Story is king, but research comes pretttttty close.

Exactly that.

Research and theoretical things have been such a big part of my life since i was young that I find I cannot do without them these days.
People may feel that it's a heavy reliance on external sources,
or that it would influence your way of thinking and hence limit your own creativity,
but i beg to differ.

Though i do agree that those points above make sense,
my being tells me that I can only gain some confidence in my work if i know everything about it - every nook and cranny, from surface to underlying meaning, the reasons to all the whys.

So what is it about research that makes me feel it's important?
First, I read about the different elements that I have brainstormed in my conceptualizing stage.
Then strike out those that I feel do not lead me to what i want to depict in my work.
Then comes the photographs and other artworks as references.
I do not think that having references is a form of copying because, from viewing all these you can make out what is good and bad in a piece, how it can help you enhance your own design, how things work and move, build up your visual library, and eventually it will lead you to form an original idea. After all, knowledge always comes from somewhere.
(But fuck no, please don't copy and paste others' works :I )

The bad side of this is, that i usually do so much research into a certain subject that besides taking up a lot of time and brainpower, it also leads me to having too many ideas. With not much self control, i tend to try to mash up all these ideas into 1 piece, which leads the final work to looking too cluttered, or having too many details that may not match well.

HRRRRM, such a dilemma.

I've also been told by others (namely, NG and Jiunn) and myself that I go overboard with all the theory, but i've been unable to change that much. Since that is so, I feel that i can only embrace it and make it work for myself.
However!
What i can do to make things better is to step up on the practical at the same time!
TEE HEE, in progress.

But of course, I'm not saying that research is one and all.
It is just a stepping stone to better looking work, you will still need a lot of practice, originality, creativity, skill, determination, design principles, time, story and so on, so forth.

Okay, toodles!
Just felt like reminding myself why I 'wasted' 2 days on researching for assignment 2. LOL.