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Project title：The greedy dopamine （sweet addiction）

Target Group：Children or some group of people who share my experience of sweet addiction.

Final outcome：

1. A series of sand art illustrations

2. An A6-sized 12-page booklet

Dopamine is the key to human pleasure and allows people to live a life of pleasure, but when people want to overdose on dopamine this can lead to addiction. There are many aspects of addiction such as gaming, overeating, alcohol, etc. These forms of entertainment can be very enriching but when they are overused they can have negative effects. From my own point of view, when I feel anxious or unhappy, I start to eat all kinds of sweets, the rapid rise and fall of blood sugar brings me great pleasure but at the same time accompanied by fat and tooth decay. So I want to use this project to tell people not to abuse dopamine to seek it.

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For this check point I brought my selected sand art and zine designs. I was apprehensive at first because I was afraid that no one would like my theme and style, but when I got back to my seat I realised that I had received a lot of messages from my classmates, and I read each and every one of them very carefully. Many students said they wanted to buy and get my sand art work, which surprised me and made me happy that my work could be liked by my classmates. This gave me great encouragement as I reached a plateau that caused me to not be able to come up with more good ideas and thoughts. The encouragement and advice from my classmates gave me great confidence to work hard in the last month to revise and submit my final outcome.

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My peers not only liked my sand art work but also my choice of theme, which made me feel that my efforts during this period were not in vain, at the same time I talked with my teacher, who felt that the story line of my zine design was not complete enough, she suggested that I discuss more with my classmates and friends and let them give me some suggestions, because there was no good connection between page 4-5 and after, and the location of the girl was not indicated. ‘s position is not indicated, this is something I need to focus on thinking about, as there is still a month left for final adjustments, so I will be redrawing a storyboard as well as combing the story line to improve the completeness of the story, this is the part I need to focus on revising at the moment. At the same time, the students in the afternoon group have a very personal style, some hand-painted works made me feel amazed, I seem to see the future designers around me, some hand-made objects attracted my attention, these works are extremely beautiful, there are a lot of things worth learning, such as some of the colour combinations and material splicing is very creative, I like everyone's work.

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In this check point, I met a student from Hong Kong. At first, I didn't tell her my theme and let her make a guess, which was generally correct but still a bit off-topic. When I explained the theme to her, it dawned on her that she understood it, and she gave me a suggestion that I should put a layer of bag on my sand painting to protect the sand on the surface, because long time touching will cause the sand on the surface to fall off and ruin the picture. start to fall off and ruin the picture, and she also liked my painting. I began to reflect on how to make my work more accessible to the viewer and whether or not I should continue to use this material was something I needed to think about. Because sand painting is really time consuming and I can't afford to make a mistake or I would need to make a new one. I hope to be able to face my mistakes bravely in the next stage and then keep improving the quality of my sand painting is my current goal.

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I am satisfied with the output of this stage because I tried many different ways to express myself this time including finding my favourite way to present the illustration at the end. I used to like to draw things on paper, but this time I am completely in love with the printing studio, and experimenting with different materials helps me to open up my mind instead of being confined to the theme. These sand drawings are the main works that I brought to the check point to share with my classmates, in which I made some attempts to not connect the story, so I want to create more illustrations in the later stage to attract the audience's attention.

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Mary Herbert is a London-based artist who is good at using soft pastel to depict the subconscious mind, and seeks a balance between reality and dreams, with dreams, memories and streams of consciousness recurring in her works.Mary Herbert's works give me a vague and subtle feeling, which may be felt differently by everyone, but it can give a sense of the inner depths of the mind. But it can bring a sense of peace and warmth to the heart, even though everything is so unreal. I like this kind of vague feeling, so I want to try to draw some illustrations with this kind of feeling. Because I try to decipher what humans feel at the different stages of addiction so what I may be deciphering this time is the feeling of emptiness after getting satisfied, which is what people feel when the body's blood sugar drops rapidly, and I'd like to visualise that emptiness.

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By analysing this with my classmates and teacher, I felt it was necessary to reorganise the story line, and I liked the idea of writing down some ideas and drawing some sketches to help me clear my mind. At first I was thinking of doing a zine but a normal zine can only accept 8 pages of illustrations, this idea confined me so I started to increase the number of pages of illustrations and a booklet was possible. So I started to add the story line as well as the teacher suggested me to add the main character to the picture, which inspired me a little bit, so that the audience can have a clearer idea of where the girl is in the world and how she interacts with the world. So I started to implement these as well as some of my classmates suggested that I could also make it better for the audience by adding text as well. These suggestions were noted down for my reference. So I started to think about using some similar patterns flat for the cover, and since some of the ideas came from testing, I would start to present my strange ideas as paintings. I'm planning on 12 pages as a base, and if there aren't enough pages you can stack them in multiples of 2.

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I started out with a plan to do a booklet incorporating sand drawings, but the main material was more specific and I wasn't able to do a good blend, so I planned to do it in two ways that would become my Final Outcome. A series of sand drawings and a zine that told a story. so I started to write the story line as  I plan to develop a short story with the girl as the main character to echo my theme. Since my audience is geared towards children, I planned my style to be less evil and dark, and more of a metaphorical approach to storytelling.

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I took the advice given to me by my teacher and set the girl in this weird candy world full of teeth as buildings so that the viewer would know where the girl was at the same time adding richness to the picture. Above is my draft, I started to think about how to make the image fuller, and on the left side is the process I did to articulate how the girl fell into the weird world. I designed the girl to be trapped in a labyrinth looking for an exit, but the exit she finds is not a doorway back to the real world, but a passageway to the weird world. But the labyrinth on the left has a perspective problem as well as an angle problem, it's just a rough draft I'll redraw a labyrinth at a later stage. But I didn't want to add fonts to the illustrations because I didn't want to make it clear what I was trying to say, I wanted the viewer to understand what I was able to say through my illustrations.

