Sticking with my theme of people, I decided to focus on the photos that I had taken over the summer of family and friends when we went on holiday to Spain. I fell in love with the beautiful blue colours in the photographs which also influenced my decision to stick with just the holiday photographs. In this work I decided to cut out different shapes in the water area and I wanted the shapes to represent the movement of the water. I feel that this piece is not entirely successful as it is very busy and not all of the shapes are noticeable (i.e. the swirl in the bottom right corner). I think that it would have been better if I had stuck to one type of shape instead of trying to combine different shapes as it doesn’t allow the composition to flow nicely.

I did a black and white photocopy of this piece to focus on tone so that I could compare the two. I feel as though the black and white version is not as successful as the coloured version. There is less depth in the composition and for me it looks tacky and seems to lose the extra detail you get from the coloured version. I love the different blue tones of the water in the coloured piece which I feel you really miss out on in the black and white piece and it also seems to lose its balance without the colour.

I decided to try again doing paper cutting but using my own drawing, as I had drawn the figure from the photography onto white paper I decided to cut the figure out and stick her onto black sugar paper so that there would be contrast between the figure and the background. I also thought that by doing this it would allow the shapes cut into the background to be more visible and it would make the composition more balanced with white shapes and the white main subject of the piece.

This is the finished version of the previous image. I cut out some wavy shape to try and represent the movement of the water however I changed the drawing from the photograph I drew it from by just focusing on the figure and not including anything else from the photograph. I did not feel that this piece worked well as I think it was too simplistic and I think that the lack of detail in the piece makes it hard to appreciate it. It definitely was not as successful as the first style I tried with my other charcoal drawing composition I think perhaps it was the black background and the negative space that stops it from working.

As the last drawing composition failed to work successfully I decided to try it again however this time I used Biro pen for the figure to try and get more detail into this piece as there was a lack of it in the last composition. I kept the white background in this piece of work to see if the style of paper-cutting would work better and decided to then stick it over black paper to make the cut out shapes stand out and contrast with the background. I also did less cut out shapes in the background to try and not make the piece to overwhelming and to try and prevent the focus moving from the figure in the piece to the black shapes seeping through the background. I sprayed hairspray over the Biro pen drawing and moved the paper around to try and create a water effect as she is in the water in the photograph. However once I had sprayed the hairspray over the piece and manipulated it around I realised that by doing this I had actually stripped away the detail from the figure and made her almost translucent which was not what I wanted as it meant that the figure now looked lost compared to the shapes and contrast in the background. As this didn’t work I decided to refine it and draw back over the figure to make the lines bolder so that the figure would stand out again.

This is the piece once I had refined it and as you can see the figure now stands out a lot more in comparison to the background which has improved it greatly from before. However I feel that the composition still doesn’t work, it could be the style in which I have cut out the shapes but I felt as though this style actually had worked really well when I did it on the photograph. I think again that it is the lack of detail in the background that prevents the piece from actually working much like the last composition I did with the charcoal drawing. When compared to the photograph pieces and my first drawing composition I noticed that there was detail on the majority of those pages with little blank space which I realised seems to make the paper-cutting more successful so I decided to stop for now with the drawing compositions and to focus more on the actual photographs.