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FMP Evaluation

I started off looking at places and people that meant a lot to me, my Grandad and the woods where he lives came up a lot so I thought I’d do what I have done since I was very little – go on a walk with my Grandad. This is something I have always done and the woods around where he lives are my favourite walks. Whilst we were on the walk he told me about the proposed sand quarries in the Severals which I was really shocked about as the Severals are part of the South Downs National Park. I researched a little more into this and found that they’re proposing to quarry 4 million tonnes of soft sand from 75 Hectares of land within the South Downs National Park. I contacted Facebook groups that had been put up because of the proposed quarries and a few people came back to me. One of my Grandad’s neighbours sent me the document he sent to varies authorities objecting the quarries. There was so much that he had researched and had so much to say about why the quarries should not happen in our beautiful Severals. Among some of his research was the historical value of the Severals, he had referenced that the Severals were mentioned in the 1884 revised guidebook to Midhurst written by G.D. Wolferstan. He had unfortunately spelt the name wrong so I was unable to find it. I eventually found the book after seeing Susie in the library. The book was so beautifully written and had such amazing things to say about Midhurst and the surrounding areas. Firstly I wanted to carry on doing something on the Severals using the quote from the book about how the Severals is ‘Inexhaustable in walks’, I did a few experiments that I wasn’t overly happy with. I thought about it and wanted to use Wolferstan’s book. The book is just full of text so I thought I could create images for the text from Wolferstan’s descriptions. I looked at Alfred Wainwright’s illustrations and they are so beautifully detailed.

I began looking at modern guidebooks, for example Monocle series and Jason Brooks New York Sketchbook. I also found all the guidebooks I had of everywhere I visited. I wanted to create a new version of Wolferstan’s guidebook. I visited everywhere within Wolferstan’s guidebook over Easter and documented each place using photography and occasionally illustrstion. The idea to do this came from Michael Portillo’s train journeys where he follows George Bradshaw's 1913 Continental Railway Guide. I realised that creating a whole new guidebook was crazy so I thought about creating a series of maps and researched a lot into cartography. I did a few experiments but didn’t like where it was going. I decided to focus on one place, my favourite walk, which was between Woolbeding and Stedham. I met a really lovely man on my walk who told me that every morning he went down the Stedham Mill and drank his cup of tea. This was incredibly heart warming and I could clearly see his love for the little village that he lives in. I thought I’d look at images of what Stedham Mill looked like around the time that the guidebook was written. This gave me the idea to compare the old to the new, not much had changed in each place which was really interesting. I wanted to create a series of postcards showing the past next to the present but the experiment I did didn’t feel right so I decided to focus on making a book comparing the differences. I chose to show the old images as watercolours as all the old images were from Gravelroots and they all had watermarks on them. I also thought this was a really good medium to use as watercolour was used a lot in the past. It also gave it a bit of a contrast from the photographs.

I feel my project has developed a lot and I have gone through a lot of ideas to finally come out with something I am really proud of. I feel I worked consistently throughout this unit and have created a solid body of work and a well considered final book.

I have had a lot of feedback from the tutors and they have helped me realise my ideas. I have taken their feedback on board and researched things they have suggested and altered my project based on my own feelings and the feedback of the tutors.

I feel that I have developed my layout a lot from the start and I am now really happy with my layout, I feel it gives my illustrations and my photographs the space that they need and gives the reader time to pause and think.

Something I am not so happy with is my process book, I have gone through different layouts to try and make it have more space however I seem to have ended up with the same layout I started with. Something I was really panicked about was creating my casebound book, I have never created one I have been proud of so it was a big task for me and I had to have it so that I had a spare book incase the case bind didn’t work.

I have learnt a lot from this unit, I feel I have learnt to believe in my capabilities a little more and if I really try and really want to achieve something I can. I have also learnt that I need to plan more than I already do so that I am able to purchase everything I need for my final piece. I think I did this quite well however as I was able to buy the paper that I really wanted and bind it in the exact way that I had imagined.

There are only a couple of things that I would do differently to my book if I had more time. I would have considered my dust jacket more, I definitely thought about it however I also didn’t plan for it so I didn’t order the paper that I wanted for it and so ended up with paper that was a tiny bit too thick, this is something I should have thought about and researched more on, I should have gone to the library and felt the paper of any dust jackets. Overall though I am incredibly proud of everything that I have created in this unit and especially proud of my final piece.

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My final book. Really happy with my final outcome, I feel like it’s well considered and created to a professional standard. Really happy with my final layout as well.

