Visual Development Work

Throughout this project I have felt pretty blind when it came to the direction my work was going in. I had a lot of different ideas for potential outcomes, so when I did finally narrow it down, I thought I had wasted a lot of time being indecisive. In retrospect however, I can see the direction of my work throughout my sketchbook has been centered around the visual signals we use to communicate gender.

My initial drawings were in response to some of the reading I was doing for the essay (Pretty in Punk by Lauraine Leblanc). I was interested in how punk girls challenged gender norms by adopting typically masculine attributes. I really like how these were rendered and I can see how it influenced the way I produced the final outcome.

In the next set of drawings I was investigating a similar concept, only this time I was trying to juxtapose typical masculinity with femininity. The small use of colour here lead me to consider how we associate colour with gender and as an extension of that, how shapes and patterns can communicate masculinity or femininity.

Taking into consideration the visual signals we look for to define a gender, I began drawing somewhat androgynous characters. As my target audience (children) has remained the same throughout, I drew child like characters so that the audience would have something they could relate to. As I moved onto exploring activities/toys typically associated with gender, the work really started to take shape. Extending the exploration of toys/activities that children are interested in, I decided to investigate how adults genders may or may not affect their jobs and roles within society.