Personal Project Plan

This week I have worked out my plan for my personal project. Making goals, a schedule, deadlines, and a rough draft of how my story will progress through the paintings.

My Goals

Through this project this semester there are several things that I wish to accomplish besides just the obvious of becoming a better artist.

One important goal is to become faster as producing digital paintings. I would like to do commissions but I do not work fast enough, so if I charged for my time they would be unrealistically expensive. I hope to hone my skills so I can become much faster and produce high quality work that meets my expectations without taking an insane amount of hours.

Id also like to focus more on scenes of people rather than one individual person. I hope to also improve my artwork by using much more dynamic poses for people, where in the pass they have been very static and "portrait" like.

Another big goal I have for this semester is time and stress management (the first greatly helping with the other). I am an excellent (or awful) procrastinator which usually leaves me extremely stressed and in an awful crunch at the end of things. I want to get away from this bad habit, as stress has a very negative effect on my well being and mental health. Working in addition to getting my MFA is already proving to be a challenge that I will need better time and stress management skills.

Deadlines

I have decided that I am going to try to get out 6 paintings done within the next 12 weeks, with the idea of having a completed one at the end of every two weeks. This will bring me all the way up to the beginning of December. It leaves me a little wiggle room but I plan that I will use the rest of that month until the end of the semester to go back and refine anything, and possibly get a 7th painting done so I can have a total of 8 (including the piece I have already done as the start).

The Story

The series of paintings will be a progression of two characters journeying through a large forest. They will meet several people along the way and face many trials and tribulations together. The series will end with the two beginning adventurers and people they have met officially becoming a group.

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This week I also was doing some research in different ways stories can be told visually and I found a very interesting story called "The Taxi Driver" (not to be confused with the movie). It was a story about a girl who gets abducted by her Uber driver. The story was okay, dark, twisted, action, and a thriller but how it really stood out was the way that it was presented. It was all told through screenshots of text message conversations between multiple people (around 7 different characters). I thought it was really clever, and it made it feel much more real. It was a great way to tell a story in our day in age too because so much of our communication is through texting. It felt personal, because usually the only texts I read are my own and it displayed on a phone screen perfectly.

I tried to find a link to it on the computer but it's very weird when I pull it up, I guess the website was really just meant for mobile? Which makes sense for how it was presented. I looked on my phone and cant find a version that works either... it looks like it's the right thing but then when I click on it it doesn't work... so sorry for not linking to an example. The website both on mobile and the computer was very spammy unfortunately anyway.

I also spent time on researching ways to balance working at my job and going back to school. It has already been something that I have been finding stressful. Basically I have found that my time management skills really need to be improved. Which is why it is under my goals. The big focuses will be to not procrastinate and to schedual my time.