So the previous posts have featured the hastily-done project "Observe to Preserve", which was based on an older project from back when I (Ben) was at college, and which was completed for the "Perception" open call at Cupola Gallery.
Today on the blog, a hastily-done project based on an older project back from when I (Ben) was at college, and which was also completed for the "Perception" open call at Cupola Gallery.
Dejavuuuuuuuuuu...
Anyway, when the "Observe to Preserve" stuff started going wrong when the weather turned, mixing up the shooting schedules, I had a cast around for something else which fit in with a definition of the term 'Perception' to use as the backup project, and decided to do something with this older body of work, "Happygoth"...
So quick background. Happygoth was a character I started drawing in about 2003, when locally in the West Mids goths were getting a bit of bad press. People who wore black and who tended to hang around in an orderly group in a part of Wolverhampton city centre doing not very much at all were getting the hell beaten out of them by sports-clothes-clad thugs... and comment pages in the local paper were full of people who thought the harmless goths were the menace rather than the sports-clothes-clad thugs who were beating them up, because the goths wore black and listened to music with guitars. Take that, society...
So anyway, I started drawing an overly smiley goth girl as a character in the proto-webcomic I worked on at the time, someone who tried to reassure Society by being perpetually cheerful. When I was at Carlisle, a project on fashion photography gave the perfect opportunity to satirise the cynical rebranding of subcultures to make them more mainstream (which was happening a lot at the time with some of the big high street clothing chains) and so Happygoth made the leap from sketches to a photoshoot. The only surviving picture I can find from the studio shoot is that one of the photo shopped billboard at Citadel station, above the design sketches from the shoot...
Towards the end of Uni I did the long-planned-for outdoor shoot with a new model, mainly to create some new images to use as posters in the planned expansion of the Model Village project. Yet another shoot, with another model, took place not long after moving back to the West Mids so I could get some more images to use for a further expansion of the project, meanwhile Happygoth made the leap to the webcomic as a recurring main character back when it was a thing.
After the webcomic bit the dust, the project became dormant. Until recently...
Wanting to do something with the project, but realising those of us involved with the shoot were getting a bit old to be mucking around dressing up in stormcoats in the woods as we crashed into our early 30's, I ended up reviving the project in a limited way as a possible commission for some T Shirt designs, back in late 2015. That commission came to nought as I moved onto something else, and frankly this redesign of Happygoth was straying stylistically into 'Tracey Beaker' territory (shudder) so I took the original quick sketches, and developed them into something a little more geometric and stylised just as a project for myself...
Above, one of the finished concept pics, with new hair colour, more geometric head and body, and a somewhat over-cluttered scene.
For the Perception call, I took those original pics, de-cluttered the backgrounds, and made the design if anything more geometric for this open call. Poses and scenarios were based very much on what we'd done with the final Happygoth shoot. This time there was no hand-drawing, everything was done straight into editing software.
For the purposes of the open call, I 6 new designs, a few of which are shown here.
Displaying them on the wall rather than a T Shirt meant coming up with a better way of showing them off than just flat prints, so I thought I'd try a multi-layered pic, so went for a hybrid of the newer character design with the older backgrounds.
The quick test pic above- all a bit rough, as the small frame was all I had to hand, and my printer wouldn't quite print to the right size, but at least it showed the concept I was after.
So anyway, after all that the gallery also didn't like this idea, which I don't blame them for because it really was a backup idea thrown together at the last minute, and it didn't really fit in with their open call.
But looking at the bright side, coming soon, Happygoth T shirts with a bit of luck...
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