Crit Feedback

The feedback from today's session really helped me. I talked through what I thought were the main focal points of my year with a number of people and I was surprised by how different everyone's experiences have been even on the same course. I am very grateful that this year has exceeded my expectations in what I wanted to achieve coming here - mainly on a personal level but also looking back at the work I produced at the start of the year to now.

On the sheet I left next to the work I have produced so far next to my visual experiments I got a lot of positive feedback for the adventure/explorer idea. I am happy to continue to develop this idea over the others and I am glad people thought that this worked. This has given me a bit of clarification where I was a bit unsure of which one would communicate what I was trying to achieve in the best way.

Trip to York

Today Me, Meg and Shelly went on a well deserved trip to York as a bit of a celebration for the end of the cop module. I was super excited as I have never been before and have only heard good things! I was definitely not disappointed.

First we visited York Art Gallery and stopped by Mark Hearld's lumber room, which I turned into a bit of a nerd about (on a separate post). Grayson Perry also had a sculpture displayed in one of the exhibitions which I found really interesting. I saw his new documentary 'All Man' yesterday and found his work to be very symbolic and profound when you look into it, kind of makes me want to try ceramics - maybe something to think about next year!

OUR DAY

Walking along the walls

I don't know if we were supposed to do this but we found a creepy looking door so we went to investigate and it led across some beautiful gardens in York. On the other side there was a sign and an entrance for some kind of roman ruins tour that you had to pay for - I think we were supposed to do that but we went the wrong way so oh well! It felt so nice to be in the quiet and at one with nature, York is such a peaceful place! Just what we needed after a hectic few weeks to clear our heads.

Shambles market

Now this was seriously cool. I felt like I was on the set of Harry Potter or something, I feel like this part of the city is what people think England is like. Wandering around the market and into the cute little shops was so much fun! We also bought lots of fudge and watched it being made, I got chocolate orange (my fav) and chocolate mint flavour which didn't last long. We also went to the little shambles tea room for afternoon tea which was lovely.

The Train

We were a bit naughty and got an earlier train. Because Leeds was only one stop away we thought we would get away with it but the ticket dude did notice, however he was a very nice chap and let us off 'just this once' phew! Also, we bumped into Jamie at the station which was funny because we had been joking about that all day.

I felt very refreshed after the trip.

Mark Hearld - The Lumber Room

Whilst in York I knew I wanted to go to Mark Hearld's Lumber room. As one of my favourite illustrators it has been on my list of places to go for a while. The actual room was full of weird and wonderful things such as taxidermy birds (ew), rocking horses and odd little toys that have an obvious influence on his work. His sketchbooks were particularly fascinating to me, I aspire to be more care free and less constrained in my sketchbook and the ones in the lumber room were so playful and embodied the idea of experimentation. This has also made me think about what materials I may want to try moving forward, lino print is something I have been meaning to have a go at for a while.

I found York to be an inspiring place to exist - especially its wildlife and architecture.

I am a bit of a sucker for gift shops, especially those that sell picture books, so as a treat to myself for finishing cop I bought Nicola Davis' 'A First Book of Nature' illustrated by Mark Hearld and a cute little concertina fox card to put in my bedroom. I have taken the same book out of the library before and fell in love so I couldn't walk away when I saw it again! My favourite page is in the Winter scene with the fox, I really like the contrast of the orange against the blues/greys and the general composition of the page. Also, I really like foxes.

Presentation Plan

So far I have tried to make sense of what I want to put in the presentation by separating the slides and writing down answers to some of the questions I found on the PPP brief presentation. I found this a lot easier after creating my written map as I felt like that was more informal than the way I started writing for the presentation.

PPP Values Posters Evaluation

My own thoughts - Poster ranking

Before we were asked to give our posters to other people in the group, I rated them with the most successful first to what I thought was the least. My favourite poster was the one that states 'to do what I love for a living'. I thought this was fairly clear and concise, but I also preferred the composition of the lines of typography to the others. The second one I also liked for these reasons but slightly less due to the lack of innovation and the third I felt was a bit too busy and less 'to the point'.

What my peers thought

I was slightly surprised to learn that my peers had chosen 'Humour, positivity, passion' for my most successful poster. Originally I had thought it was too simplistic whereas maybe this is an element of the work to be celebrated rather than criticise. The layout, readability, crafting, concept, colour palette and typography were all things that were picked up on. I think maybe in similar tasks I will remember that sometimes less is more.
The three words I chose to use are all things that I believe help to guide me, just in general, when it comes to work and my own personal life outside of Uni. 

Rufford Park

On my way home for Easter I decided to stop off at Rufford Park, I hadn't been there for years and I remember it having some interesting sculptures. I think my favourite was the thumbs up, there was so much to see within it and its not the kind of sculpture you expect to see usually in a park setting - nice! There was a cute little pigeon just chilling out in a hole in the wall too! Overall, I had a great day and it was nice to be at one with nature to clear my head a little after a run of dong a lot of work.

Poster Task 2 - PPP Values

Ambition

This what I initially thought of when I started really understanding what my ambition is - the core of it and why I started an Illustration degree in the first place, because it's what I love and it feels right.

Professional

This is definitely the most difficult poster to think about, but Fred's list did help! I really like the word innovative and I hope that is what I am - although I am working on it. And intrinsically I have always been a very creative person, in near enough everything I do.

Personal

I chose 3 simple words for this poster. These are the things I value most in myself, I think it is incredibly important to keep a sense of humour - which probably crosses over in to my work. Being able to not take myself too seriously and having an open mind about people, situations and life in general is something I have learnt fairly recently. This links in to positivity and passion. Luckily, I think I am a naturally positive person and I like to see the good in things. Passion is something I think everyone needs, whether that's for your job, a person, food, my cat, whatever. It is what gets me up in the morning, and what feeds life.