Sarah Hanson

Sarah Hanson is an illustrator who uses mixed media to create innovative pieces of work which represent her travels around the globe. Hanson’s work uses a mixture of built up surfaces, collage, printing and computer editing. These examples of her work clearly show how she uses such collaging skills to create interesting and abstract work. The combination of such media gives the work a messy and unfinished feel which could suggest something about the way she views the world and places in which she has travelled. I find her work incredibly intriguing and visually pleasing as the collection of media and bright colours create interest within the work as well as telling the story of that place.

In response to Hanson’s work, I printed a mixture of different images onto a layered background. In order to create these responses I:

1.      Built up surfaces with brown paper, masking tape, paint and card.

2.      Using a photocopier I scanned and printed onto a layered background using images of places I’ve been and maps of locations.

3.      After repeating the printing aspect, the end result was a layered response of different images printed onto a layered background.

 This although giving an interesting affects, I did not like the end result as I thought it looked dull, boring, the colours were not vibrant. However from these responses and through the steps in created the images, I learnt that printing images in this way did not give an interesting affect.

From the experiences of my first responses I completed pieces like the ones above in the same way but using Photoshop instead of the printer. Therefore this gave me much more control over the opacity of the layers and how the layering was organised.

This affect although interesting, vibrant and even managing to tell the story of the journey, I found appeared to be too computerised and fake, giving a negative feel to the work. So in my opinion I found both of these two approaches didn’t portray my journeys as exciting as they actually where.

From my experiences of the first approaches into creating Hanson responses, I combined the two approaches and simplified the amount of layers and pictures used in the image. The steps used in this piece are:

1.      Build surfaces using papers, masking tape, maps and paint.

2.      This surface is then scanned in.

3.      Through Photoshop pictures are layered and the final image edited trying to keep the work simple but effective.

This process although similar to my second approach, attempts to successfully combine the skills acquired through completing both early responses. This work shows places visited whilst on certain journeys and memorable buildings or people viewed whilst in that place. The messy feel of some work contrasts with some of the more simplistic organized work referencing to the place it represents and the experiences whilst on that journey.