Tuesday 15th March 2011:

I began to create a questionnaire about bullying to give out to students. I looked at a few other existing similar questionnaires to see what sort of questions have been asked and used these if I found them relevant. Hopefully I can give these out next week and evaluate the results.

I then completed the page which I started yesterday looking at the artist, Clay Sinclair. I think it has turned out well. I especially like the gold as it helps it to stand out. I had intended to outline the letters in black but then the ink ran out and I had a gold pen so used this for the meantime. I thought this worked well and used more of it (ie: behind ‘don’t bully me’). I want to include typography in my final pieces, but maybe have more interesting letterforms than the ones I have used here.

I then found a few stories on the Internet from victims of bullying and picked out the key words/ points in their stories (eg: sad, lonely, picked on, easy target). I used red to highlight these words/ points on black/ white. I feel that these three colours represent bullying well as black and white are quite simple, blend in and sometimes hard to see, but there are always things which stand out (ie: the colour red).

I then used this when looking at the artist Claire Brewster further. In her work, she uses things such as maps and then cuts out, for example, birds. I used these typed up stories and key words and cut them into the shape of someone holding their hands to their face. At first it looks like a scared victim hiding their face behind their hands, but then you can see that the hand on the left is in the ‘stop’ position, which could be saying ‘stop bullying’. I could take this further and make this particular hand and position stand out more in order to convey the message in a stronger way. I think it would be useful to do a few more pages similar to this as I think they would be quite effective and could even work well as part of the final pieces.

Target for today: Begin to produce questionnaire (to give out to students). Complete sketchbook page (looking at Clay Sinclair), and continue with sketchbook work relating to bullying situations and emotions (looking at Claire Brewster).

Target for tomorrow: Begin reading Chapter 11 in ‘Bullying’ book – ‘Helping Victims’.