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Exhibition Plan

16/04/19

Now I have actually done the work I need to plan how am I am going to present these pieces in exhibition. My first thought was to make a little pop out shelve to place all my magazines and cards on, whilst my drawing work and development work could be displayed on the wall behind it. However, I thought it would be a really good idea to have a piece off string going across the wall and to peg the magazines and cards by their corners on the line as if you would hang football shirts on a washing line, whilst still having the drawings and development work on the wall with it. This idea really won me over compared to the other one and this is definitely what I am going to try and do for my exhibition.

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Printing Cards

15/04/19

This process was far more simple than printing the magazines thankfully. I already had the designs for the cards so it was just about printing them. I printed them on glossy photo paper to give it a shiny effect that I wanted and then cut them all out the same size. This was a pretty straight forward process with my only problem being that they sometimes printed on the wrong side of the paper, which in turn actually gave quite interesting results. After this I stuck them onto some shiny silver paper that I had bought so that they had a strong back to them and felt like thick playing cards. I managed to print three cards out for each of the twelve models and I was extremely happy to add these to my final piece.

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Printing Magazines

14/04/19

After printing all of these magazines, I have come to the conclusion that this has been by far the most problematic and perhaps slightly unsatisfying bit of the project. My original idea was that I would print the magazines off professionally but the cost was unfortunately just way too high. I then bought certain paper that I thought would work well; however, there were many problems with this as some of the paper I tried to print on was not the correct size or wouldn't work with the printer I had, which was hugely frustrating and with time running out I needed to use the resources I had that worked to the best of my ability. I tried to print these out a4 with two pages on one sheet so that I could then fold them into small a5 magazines. However, this did not work as the editing software would not allow me to print these pages without a white border round the side and the fold in the middle was not reliable enough to always match up straight in the centre. My next option was to print each page a4 but double sided so it could almost be viewed as a newsletter type magazine. Although very time consuming with the printer, this was my best option so I continued forward with this on the a4 paper that would be compatible with my printer. After my printer scrunched up quite a few pages and failed to print double sided on some I slowly but surely printed out all the pages I needed. Now I just needed to bind the pages. Originally I wanted to put two staples down the spine however this obstructed a lot of each page to I resorted to either putting a staple or a hole punch in the top left hand corner of each magazine (depending on thickness) to bind the pages. This was very simplistic but I think it actually worked quite well and achieved a look that I was going for. Despite all my troubles and the magazines not turning out how I first planned, I was ultimately actually quite pleases with the results and was happy to present them as my final piece.

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Editing Cards

12/04/19

Editing the cards was a much simpler task than editing the magazines. Now I am so used the the editing software I could produce these relatively quickly and found the look I wanted pretty much first time. I knew exactly what I was looking for after researching the Match Attax cards from my childhood. I like the simplicity of the designs in contrast with the rough text and logo drawing. I am looking forward to printing these off and seeing the end results.

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Editing Magazines pt.2

11/04/19

Now that I have got into the swing of things and feel thoroughly comfortable with the editing software, I have started to pick up some pace with the editing and have regained a bit of time that I thought I had lost, however I am still behind. I’ve now completed editing all of the magazines, which is a great feeling after it has taken so long but I still have a lot more to do. I was so happy with the written text I decided to make a poster like page for each model with one of my favourite quotations from each interview. These are some of my favourite pages. I also played around with the font as much as I could and I am satisfied with how it looks but if I had the more time perhaps I could have invested it more into experimentation with this kind of thing and really found the perfect look. Despite this I am really happy with the results and can't wait to print them, but first I need to edit the cards.

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Editing Magazines pt.1

08/04/19

Editing the magazines has been a much more long and laborious task then I had perhaps first imagined. It has taken me a lot longer to produce each individual page than I had expected, which has set me back on my time scale quite a bit. This is because each individual drawing I am having to draw with ink on a single page then let them dry, then scan them and then edit them so that the black ink stands out on the page, or whatever the colour of the ink needs to be for the magazine. Although this is frustrating I just need to try and carry on with it and produce the best I can. If I could do this again I would of set myself much more time to produce the actual magazines rather than researching for them. Nonetheless I am very happy with the results so far and it is really interesting to see the contrast of the passionate drawings with the fashion styled photos. I particularly like the hand drawn quotations on the pages as I think it offers great personality to the pieces.

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Interviews

01/04/19

To be able to fill the contents of the magazines and discover why each of the models wear their football shirt, I needed to interview each person and get the answers I needed in order to properly display the contrast of why different people wear their kit. It wasn't very difficult to think of the key questions but it was interesting to ask about some of the models previous memories of football and what they remember, or whether they even like football in the first place. Some people not only don't like football but actually have many issues with the game and they intellectually put that across in their answers, which is perfect for the magazines as it throws up many interesting page prospects and also headlines. Now I have got these answers I just need to put them into the magazine and edit the formats.

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Editing

31/03/19

In order to produce the magazines and cards I needed to get familiar with an editing software that is easy to use but still has the capability to produce what I am looking for. I’ve decided to use a software called gimp as it is very accessible and is free. I have watched loads of youtube video to help me get used to the software and allow me to do what I need to do to produce the magazines and cards. It has been difficult to start of with and really frustrating when I can’t get things right straight away but I have been slowly getting there and I now feel like I am in a position to begin editing the contents for the different pages.

