Vintage project evaluation

The era I have chosen for the vintage project is the 1950s. I have chosen this era because it wasn’t popular among other people in the class and there are many events that took place that interest me in the decade, such as the cold war and the atomic age that had started. I wanted to explore more about the films and comics industries from the 1950s and the red scare.

I researched both images and info for every page I did, including dates, context, etc.  Towards the end of my sketchbook I started to focus on more obscure subjects such as horror comics, movies, artists and popular technology of the time. These I felt I could explore with more enthusiasm so left them until the end to help me anticipate finishing the sketchbook.

The main cultural references in my era are focused on the rock and roll era and the fashion and hairstyles that were present in the decade. I have also focused on the then fully active cold war between the US and Russia and the repercussions of their conflicts.

Artists I studied in my sketchbook are Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem De Kooning. The main art movement in the era was Abstract Expressionism and cubism. I think that the age of impressionism had become very old in its style and relevance in the 1950s and with cubism, abstract and other forms of expressionism becoming popular, artists had started to paint much more simply.

I have used a wide variety of media in my sketchbook including brush pens, pencil, acrylic paint, oil pastels, coloured pencil, marker pen, pro markers and water colour paints. I used brush pens to replicate a comic book effect, the acrylic paint splattered on the page to replicate Jackson Pollock’s style and pencil to achieve the best detail in studies of people or scenery for examples.

The annotations’ positions could have been more creative in how I added them alongside the drawings. I wrote them close to the images on the pages.

In hindsight, I could have managed my time a lot better, often having to rush because of taking too long on certain pages. To improve I could have studied more relevant subjects, for example, maybe cut out the page on toys, and definitely included more sketches on pages like movies and hairstyles.

 I am happy with the final outcome of my sketchbook and despite the problems mentioned before, I am proud of how some of the sketches have turned out and could be some of my best.