Summer Brief 10

Something that tasted good - my favourite food chicken

From my ten outcomes from the summer brief I chose to work with 'something that tasted good' as I had a lot of imagery to play around with for this. I came up with the notion of my favourite food and it being chicken; however I have chicks in my back garden at home that we use for eggs. I started to think about how guilty I feel watching those chicks grow into chickens and would I then eat them? And the answer is I wouldn't.. yet I am not a vegetarian why is that? It got me thinking about how chickens as animals have their own right to live and it got me thinking about what they would be like as humans with the same rights as us. If we went around murdering eachother and eating one another we would have a life sentence and be considered a cannibal; but as creatures on the earth we should all have the same right to life.

I wanted my pieces to be quite playful so I came up with human figures with chicken heads on them just to make it a little bit funny and for the audience to question its purpose.

I experimented with different media such as marker pens, fine liners, watercolour, pencil, but the best technique I found was drawing the figures out quite bold and simple and colouring them with gouache. I think this gave it a more animated feel and not as realistic which reflected the humorous concept. In order to get a sense of a modern day chicken as a human, I used modern social networking sites to play with the idea such as 'Chickbook' and 'Chickstagram'. My final piece is based on the app 'Instagram' for Iphone whereby you upload your photos and to fit 10 outcomes onto the A2 poster as the brief stated, I felt this worked really well as it included 9 photographic uploads and a profile picture. I enjoyed working with the gouache but to be honest it didn't come out looking as professional as I'd hoped. I felt I rushed colouring the piece as I painted it within one day and if I were to do this brief again I would either spend longer painting it more intricately or I would use a different media.