The Great Grillust Bake-Off!

Semester 2 begins!

​With semester 1 having come and gone in the blink of an eye, so begins the second. In all honesty, I didn't expect it to begin with a live baking task - but it did, so here we are.

​At first I wasn't entirely sure what brownies had to do with illustration, but we were swiftly enlightened - as well as a fun and engaging start to the semester, the bake-off was an integral part of our first project! The first step was to document the baking process in a variety of different ways; this would later help us develop ideas to experiment with.
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How To Document A Disaster?

Anyone that knows me well will be aware that I am possibly the worst baker in existence. It doesn't seem to matter how closely I follow a recipe, it always goes wrong. Ironically, I'm pretty decent at cooking - but ask me for cake and you'll either get a puddle of underbaked sludge or a burnt black slab. There is no inbetween.

​My point is, the vibe of my project is naturally leaning towards the humorous side. As stated in the project brief, the final visual recipe has to be entirely pictographic - no words allowed. But before figuring out how to tackle that and in what format, I thought it would be useful to use this session to determine the feel I wanted to go for. I particularly enjoyed the more humorous infographics in Wednesday's powerpoint - though I intend to keep an open mind during development, I do like the idea of a comedic recipe as opposed to a serious one.
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photographic documentation of the baking process

​Taking photos gave me images to refer to later when creating visuals, and taking notes of the process documented my personal experience. To collate all this and play with ideas and humour, I made a quick copy of the recipe with altered steps - this gives me a basal idea of the kind of info I want to include, and what would translate well into visuals.
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video documentation of the baking process

Documenting it via video also helped me experiment, and develop a suitable "voice" for the recipe. All the clips were taken in live time during the Monday task, so they accurately represent the process. I can use these as reference for experiments and sketches.
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sketchbook documentation of the baking process

I also did some quick, rough doodles to document key and notable moments of the baking fiasco. Between sketches, photos and videos, I feel that documenting the process has helped spark some ideas for further development. The next step will be to refine my ideas, play with mediums, styles and formats, and figure out a definite direction I want to run in.

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lecture notes