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Magazine and Card Templates

29/03/19

In order to get some ideas started with how the magazine could look I sketched out some magazine front cover templates and card templates with drawing ink. I came up with the name ‘SHIRTY’. The name just felt right straight away so I am going to go along with that. I also just roughly drew out some magazine pages and what the contents could be or look like. This is really useful because when I do get onto to editing the pages I can look back on this for ideas.

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Research: Match of the Day and Match Attax

26/03/19

I also looked into football magazines that I read in the past. Match of the Day was a massive part of my childhood and I brought out a few of my magazines from when I was younger to see if there was anything I could take as inspiration. Although I am looking to produce my magazines in a much more simple style than Match of the Day, it was still interesting to look at another style of football magazine. Reading this also reminded me of the football cards I used to collect when I was younger like Match Attax and it instantly makes me want to produce football cards that could go with the magazines. Little card profiles with each model could look good I think. I have looked at the style of the cards I used to collect and it could be really interesting to recreate something similar.

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Research: Magazine Contents and Format

25/03/19

If I am going to properly pursue the idea of turning my work into a magazine sort of structure I needed to research what a magazine can look like and what particular magazines I think work well and look good. I started off by looking at a magazine that I already regularly read called ‘CRACK’, which interviews musicians. I loved the aesthetic it uses with big photos, some small text and then a larger heading. I want to make my photos at the forefront of the magazine so this was great inspiration. This also triggered another significant idea and this was that I should interview all the models about why they wear the shirt that they were wearing in the photos. I could very easily do this and it could bring powerful results and concentrate on the contrast that some people wear them for fashion and others wear them for support. I then looked at a youtube video by the channel “PAQ” where they are set the task to each create magazines for a clothing brand’s release. One of the magazines used drawn text and headings really effectively and this is something that I definitely want to try and do. I also looked at GQ’s interview with Marcus Rashford, which gave me information on how I may produce the magazine with great aesthetics but also in a footballing context.

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Magazine?

23/03/19

After analysing the work I had already done I need to decide where to take the project next. When looking at the combined drawings and collages, something that is starting to strike me, especially when text is involved, is that they almost look like pages out of a magazine. The photos could work really well in a magazine as they have that kind of fashion shoot vibe about them and the drawings really add to them and I can picture them in a magazine working really well. Perhaps I should look into the format of a magazine and the contents of a magazine and see how my work could evolve into this idea.

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Combining Photos and Drawings

22/03/19

I decided to gather the photos I had taken and collage them together with the same ink drawing style I was using. This was really enjoyable and produced some great results. I thought the two mediums contrasted each other but complimented each other simultaneously. I also began to involve text with the pieces as this was effective in previous drawings and this is what really sparked ideas for me. I need to assess this work so far and figure out what the next stage is for me to take the project forward. I have just started to scratch the surface with comparing the two purposes of wearing a football shirt and I need to work out how to take this further towards the end of the project.

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The photos pt.3

19/03/19

Taking these photos felt like I was really getting somewhere so I just kept doing it. I continued to shoot them in this style and get as many as I could. However, I feel as if I have got all the photos I need now and can really start to move forward with them and combine them with the ink drawings of text and images that I have previously done.

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The photos pt.2

17/03/19

In my second group of photos I really wanted to concentrate on making them look like fashion shoots that could even be seen in an advert or magazine somewhere. This produced some great results, getting people that purely wear their shirt for aesthetic reasons worked really well. Even when I took photos of people that were really passionate about the shirts they wore and had allegiance to that team, they were still very effective in this kind of style.The photos are working well so I want to take as many as I can so I have a lot of material to work form.

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The photos pt.1

14/03/19

I asked people that I knew who owned football shirts if I could take photos of them wearing their kit with my film camera. I tried to picture them in everyday situations wearing their shirt and wanted to try and capture the aesthetic that I was looking for that was similar to Nike’s photos and Dexter Navy. After developing this first batch of photos I thought they worked really well and provided another great pathway into my project. They completely contrast the energetic drawings that have emotion and passion towards football, with a more calm and trendy outlook to wearing a football shirt. I feel that I now have two big purposes of wearing a football shirt that I can now investigate and contrast with each other. Furthermore, some of the photos were double exposures and although unintentional, the gave really interesting effects and reminded me a lot of Julian Germain’s work. I really want to see where I could take them.

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Research: Photographing football shirts

12/03/19

Before I go out to take all these photos I thought it would be a good idea to look into how other people take photos of people wearing football shirts, but also just photographers I like in general, particularly film photographers. I instantly found myself looking at Dexter Navy a film photographer who takes pictures of people to almost work out their identity and who they are. I thought this could be really interesting because it was like an insight into that person and what their life is about and this could work really well with what I’m doing as I want my photos to have a narrative and discover why this certain individual is wearing their football shirt. I then looked on Nike Football’s website to see how they advertise their shirts and I loved it. They made football shirts out to be a completely fashion driven interest and all the photos were of these models wearing these modern day football shirts in an outfit that compliments them and it works so well. There was even a section explaining how to wear your football shirt and what to wear it with so that it looks good. I instantly thought this is what I want to do, take photos of people wearing football shirts in the style of a fashion shoot.