It all started to make sense as the design layout of this book took shape. All the anxieties about what order the images should go in soon dissipated. There was no need to provide an order.
The moments captured during a period of some seven years had their own narrative as single captures. Mixed into a more global pot, they provided a wider narrative which, by themselves, flowed seamlessly, providing a semblance of Gibraltar’s unique identity.
Years of work, years in which the images had been stored quite literally among tens of thousands of other images on my online galleries and seemingly had no real movement, suddenly started to take shape.
Originally captured as part of an overall project which I hoped one day to showcase, it was always the final finish which had been missing.
It’s been a while since I last posted on the blog, but it’s been a busy few days.
So what has the past few weeks brought that is different?
Well, one thing I learnt many years back was that once in a while, like every business, you should take stock. What does this really mean in the arts? Especially when you’re not really running a business, just doing your art and trying to put it out there.
Well, for me it’s about assessing what you are doing, looking at the ideas you have been following, gauging what is working, and in many cases kicking yourself and going back to ideas you might have had for a while but never actually done anything about.
And that really is what I have been doing over the past couple of months, with this week being a big push in completing two ideas where most of the work had already been done, but I just never put it together.
The first one was a simple one. Well, simple in my book, which is the book of someone who spends even those moments sitting down in front of the TV with an iPad or laptop open and tapping away.
I really don’t know how to stop, and then I wonder why I am tired. Probably because I don’t know how to stop.
Anyway, the first one was to put together my Space Adventure Colouring Book. Always meant to be different, this was about getting detailed line designs together which provide a complex colouring experience. They are the type of designs which make you think a bit. Not big blocks like you find in many colouring books, but loads of tiny spaces to fill in, where there are often blurred lines between what’s what and your own interpretation of what is in the picture.
The objective of the colouring book pages is to provide not just the fun of colouring in, but also the opportunity to think and create at the same time.
To get it together was a labourious task. And yes, I’m not going to sit here and say I drew the thirty-plus designs one by one. I could have, but that was never the purpose of the project.
This was essentially supposed to have been a quick project, easy to do and put together, something else for the marketplace and another way to keep momentum growing with my Amazon publications.
However, it took longer than I had envisaged, mainly because I stalled. Instead of drawing each one this time, I created images through Firefly’s AI generation tools and started working digitally, taking the images from coloured or realistic artwork through a process of converting them into line drawings using Photoshop and Illustrator until I reached the final image I wanted.
It would have been so much easier to simply prompt AI to create the line drawings specifically for the concepts I wanted, but it felt too false to do that. So my own input had to be as significant as possible.
So what should, in theory, have been a couple of days of work in my spare time has quite literally taken me over six months to complete.
As a publication it looks awesome, and I am looking forward to colouring the pages in myself. Although that will have to wait because, knowing me, I’ll probably take another six months bringing the images back to life with colour.
This publication was launched on Amazon last week and is now available, so feel free to check it out.
Then came the second big project to complete. Now this one has taken me a whole lot longer and, believe me, it is the total opposite in terms of how it has been produced.
Zero AI. Years of work. Years of developing the concept and then finally one day it all clicks together and I have my first major 200-plus-page book, which hopefully I will have in my hands soon.
I am just awaiting Amazon approval now.
My Streets is a personal project which started to materialise in my head back in 2015 after my solo photographic exhibition — the one and only solo exhibition I have done up to now.
After that exhibition I always felt there was something missing. Having just sixteen images showcased from the many years of work I had put into creating the collection felt… I don’t know… it felt wrong. Not enough.
That’s when I came up with the concept that I needed to put it down as a publication. With more images, and at a price which made it accessible to everyone.
My Streets is about Gibraltar’s identity. Day-to-day living in Gibraltar and how I saw it.
It was a period when my art had followed a path that led me to focus much of my time on photography. Mainly because I had little confidence in my artwork at the time, and the camera became my chosen tool.
Because I was in the media, I had the opportunity to go around observing. Most of what I saw would never end up in any publication. So I was shooting for myself just as much as I was for my profession.
It was a time when I had my eyes open and could truly see. Things changed after a while because life changes.
However, the project concept never changed. I didn’t want to just store the images. I wanted to create a publication from them. A meaningful publication.
But years of pondering and shelving things meant that the project was now eleven years on and still nothing had been done.
That was until just two weeks ago when I was assessing my photographic work and suddenly had this clear vision. You know that moment when things click. The moment when you stop disliking your work and actually consider what you are going to do to make it work for you rather than simply sit idle in what has become virtual storage space.
So the idea was reignited.
I didn’t need to re-shoot or process images. I just needed a quiet moment to sit in front of my computer and select images. From that selection I would then whittle things down further until I had the first hundred images I wanted to use.
Of course, you never end up with exactly one hundred final images, but that was okay because I wanted a substantial publication.
The images were never meant to stand alone among thousands of others. They had simply become part of the clutter which so often detracts from the real story.
As a collection they worked as one unified narrative.
Indeed, these were selected images based on my own editorial interpretation of what I wanted to showcase. The reality was that my editorial interpretation was almost as meaningless as the actual selection itself. It could have been any other thousand images I had chosen and the narrative would have remained very much the same. Perhaps with a slight deviation in its pathway, but ultimately the same.
In the end, the captures had always been about capturing the essence of daily life in Gibraltar. The moments which make up our everyday existence.
The gestures, the politics, the culture, the social aspects of our society. Moments we see every day but tend to pass by.
Even during moments when our attention is focused on what is happening, there are those brief instances — a gesture, an expression, a body movement, a stare, a leap, a wave of the arm — which, when captured, tell more of a story than a moment that has been purposely orchestrated.
My Streets is a collection of those moments.
When put together as one, with my own artistic layout style where the placement of each image has been carefully considered on every page, they add to the narrative.
It would have been simple to provide a structured layout and say, “This is where the images go and this is how every page will look.”
My Streets doesn’t do that.
Every page spread has been considered. Colours decided upon. Placement considered depending on what is published, what comes before it and what comes after it.
It’s a creation in its own right, but with nothing major to say that isn’t already being said.
My Streets is a peek into Gibraltar’s identity as interpreted through the lens of one artist — myself.
And whilst it will, for future generations, provide an insight to anyone who browses through its pages, it remains only a fraction of what Gibraltar is and ultimately has been.
An unapologetic reminder of who we are as a whole.
stephenignacioart 
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