I enjoyed the mood board project. I thought that it was really interesting to choose and learn about topics of interest across all of the timelines. I choose three topics that I was most interested in learning more about which were Playing cards, Albrecht Duer’s Apocalypse Illustrations, and Grimms Fairytales. I choose to do Print & Storytelling as the overarching topic for my project. I started my project with Albrecht Duer’s apocalypse as I was always interested in his illustrations of the four horsemen. I learned about the control the church had on the output of artists and the religious subject material for his work. I emphasized this point of religious control by including a photo of the Cologne church that is dark, menacing, and overbearing. I learned the most about playing cards from this exercise, I had no idea that the cards were different all over the world and weren’t standardized until France created suits that were made standard through mass printing. This is why I chose to include three images of different cards from different countries to showcase the different designs they each had, and the final suits that were the result of this standarization. Grimms Fairytales were initially popular in Germany but were made available to the masses through the use of the printing press. I choose to include Arthur Rackhams illustrations of Grimms fairytales as he placed high value on ornate books and illustrations which I thought linked with the demand for books and ornate objects during this time. I found that the three elements were all heavily linked to the introduction of the printing press and the demand for luxury artistic work.
I think that I would give myself an 8/10 as I think I had strong research and for the similarities that I had found between the different events. I also think I was able to link three events that don’t seem to go together in a way that was cohesive. I spend around 6 hours researching and developing this project.