Create a spider diagram for each of these words:

Seaside

Childhood

Angry

Festival

Try to remember your own experiences of these things even if you have only experienced them through TV, film or photos. Include a list of objects you associate with each word:
list colours, use adjectives, textures, and subjects. If you get stuck use a dictionary or thesaurus to open up your word. If you do a Google images search you will find a vast collection of other people’s visual interpretations of the words. Take a note of anything that surprised you, or anything that was an unexpected addition to the list.
Test your spider diagram with at least one other person – use a different colour for each person you interrogate and tick words that were common and include any additional words. If the ‘joint’ brainstorm leads you to generate further words, add these as a separate colour.

In your learning log make a note of:

Which word was most difficult for you to work with

The strategies that suited you best to come up with more words.

OCA Key Steps in Illustration

Since I started this course my use of spider diagrams (mind maps) have gone up by a significant amount. I think what makes them super useful is the fact that you can trace back where a certain thought came from and go back to its roots to explore further thoughts that might stem from that initial idea.

In this exercise I needed to look at 4 words as the basis of 4 different mind maps.

Seaside

I found this one pretty easy. I think the reason for this is the fact that the experience of being at the seaside is very exciting and tactile. There is so much to experience and so many memories to be made that it is really hard to stop once the ideas start flowing.

I set down with my partner to see if there was anything else to add.

I think this was quite easy because the seaside is such an inspiring place. This is probably why there are many-many pieces of art that was directly inspired by the seaside. It is an easy topic.

Childhood

Childhood was another topic that is pretty easy to talk about and come up with various thoughts regarding. I think again since its a happy “place” it is very easy to associate it with many other things. Childhood is a big part of what makes a person who they are so gathering thoughts around this may vary person to person, but the major parts of it remain the same.

I think the fact that there are so many additions just shows how different everyone’s childhood is and what is important to each person. I think still this diagram was relatively easy to create.

Angry

This was one of the harder ones to do in my opinion. Anger is pretty abstract and hard to describe. I was thinking along the lines of what the person who is angry looks like, what colours come to mind etc, but I have ran out of things very very quickly. I think this is because anger is quite personal and it is different person to person. What makes me angry possibly doesn’t make anybody else angry…

This was really difficult. I think this may also have to do with the fact that we as human beings don’t like to be angry or upset so we don’t associate many memories with this emotion. It would be interesting to see what happens if a similarly complex emotion like “happy” was explored in a similar way, would it return more results? I somehow think it would.

Festival

This was another much-much easier topic. I think it is becasue again, it is quite a stimulating setting that can inspire many ideas at once, and also has so many elements that comes to mind that it is hard to stop once the ideas have started flowing.

After the brainstorming a lit of new things have been added to the list and a lot of my initial ideas have been confirmed. This was nice and easy in my opinion.

Conclusion

I think the hardest word by far was angry. It is really difficult to come up with ideas about an emotion in general I think, when we think of angry it can be so many things but somehow it doesn’t inspire many thoughts beyond an angry face or some colours that I associate with the feeling, hence I think this was the most difficult.

In terms of techniques, I found involving another person very interesting and useful. Their ideas have sparked more of my own and vice-versa. I think brainstorming is a wonderful tool when it comes to idea generation because you inherit some of the wealth of knowledge the other people around you have and you can build upon that. Looking at depioctions of the words online was also quite useful, for example when I was looking to generate ideas around the word angry, I would have ran out of ideas much-much earlier if it wasn’t for some google searches.