Final Postcards (front):
Final Postcards (back):
I explored my five senses in the order of sight, smell, hear, taste and touch. Furthermore, behind each postcard I wrote a little note or sentence in the language in which I associate the memory with. For sight, I remember thinking to myself how cute it was that my dog stuck his head in the snow. For smell I associated the scent of my mother’s perfume with Turkish as it is the language in which we communicate with each other. Hearing felt like Japanese, as I remember my father buying the Japanese version of the Alvin and the Chipmunks OST. The taste of mint chewing gum and eggs is something that will always be stuck in my mouth as, every time I would be late for school, to get rid of the taste of eggs I would start chewing gum as my father would shout “You don’t have time to brush your teeth! Just chew gum!”. The memory with which I associate the feeling of touch is the dryness of my hands after removing latex gloves.
Every frame, I tried to have a perspective in which the viewer moves from the bottom left towards the top right. Furthermore, I wanted to emphasize the feeling of a person being there without showing them in the frame, as I usually see my memories from my own perspective such as looking at my dog, or removing gloves, leaving my earphones on the table…
The ideation process of my drawings:
Most of my final designs actually made it from my original ideas. I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to represent for each sense and how I wanted to visualize it. At the beginning, my dog was more centered, however, I came to realize that most of my drawings were following a similar direction and perspective; therefore, I decided to change my framing. My scent design was also going to incorporate the ribbon of my mother’s perfume bottle, however, it looked to crowded and did not add anything extra to the design. Furthermore, I also decided to change my sound design, as the drawing and the memory did not have a huge impact on me, thus, I changed the design to a memory that I was more fond of. Lastly, for the taste sense I just wanted the composition to be more dynamic and decided to make the egg drip as if it were just cracked onto the piece of gum.
Drafts and trying out different media:
Finally, as I was coming close to the final pieces, I experimented with different medium such as fine liners, colored pencils and watercolors. I was the most comfortable with water colors and decided to choose them as I found that the soft toned palette reflected the nostalgic and warm feeling of my memories. I found that the fine liner was too monotone and that the senses that I wanted to express would not be translated the way I wanted and that the colored pencils were too bright and did not give me a sense of completion.
I made a few changes such as removing the egg shells from the taste postcard, the sand pile from the touch one, the blue clouds from smell and completely changed sound.
I felt as if less was more and that emphasizing on the objects or scenes would accentuate the sense that is being portrayed in the memories.