Blog post 3- Reflections on how the Better Lives themes have influenced your project outcomes and your personal development.
For my project I have developed a character that is based around the Better Lives theme of diversity in terms of the gender divide and how the rights of women have improved, my character I developed a character that essentially represents the struggle of women and how they fought to get to the position they are in today. There is one parallel between my degree subject of fashion journalism and the makeup and prosthetics industry I have been studying within, and that is that when given the opportunity to do a piece that is based around any controversial area I tend to always do something around feminism and women’s rights as that seems to be an area I like to focus
on.
In terms of a Better Lives theme that caught my intention and essentially sparked my imagination for this project, the one that seemed to do this for me was diversity, as it provides such a wide scope to work with and provides lots of paths for me to go down in terms of the chosen discipline I went with for the Better Lives project, for example I could’ve gone with subjects such as ethnicity and class equality as well as gender. I chose to go down the gender route. With my project I decided to gain inspiration from the ideas presented by the walking dead, for example I made my character almost zombie like, I done this to show how hard women have fought for their equality and rights over the decades, for example how the suffragettes were the first to spark any ideas of improving the standard for women for women at the time and how they sparked the whole concept of gender inequality. Due to the unforeseen circumstances that arose during Better Lives unit I was unable to produce my character using any real prosthetics as we were not able to access the prosthetics that we would’ve been able to if Covid-19 had not evolved. For my final project I produced a slide for the presentation that took place showing images I would take ideas from to produce my character showing the struggles that women have endured from fighting inequality, I would have used my gelatine prosthetics that we was taught how to apply in our workshops with Steven to essentially create a bloody and gouged out eye on one side of the characters face and also would use the techniques taught such as bruising, ageing and contouring to create idea that women have essentially fought for their lives.