I found this exercise an interesting challenge and ultimately a rewarding outcome. Initially, I found the limitations set in the exercise of creating a narrative using the paintings made in the previous exercises problematic. I could imagine a whole range of different scenarios regarding the ‘Man with a guitar’ painting but none that I found grabbed my interest.

Rejecting this train of thought I turned to the prop that I had constructed for Exercise 1 and the subsequent paintings that I had made.

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I considered whether I could incorporate any of these paintings into a narrative but this seemed limiting. A better option would be to try to construct a new narrative involving the T-shirt and the Lab coat. The Lab coat would soon become a proper coat as I tried to imagine how they two garments could have come together. A storyboard narrative seemed to be the best way of articulating this and the days of the week seemed to be a good way of forcing the story into a chronological narrative. I put my ideas down in a sketched storyboard.

There was nothing subtle about the story and the narrative was obvious but I enjoyed its playful aspect. It would also be interesting to paint the different scenes. There would be certain constraints in that the same scene is observed on consecutive days and therefore there would be the need for consistency in the way the paintings were constructed. I created a further set of sketches.

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The project was certainly coming together. However I thought that the story needed a conclusion on the Sunday. I made a final sketch.

At this point I set about working on the paintings. Each painting would be in landscape orientation painting on 21×29.7cm acrylic paper using acrylic paints. The paper would be primed with Gesso. Securing the individual sheets to a large board I worked on the Monday to Saturday at the same time. Concentrating on Monday to Thursday to start with and then Friday and Saturday. Lastly I worked on Sunday and the cover. When complete the separate sheets would be joined together to create the complete storyboard and also to enable them to be stored together as one.

The whole process was a joy to work on. There was a discipline required in trying to keep the consistency in the paintings. I had adopted a flat comic book come pop art style which helped in maintaining the conformity. Using colour more or less straight from the tube with very little mixing helped. Additionally the use of words and dialogue with the addition of symbols assists in the telling of the tale and makes the narrative obvious.

Each of the paintings is shown individually in chronological order below followed by the complete storyboard.

Conclusion and final thoughts. I’m tempted to make a short video with perhaps some music or dialogue however I have resisted this as I don’t feel it will add to the project. The aspects of creating as series of paintings on a theme is something that I have embraced before particularly in my Assignment 5 paintings for Painting 1. It will be my aim to produce a series of paintings on a theme for Assessment. I very much doubt that they will have such an obvious narrative but will be linked.

• Part 3 - Prop, performance, stage