Making the shopping scene...more characters and more stress!

The stress has been building today after the realisation of how much work I want to do with the time I have left and how slow I am working. I am thoroughly enjoying the making process, however it is particularly frustrating that I have elongated my the process by deciding to paint all my papers before i cut out numerous layers to build up the finished character image. I can appreciate the the improvement it has made on the overall image, which is why I am sticking to it.

The last couple of days have been about finishing off the characters within the scene, which includes people in the background layers. As I am merging two of my grandfather's photographs into one new original scene, I have thought how I could add more playfulness and a hint of story to the still image to transform it into a 'performance' as such. With that in mind, I decided to create a short narrative portraying my Grandmother's local shopping trips in Trinidad- keeping the character consistent with the same clothes- a white blouse and red shorts. By repeating my grandmother's figure in the image, the audience develops an attachment to my Grandmother and she is therefore outlined as a protagonist in the sequence of images. This compares to the lack of consistency in the collection of other images where characters have not been as easily identified. This is something to keep in mind for my future images.

 I have also been busy making the background layers needed to construct the post office. This has been overall fairly tricky trying to work with the foreground image that has not yet been completely finished and cut out to reveal what will be seen. This has of course again made the process all that slower and alot of planning was planning was made, using tracing paper to work out how to create perspective with the steps and the porch area. 

I also decided to make the background colours quite blocky in colour to not distract the viewer's eyes from the drawn details in the foreground of the image.

As we're at the end of the week and I find it much easier to do making work at uni, I aim to finish the shopping scene by the end of tuesday (taking into consideration the bank holiday!)