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I purchased a whole starter set of wool felting tools and I started to make something to correspond to my theme, first I thought of sweets so I started by first pinning out the long strip in the middle of the sweets, to be honest this step alone took most of my time as wool is always fluffy so if I wanted to make it into a shape and hold it in place I needed to pin the wool together. As I got better at it I got faster, so I made some more candies, and in the meantime I made two cavities. But as I got better at it I was going faster and faster which made it easy to get my hands stuck even though I was wearing gloves, so I had to slow down a bit to make sure I was safe as the needles were very sharp and could easily get stuck in my hands.

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I followed it up with a wool felt about desire, this time with a design about apples and eyes as the main elements. In Christianity the apple represents desire and the serpent represents the devil tempting Adam and Eve to eat the apple, so I used the apple as the base and then converted the apple core into an eye instead, because addictive desires are evil rather than desires when competing normally so I'll be doing it a little more on the evil side. But the main problem is that it's time consuming and not very big. I wanted to make a painting with wool felt for a while, but with the limited space and materials and the time consuming nature of it, I couldn't put all my energy into it, but experimenting with it as a material still gave me a lot of ideas and inspiration.

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I found a wool felting introductory video on Youtube, in which the author tells the basic use of the tool and how to poke the wool into a ball, in which the different thicknesses of the needles for poking the wool are used for different purposes, the thin needles are for adjusting the details while the thick needles are more suitable for poking a specific shape, which doesn't look very difficult but seems to be very time-consuming, so I bought a small set of the material intending to make an attempt. I'm looking forward to being able to make my own graphic designs in felted wool. I will begin the wool felting exercise by designing a simple graphic.

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Maria is a fashion designer turned felting artist, these are some of her paintings made with wool felt, I was attracted by the soft and strong images, I was curious how she combined these soft wools into a painting, so I took a closer look at some of her felted wool paintings, in which she was different from other artists in that the borders of the images were blurred, and the work needed to be placed in a far away place to be able to be seen. Her paintings have a dreamy, soft and unreal feel to them, so I wanted to try to make something with this method. In my mind, wool felt is not as easy as painting a picture, so I want to try this way, this material is new to me so I need to buy the material and learn how to use it easily.

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This book is about how dopamine affects people's moods,behavior,and habits. Dopamine fives pleasure,and the brain releases large ammounts of dopamine when people do something enjoynable. people feel good and seek more of the feeling. So I want to continue thinking about the theme of my major project from dopamine as a keyword. Because a lot of people don't really understand what dopamine is, I'm hoping to use this topic to make people realise why they are addicted.

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I started to think about using different materials to develop my work and I found that there is a type of candy that has a granulated sugar attached to the surface, I like to eat this type of candy because usually the granulated sugar on the outside of this type of candy is acidic to balance out the sweetness of the candy. I initially wanted to paint with sweets but a lot of the sweets were very large which resulted in very little detail that I was able to create, so I thought it would be feasible to paint with coloured white sugar. However, for various reasons, this idea was difficult to realise as it can easily melt due to weather or improper storage. In the end, I thought of a material that could be used instead of sugar and would not melt easily, and that was sand. Sand is finer than sugar so it is more feasible, and I started searching for the material on the internet.

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I made a mood board mainly based on extracting weird scenes, so I looked for some photos of paradise and some bright colours to give me inspiration. From these I extracted some main keywords that I could later apply to the picture making. Mazes, escape exits, overlapping staircases, checkerboard floors. I felt that these elements could be added to my illustration to suggest that I was making a weird world of candy teeth. My classmates suggested that I could try to use black areas sparingly as it might be more relevant to the word ‘dopamine’, as people always think of bright colours when they think of dopamine.

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I went through my chosen keywords, desire and dessert for the moodboard, I searched for some images of my interpretation of these two words to use as inspiration, I think that human desires are sometimes uncontrollable, and when people's desires flare up it's extremely contradictory, and there's a feeling of wanting to be in control of yourself in the midst of being out of control, so I think that this part was hard to define. At the same time I looked for paintings and realistic photographs of desserts, the colours just looked very vibrant and fitting to the theme of dopamine, there was a sense of fantasy as well as impracticality, and these inspired me to start thinking about different tools to develop this project. For example, some tools that look hard but are actually soft, felt art.

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Julia Soboleva is an artist I have long admired as a mixed media artist, her process involves painting and collaging over found photographic images, the work meditates on themes of madness and reality as well as constructing something mysterious with unsettling overtones and absurd humour, which is a style I love. In Julia's world, bird-headed creatures roam menacingly around and ghostly figures perform strange rituals in images that are both disturbing and impossible to look away from. I have always tried to interpret Julia's paintings before I read the blurb, I try to understand them from my own point of view, these images may make me think of depression or some special people living amongst us, but very few of us will ever find out about them. I intend to make a collage of her paintings with my own photographs of El's work.

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Marcel Duchamp is a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer. Toussaint believed that an object should be created in its own stylistic character, not as a ‘picture’ of another object. Upon closer inspection, the nude woman descending the stairs is made up of a pile of geometrically shaped pieces of broken wood that fill most of the space of the picture, to represent the succession of geometries of the head, arms, pelvis, and legs, as he extracts a number of frames to create a tense sense of movement. In this work, he uses abstract lines and shapes to combine the images and further reacts to the movements, complexes and columns of the subject's nude female body walking down the stairs through the image. I really like this feeling of urgency and I think this can be applied to desire, similar to a drug addict who starts to become delirious when prompted by jealousy and desire this is the feeling I wanted, so I also wanted to create this feeling by altering the images to reorganise them.