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Layout change. I went to see Joseph again to ask what book cloth I needed to buy and I showed him my new book after the size change. He really liked the tiny book that I had made and thought it was very precious. He gave me the idea to spread it out a little more and give breaks after each place so there’s a page left blank on the left then it starts on the next place and just has the title of the place with the text to go with it then on the next page I have the watercolours and the page after I have the image of what it looks like now with a quote opposite and the footnotes about what has changed underneath the image of what it looks like now. I then have a bit of a layout change for the second section with 3 new layouts and one taken from the first section. I feel this works better however I’m worried that there’s too much space now and the quotes and text are disjointed from the images. I’ll concentrate on getting all my personal branding up to date this weekend and get other opinions on Monday and do a test print on my paper over the weekend and get everything ready to bind and hand in next week!

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I had my tutorial this morning and although they did like the size of the book they said it could do with being a little bigger so that it would give more space for my text and also I’d be able to make my images bigger showing more detail. At the moment the photographs are very small and although they’re quite sweet that small you can’t see much detail within them so could do with being bigger. I also decided to have the title of the place and the photos of what it looks like now come first before the watercolour as it was noted that they didn’t realise that the watercolour related as there was no title on the watercolour page. Still a little unsure about the layout on the final pages.

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Book binding

Went to the library to get inspiration for my book binding. Found the new book design book. Obviously not super up to date but got a few ideas from it. I have already decided that I want to bind in signatures and then case bind it however I wasn’t sure how to get the title on the book as I wanted to have a dust jacket over the case bind which would have one of my watercolours on it. After seeing this I thought I could have a wrap around my book which would have the title on it. I’d still have the title on the inside of the book with more information underneath but I feel like this would make the reader interested to pick it up. 

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Making my book smaller

After seeing Joseph this morning he gave me the idea that I could create a tiny book. I thought this was a really beautiful idea as it would make it more precious. Our landscapes and scenery are precious so I thought this fitted nicely. It also makes the book more endearing and you would want to pick it up and look at it. I want to create a very beautiful book as that is what my subject is; the beauty of our landscape and how much or little it has changed over 100 years. I also gave the book more of a pace and a bit more of a system as that is something Jospeh picked up on. It didn’t really have an order but now I feel like it has a good pacing. I’m still unsure about the end section where I display my photographs alongside the text from the guidebook. Also need to add in the reference to G.D.Wolferstan.

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I did four more watercolours, two of them are new and two I had done before however they weren’t completely in keeping with the rest of the watercolours so I re did them. 

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Really like these images, similar to Gregory Crewdson’s work. They have a very staged cinematic feel to the photographs, and like Crewdson’s create a sense of loneliness and open space even though there is never a person on their own. 

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Interesting layouts in the magazine. Can’t really read the text overlapping the image, I like the outlined Vacationist title and how it overlaps the image. The images have an old feeling to them with a sense of nostalgia. Slightly similar to what I’m going with for my watercolours however the magazine has an incredibly bold approach which isn’t something I want for my book.

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Looking at the book Sally showed me of ISTD from 2014. Some really beautiful layouts, need to concentrate on my layouts from now on, got all my content just need to make it look amazing... or at least try! Need to get a lot more inspiration though, so going to look at more layout designs. Will probably visit the library in a bit to get more inspiration.

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Looking at typographic systems. I’ve never been great with layout and type as I create something and thinks it looks good and then show it to someone and they look at it thinking what have I done... So I thought I ought to learn even if it’s 3 years too late, better late then never though. 

These are some very weird typographic layouts, but also very interesting. I like how it shows the design on paper first mocking up what they want to create, shows their thinking process.

I want quite a formal simple typographic layout, as I want my watercolours and photography to stand mostly alone with supporting text.

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Eye magazine

Looking through magazines for inspiration and found this in Eye magazine. I really like the line and detail in these images, there are definite leading lines in each image which is really eye catching. A lot of my photos and watercolours have obvious lines, especially my buildings, I used rulers to create the lines in my watercolours which are really nice but still subtle enough in the watercolour.

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Basic spreads so far. The 1884 guidebook text needs adding however I like my annotated watercolours at the moment. Might have to try another way of doing this though, as it could look a little messy with loads of hand drawn annotations or is that what it’s meant to look like - someones sketchbook.... Could be an interesting way of looking at it. As though I have taken my sketchbook with me on this walk from Woolbeding to Stedham and annotated as I have gone along and taken photos of each place and drawn images of what it used to look like... 

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Text from guidebook

I have written out all the text I will use for my book from the original 1884 guidebook about Woolbeding and Stedham. I’m thinking of possibly annotating the text as to what has changed within what is written that I don’t have photos of or something very broad like the peterfield road that is mentioned. It is surrounded by trees and I wouldn’t say there are many cottages. It is a very main road too so has lost some of its beauty. I will probably annotate on the print out to show what it would be like in my book... Just a working idea at the moment but I will print out my book so far and show it in my 1:1 tutorial tomorrow.

