Beginning my project - Listening to the 'Warhorse' audiobook - 03/10/2022

Beginning my project - Listening to the 'Warhorse' audiobook

Daisy Jackson / 03/10/2022

To begin the project we were assigned today, we were tasked to choose a narrative from the list and listen to the audio book version of it. Out of all the narratives that I saw, I decided to choose 'Warhorse'.

Why did I choose this narrative?

I acknowledge that Matt did mention to not choose something you're familair with, however, I do not normally read books anyway so this is all new to me. I remember watching Warhorse years ago with my dad and it has been one of his favourite films since. I have also found horses extremely fascinating and unfortunately have not been able to explore this interest within my art projects. 

Instantly when I saw that Warhorse was an option, my mind started generating ideas. I have many associations that I can make with this narrative and can explore the concept in many fun and interesting ways. Either this is through prints (linocut etc), drawings or even models. 

Because we are able to sell whatever we produce, this brings me back to my foundation year when I focused a project on birthday cards. It would be fun to make something similar to this for this project as when creating these cards, they're so obscure it would be such a different form of art to make as I have not really seen many Warhorse themed cards.

Visual note taking:

Above is a picture of my visual note taking. I wanted to test myself once again and retain knowledge of the first chapter in different ways. I did this through word associations as well as imagery as this way I am less likely to forget the important elements in chapter one.

When listening to the audiobook, I associated what I was hearing with colour. The colours I thought of were black and red as black is a very hands on colour to association with pain while red fully represents this as 'Joey' the horse was suffering at the time. 

I also like the idea of including key quotes that I heard. These quotes include 'You're quite the fighter aren't ya?', 'Smartest horse in the world', 'Young boy looked at me', 'Wonderful and brave horse' and lastly 'Soothe my spirit'. I have never created art entirely with words so this would be a very interesting route to take. I could even do this through linocut or even digital. I could include imagery within these words as well. 

Rather than just imagery, I also wanted to focus on my techniques. Cross hatching can come across quite emotively and raw so I wanted to include this in my visual note taking. This can represent the pain and suffering Joey the horse was going through as well as the fear as cross hatching can represent how rough everything was. 

I really like how I drew the rope as I made this appear tight and coloured it red to represent the pain that Joey was going through at the time. When being auctioned, everyone was very rough with him and he was extremely scared as a result of this. The overlap of the cross hatching onto the illustration shows how this pain effected him. 

I also wanted to include an eye to represent emotion once again. This was a common theme in my last visual note taking exercise that I could see potential experimentation with. In my visual note taking, I decided to draw an eye that clearly showed a happy emotion which represents how Albert the young boy felt when he saw Joey the horse. This can communicate the story and the emotions felt when seeing each other for the first time.