I’d do him a wee drawing to inspire him in the last leg of his education and the first step into his career. Take him (and myself) back to the old days of sitting on cushions on the floor to get so close to the screen you could see the colours separate into RGB and the only sound under our held breaths was the relentless tapping of desperate thumbs. The days when money meant nothing more than the chime of disappointment, because really you were desperately hoping for a mushroom. The days when clouds were solid, vines were opportunities and barrels were terrifying. The days when bananas meant so much more than a good source of potassium and even the chesnuts were against you…Actually now that I think about it, that’s all pretty batshit mental.

Anyway I drew him this:

DK-brotherAnd if you don’t know what it is, that’s probably a good thing, for all the reasons discussed.

B

 

Weddings, Woofs and a Whole Lotta Love

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wedding-cardThis weekend two people got married.

Actually, there was probably a lot more people than that getting married, it’s just that I only saw the two. And therefore they were the only two I really care about, certainly enough to mention.

Anyway, this weekend a beautiful friend of mine from school married her childhood sweetheart, and all round very nice chap, in a church and I had the pleasure of throwing paper at them, signing hymns I don’t know the words to, then drinking a lot of wine.

Weddings are fun.

Anyway, in the years between school and here, while they were busy being grown ups and building a stable life together, I’ve been busy jumping from place to place, ignoring useful adult things like owning vehicles and making investments and starting ISAs, instead burying the adult part of my head in the proverbial sand of education until a later date when I’ll be forced to dig it out again.

This is fine. It’s nice actually, on the rare occasions when I and my school friends do all return home, it means we all have a lot to talk about and is a good tool in preserving the strength of our relationships enough to know we will all be invited to each others weddings and other such life milestones.

But for the first time, this wedding presented me with a pressure. I love this girl. She deserves every bit of happiness with her loving chappy and long may it continue in the life they’ve now formed together, and I wanted to give them something that would represent this. Something that could represent my happiness for them and my graciousness in being chosen to share it with them on that day. Unfortunately presents of this magnitude often involve money and, as a student and avoider of life things, this is something I do not posses.

So I did the only thing I know how to do these days, and offered the only thing I have to offer and drew for them an aspect of their lives that I know they love. Their bloody dogs. bennyalphie

I worried for a while that something like this might be a bit self indulgent, after all a wedding should be all about them, not me and what I do. But it’s not that I think they SHOULD own my work, it’s literally that, right now in my life, it’s all I have to give them. And it was born from love for them and made with the best of intentions.

And they really do love those little mutts.

So let us, once again, raise our glasses to Jo and David, preserving friendships and the beauty of sharing the differences within our lives.

And of course, those two little dogs.

Illustrating Science: The joy of pseudo diagrams (fig. 2)

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This is Lucy.

Lucy's feedback

And this is Carl.

Carl's Brain

They like to do things. Things like moving. They’re especially good at intentional moving, unconsciously.

This was Lucy, once.

Lucy's egg legThen I got my hands on her.

And This is Proprioception.

(A project from last Christmas.)

This is Proprioception

propbook5

Inspired by the ingenuity of the pseudo-educational comedy, Look Around You, Proprioception was a mock 70’s educational manual in which I took a real life bit of, really damn interesting, biology and explained it using entirely non scientific methods. Because I am an illustrator, so cutting things up makes more sense to me than the deeply fascinating intricacies of real life biology.

FeedbackThe pseudo diagrams were designed to portray the importance of this fascinatingly vital sixth sense, so inherent in our bodies most people have never even considered a life without it (and in fact there are only 6 known cases of people having a complete lack. This is a really cool video about one man’s battle.)

The “text book” had fold out elements to reveal new tasks that got people thinking about the impact of Proprioception in their own life.

Opening page 1Opening page 2I wanted to draw people’s attention to it’s vitality to our functioning everyday and used tasks and design choices to create a style reminiscent of an 70’s school textbook/instruction manual with a playful, modern twist.

Carl dancingProprioception allows us to understand our own body’s position in relation to itself without consciously considering where each limb is. It’s why when you close your eyes, you know where both your hands are. It’s super neat and super vital and I wanted people to understand that fact using simple collage techniques and fun imagery to demonstrate the incomprehensible struggle that would be living without it.

Plus it gave me an excuse to cut up my friends faces for a few months.

Seriously, I was picking Carls head out of my carpet for weeks.

Illustrating science: The joy of pseudo diagrams (fig 1)

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Hands up if you want to learn a totally amazing fact?What about something entirely controversial?

Or even just utterly trivial?

And who wants to learn them through the medium of…TYPOGRAPHY!? …no?

Well if you raised your hands to any of them you are a fool, because I can’t see you and that was very clearly a rhetorical request. So you can sit down, behave and have all three.

This was a short uni brief: 3 posters to work as a set and detail three facts that fit the above criteria.

The conception of the carbon that makes up all living things.
The atoms that form most of your body’s cells were created in the explosion of a star.
The lifespan of our cells, built from this carbon.
The maximum number of times your body’s cells can multiply and divide before they deteriorate and die.
The life form that housed the carbon is gone, yet the atoms continue.
In reality, the afterlife is nothing more than the continued existence of atoms after the death of the cell they once formed.

So here they are, three posters about the passage of time and our simple, biological place in it. An amazing beginning to the journey of carbon atoms, a trivial definition of our cells’ lifespan and the true, if not hard to swallow fact that we are nothing more beautiful than a temporary home for ongoing carbon.
Some may see this as a dark concept. I think it’s an utterly beautiful one, although the project itself is not one of my favourites.

Still, either way it’s all pretty interesting

The Spotlight’s all on ME!

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Okay, I promise you NEW work, BUT FIRST check this out!

My first ever online inteview brought to you by them clever fellas over at Broken Frontier!

Big thanks to the guys, especially Andy who saw value in my work enough to wanna know ALL ABOUT IT! And with any luck you do to! So go get an insight into my noodle and why I do the things I do and I promise I’ll reward you with shiny new things soon!

Why Words Will Never Be Enough

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The art of language (and I might be biased here, but specifically the English Language) is utterly incredible.

We have perpetual potential at the end of our tongues to convey and share limitless emotion, information, opinions and experiences. It’s a wonderful gift, to have access to innumerable possibilities of communication that, with the sheer number of words and careful choice grammatical order, can convey from one human being to another, just about anything.

But we, as human beings are greedy creatures. And sometimes I feel that, despite the incredible number or words in my aresnal of communicative choice (and even the vast linguistic toolbox that is outside of my knowledge ) there couldn’t possibly be one that would ever communicate effectively the strength of feelings in certain situations. For the extent of some things, there are simply no words.

jennyNo words to accurately convey how much we love someone, the pure injustice that they, of all people, have had to suffer, the pain of their early departure from us and the sheer size of the hole the loss of their presence has formed.

No combination of words could ever accurately explain the true uniqueness of someone. The amount they made me laugh and, above all, how very, truly, incomprehensibly lucky I am to have had them for the time I did.

It is easy, when something has been taken from you, to feel a level of injustice at what you’ve lost. But I would just like to attempt, even with my lack of words to explain fully, how grateful I am to have experienced and known someone so wonderful. Especially when it turns out that their time was so much shorter than expected.

In a world without our girl, so many have never had the chance to know and love her. I am truly blessed and honored to not find myself in that category.

And I wish I could explain the extent to which I mean that, but sometimes there are just no words.

My Beautiful friend, we miss you and love you. But I could never convey how much.

x