WOOLBEDING

The Village of Woolbeding is like a beautiful jewel in a beautiful casket; the places that surround it are all beautiful - Midhurst. Easebouren, Cowdray, Iping, not one is without its element of beauty; its rivers, its heath, its hills, or its woods.

But the beauties of these places only prepare you for the excelling beauty of Woolbeding; here the attractions which struck you separately are so charmingly mingled, so harmoniously blended, that you feel you have hitherto only been going througha work of intuition, have been educating your eye and taste for the scene before it, and now gazing at its perfection, your of the beautiful is satisfied. From whichever side you come upon Woolbeding, the approach is in harmony with the place itself, whether it be from Iping, Easebourne, or Midhurst. There are few more charming roads than that from Midhurst to Petersfield, skirted on the one side by the high heath, with its rich swelling plantations of firs, its quaint Swiss build cottages, and its pretty gardens and orchards, fringed with graceful silver birch, the oak, the lime, the beech, and the ash. It overlooks on the other side the rich vallet of the Rother, which gradually widens until Sussex is lost in Surrey; but it is only the first half-mile of this delightful road that the visitor to Woolbeding has to tread; having passed the national school he must quit the highway and plunge down this shady road to the right; an arch of foliage, a leafy tunnel, with its high banks full of strangely-twisted roots, overgrown with ferns and ivy, primroses, and violets, and wild strawberries, with its rows of rounded oaks that bend in stately guise to meet each other. For some hundred yards or so, you are in half light, more or less broken according to the time of the year, and then you come upon a stone bridge across a stream, that tempts you to look up it and down it, so pleasant are its winding waters and its wooded banks; here, right before you, lies a scene which few could look upon without exclaiming, “How lovely, how exquisitely beautiful!” How is it possible to describe the spot, how, in fact, to describe in words any spot that nature has clothed with beauty! Feudal castles monastic ruins, high reaching cathedrals, any work of man’s hand may be described, but fields, woods, rivers, meadows, uplands, these cannot be described, for whilst in the infinite variety of nature the scene changes a thousand times, assumes a thousand lines and aspects, excites a thousand tones of feeling, the words used to describe them remain the same; they are but trees, meadows, and uplands, not the trees the meadows and the uplands that are in our mind’s eye, and which we desire to present to the imagination of others.

Yet to an English mind Woolbeding may be made in some slight degree palpable even by the ineffected medium of words, being essentially English in its beauty. The two square-roofed mansions, relieved by their numerous white-framed windows, looking out from foliage that gives to them at once an air of beauty and comfort, these are essentially English; so are the rich meadows on either side of the road, from the bridge to the Village Church, meadows only separated from the road by wooden railings, so that you are really for all purposes of enjoyment walking in them; here cows and horses are grazing on rich herbage, or sleeping under fine old trees. And let the eye  take a wider range, and behold the wooded uplands that rise behind the mansions, and the fields of corn that lie under those wooded heights, and all this will be felt to be English; and then the air of response, comfort, and happiness that reigns over all, the sense of completeness, of its having something of all those essentials which make up the ideas of comfort and beauty, this too is English; for if there be mansions, and church, and cottages, there are also the farmer’s solid-looking house, outbuildings, and gardens, there are also corn-fields, clover-fields, and turnip-fields, and the peculiarity of Woolbeding is that you cannot tell where the grounds terminate and where the farm begins; there is no sharp line of demarcation, no park wall, or high fence to divide the one from the other , but from grounds to orchard, from orchard to paddock, from paddock to cornfield, you glide from the useful to the purely ornamental, until, without being sensible of the change, your eye passes from the farmer’s fields to the gentlemen’s grounds. The beauty of Woolbeding is fully matured and ripened; has all the richness and fulness that ages of careful tendance alone could give it, and yet it has no touch of age, none of its decay or neglect.

In Spring, the road from the bridge is skirted with cherry-trees which are one mass of blossom, whilst side by side with them stand gigantic Scotch firs, with their smooth ruddy branches; scarcely less grand than the stems themselves, and when these cease to draw your attention you come upon the pride of English forests, the oak, with its sturdy strength and well-rounded symmetry, the yew, with its deep rich green and waxen berries, the lime, the beech, and the chestnut, all these go to make up the roadside shade and roadside beauty.

The road, after passing by the church, plunges into another leafy tunnel that you cannot see the issue of, but about this the visitor need not trouble himself, but follow the broad steps to the right, get over the low stile, push open the loose gate, and you are out of the road and in a paddock, at the back of the two square mansions and the little low church; you are doubling the village, taking it in the rear, not less beautiful than the front, and with the river still with you (or it clings to Woolbeding, and winds round it on every side, as if it could not bear to leabe it), and with the hills before you, which recede from the village as if they had left it with reluctance, and with trees and hedges always by your side, and rich herbage at your feet, with the cry of the cuckoo or the cock-pheasant as the case and season might be, in your ear, you walk round Woolbeding, turning at every step to look back at it, leaning ober every gate to take in the wider prospect about it, loitering at every hedge to gather some wild flower, or some tempting berry; and so imperceptibly you pass from Woolbeding, and are once more entering Midhurst, not by the Petersfield but by the Easebourne road, and whether you come again, or come no more, you take with you the impress of a scene which years cannot efface.

