After the tutorial, I worked on the project question. There are two areas that I want to focus on, which are awareness and creative process. It’s about the effort and thought behind creative works that encourage consumers to appreciate the process and narrative behind them.
I came up with two questions…
- How can creative works raise consumer awareness of the effort and narrative behind artists’s creations?
- How can creative works shift consumer perceptions from following trends to valuing the process?
I think the second question is better and perfect for what I am focusing on, so I will continue with this question.
How can creative works shift consumer perceptions from following trends to valuing the process?
Next, I will focus on the next intervention idea of creating my art toys.
I desire to create work that reflects a commitment to sustainability. To explore a possible collaboration, I reached out to Brothers Make, a company that specializes in creating products from recycled plastic.
For the intervention, I have the idea of creating my own art toys and post on social media.
Intervention idea
- Compare how people respond to my art toys and illustrations
- Measure whether consumers appreciate the artistic effort or if they still lean toward trends
Plan
- Create art toys and illustrations in my style and character design from Song.Soong.Sooong
- Record every step while working on art toys and illustration
- Display and engagement on Instagram
- Post images and videos of the works and share the story, the process, and the message I aim to convey through creative works.
- Use a caption that will invite followers to engage
- Track the engagement on each post to see which piece resonates more and why
- Run a poll on Instagram Story to ask specific questions
To create art toys, I need to have a theme because It will help me focus on what design I have to design. I came up with many ideas, such as weather, imagination, festivals, daily life, and feelings. But I think those are too simple for my first art toys collection. Then, I went through the research that I did during this project, and I found that people who buy art toys have a nostalgic feeling that reminds them of their childhood. From that, I immediately knew that I needed to create a theme of ‘Reimagine childhood’, which is about the idea of taking elements from childhood, wonder and playfulness that bring into adulthood. I have sketched the design of art toys, as shown below.
The design of this theme represents the moment that adults do childish things in their lives, such as a businessman who has a lot of cute keychains on his working bag, etc. I want to design art toys to have a meaning that people can easily understand and touch their hearts.
I am so excited about this intervention. So, this weekend, I am working on practising how to create an art toy using resin because I think it is the easiest way to start making art toys (I have another idea to make, but it will take more time and more equipment, so I will go with resin first).
I start by using clay to create the shape of my character design. When the clay is dry, I pour silicone onto it to make a mould. When the mould is dry, I pour resin as the last step and then wait for it to dry. All the processes take around 10-12 hours.
There were some problems and defects during the process, but it turned out better than I thought. I think this is a good sign to start making my own art toys!