1. Hello! My name is Ellie and I’m going to tell you about my second year as an illustrator. 2. This is the last slide from my first year presentation which shows all of the things that I aimed to achieve this year. When I look back on my first year I have realised that I didn’t utilise the ‘play and experiment’ element as effectively as I should have due to being too concerned about being neat and keeping my blog up to date. This year I wanted to re-visit all of the things that I feel I missed out on, and just having a more confident and positive attitude towards the course, going by the motto ‘Say yes to everything’. 3. Over the summer I found myself becoming really detached from my passion for illustration due to coping with a family bereavement and being stuck in a monotonous day job packing bread rolls. I still managed to tackle my summer briefs despite life getting in the way, and challenged myself to draw a double page spread every day on a specific theme, mainly subjects that I found difficult for example shoes, birds etc. Towards the end of this project I found that I really enjoyed drawing buildings, which developed from the theme ‘draw every house you have lived in. 4. I went on to develop this further by creating a zine called ‘the illustrated Otley Run’, which acts as a visual guide to Leeds’ most popular pub crawl, and I was really excited because someone bought one and wrote an Instagram post about it! It was also the first time that I had been to a comic convention, which opened my eyes to the world of sequential art, cosplay and various other narrative platforms. 5. For the other part of the summer project, ‘About the Author’ I chose to study writer and neurologist, Oliver Sacks and was inspired and really moved at the lengths he went to in order to truly understand the nature and difficulties that his patients faced. In hindsight I think I would have flourished more if I would have chosen to study an author that wrote fictional books as opposed to case studies as I found myself going back into my ‘drawing literally’ mode, and not really developing my image making skills as much as I’d hoped. This was the module that I struggled with the most as I found it really difficult to adapt to the structure of second year with the projects being much longer and self driven as well as my level of motivation being extremely low. 6. For my final prints I decided to visually communicate the symptoms and struggles of three neurological conditions that are commonly misunderstood by the outside world. I was pleased with the concept of the prints however in terms of presenting to an audience I realised that the category was quite niche in the fact that people may only relate to the content if they know the work of Oliver Sacks really well. 7. For the exhibition at Colours May Vary, I was part of the marketing team helping to spread promote and spread awareness about the exhibition, also helping to run the Facebook page and take photographs on the night. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to sell any of my prints, but I didn’t really expect to, yet this is something I aim to consider more thoroughly in further projects. 8. For ‘Life’s a pitch’ we came up with a business called ‘visuwallise’ that specialised in interior and exterior space rejuvenation. The whole project was challenging as each of our group members had different interests and different ways of working. Whilst evaluating my work from 504 and thinking about an audience that would have appreciated my prints, I started to look into how creative practice is used within the healing environment and produced some designs for murals within children’s hospitals which is something that I would be interested in researching in the future. The whole brief gave me confidence in working with other creatives, and an insight into setting up a creative business after graduation, which has previously been a concept that I have found extremely daunting. 9. I started Responsive relatively late due to struggling with 504 in the first semester, but I gradually eased myself into the swing of it by starting entering Illustration Friday every week. I set myself the