True, you have only seen material beauty, you have looked upon a fair scene as you might upon a fair face, with only the power to guess upon the kind of soul which dwells within it; you might pass on and never know what kind of inner life possessed that spot – whether it was grovelling or soaring, rough or gentle, earthly or celestial, Pagan, Turk or Jew. Yet even with this ignorance of its higher attributes, or with a knowledge that there were none, the beauty of the scene would not be without its influence upon you for good; you would feel as Maranda felt, when she gazed upon the face of Ferdinand “There’s nothing ill can well in such a temple; if the ill spirit have so fair a house, good things Will strive to do well with it.” In the Creation of such a spot, Good influence, you feel, must have been at work; In the peace, the repose, the softness, the beauty of the scene, in the absence from it of anything to jar upon the feelings or to vex the mind, there must be the working of good spirits.

And in the calmness that comes over the mind in the presence or in the recollection I was such a spot, is there not a proof even to the merest wayfarer that, in the conflict of good and evil In this world, good has won a victory in the village of Woolbeding ? But it does not follow, as a matter of course, that the gazer at this scene should only be touched by its external features. His sense of its material beauties may be heightened by a knowledge that it has another and a higher beauty, that it has a moral and a spiritual beauty, A heart and a soul. We do not speak in a Pagan sense; the “great god Pan” has long Been dead; our woods are without dryads as our fountains are without naiads. We have discarded these fancies, And settled down to realities.

The church of all Saints, Woolbeding, is a small edifice, Consisting of chancel, Nave, and a square tower containing three bells. Before the church was repaired and enlarged in 1880, the east window was filled with stained glass brought from Mottisfont Priory in Hampshire, a property of the family of Mill, Baronets, to whom the manor of Woolbeding formally belonged. The subject being the taking down of the Saviour from the Cross. Fragments of this glass have been inserted in the north window of the chancel, and in one of the South windows of the present church; they are very good specimens of English 15th century work. In 1880 the church was repaired and in part remodelled, a new chancel was built in the late decorated style, replacing a much smaller one which had been erected about the beginning of the 18th century. The tower at the west end was thrown open to the nave by the insertion Of a large arch in its eastern wall in place of a low doorway; a porch was added on the south side of the tower. The walls of the nave which are of early Romanesque work, about the middle of the 11th century, being divided externally by narrow vertical stone pilasters like the tower of Sompting and the walls of Worth, have been preserved unaltered. Internally the church has been fitted with solid oak benches, and oak screen handsomely carved, pulpit, lectern, reredos, and sedilia all of the same material. The stained glass in the east window was designed and executed by C.E. Kempe, Esq.

STEDHAM

The next village on our route is Stedham, which may be apprached if driving, by returning to the main pertersfield road and continuing on for about a mile, until having passed  the bridge and coming to the cross ways on the top of the hill, the road leads to Stedham.

For the pedestrian there is a shorter route and a most delightful walk; passing the manor house at Woolbeding, on the right, lying back in a garden is a farm-house, opposite it are some stone steps surmounted by a wicket gate; entering which, and following the pathway until a similar gate is reached, the footpath bearing to the left takes you through a pleasant coppice; on emerging from it you find yourself in a meadow, intersected by the Rother. Continuing the footpath, the turn to the left leads up past the mill and out by Stedham Church. This is a modern structure with the exception of the tower, which was rebuilt in 1670; it consists of a nave and chancel, and is dedicated to St. James; the incumbent is the Rev. R. C. Bull, M.A. In the Churchyard is a fine yew-tree, measuring twenty-eight feet in circumference.

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Went back to a few places to get better photos of each place as I had found the old photos that I wanted to compare with new images and they either weren’t at a very good angle or I hadn’t previously got images.

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WOOLBEDING GARDENS

The beautiful Woolbeding National Trust Gardens. They are only open Thursdays and Fridays from 25th April through summer although they might be open Wednesdays as well this summer. Had to get a bus there from Midhurst as you are not allowed to park at the gardens. 

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Currently got 8 watercolours. I’m going to re do the second one and possibly the third and fifth one. I re did the first one last night, looks so much better than the first one I did. I mean obviously they’re not amazing however, they have gradually gotten better after each one I’ve done... very therapeutic watercolour is... I decided to do watercolour for the old images as watercolour was a popular medium that was used years ago. I also feel as though watercolours can feel like memories fading and although I’m finding that not much has changed from the late 1800s and the early 1900s there are aspects that are fading.