One Week Book: Exploring the Merrion Centre

Our task for Studio Brief 1 is to create a two colour hotdog book in groups of six on a given theme to do with a place in Leeds. My groups theme is The Merrion Centre, which is a bit of a run down, tacky shopping mall where one tends to find an array drug addicts  obese people, and of course, bargain shops.

Whilst carrying out research, we had to do the following:

• Record a conversation
• Pick something up and put it in your pocket
• Take photos of things
• Draw architecture space
• Draw objects/people
• Find a piece of factual information 

Unfortunately we were restricted in the majority of these areas as we were not allowed to take photos/draw the shops because the centre 'didn't own them' which was a shame. It was certainly interesting to take in information by people watching and listening in to their conversations!

I did some quick sketches (of what I was allowed to do) around and outside the centre.

Towards the end my drawings turned towards the more biased and sarcastic side, playing on the ironic fact that we were not allowed to draw in the Merrion Centre.

As a group, we decided that our colour scheme would consist of, red and white in correspondence to the logo of the centre, with the addition of black to add strong definition. We presented our days experience and ideas for the book with the rest of our class, and decided that we might make a 'welcome brochure' advertising everything bad that we figured out about the Merrion Centre today.

Here is a summary of or day! Using these ideas we will be able to come up with some effective imagery to collaborate into an 8 page book.