OCTOBER I ended last academic year on a really strong project for myself, which had a lot of purpose, and meant a lot to me personally. I really want to continue this year in the same manner, and ensure that the work I create reflects who I am as a practitioner. I therefore chose a wide range of briefs, which I think will help grow my skills within specific design areas I am passionate about.
Throughout this module, I want to really focus on packaging design, colour and pattern. Therefore I have invested a lot of time into the research of appropriate projects, which will keep me motivated. Something I have struggled with is my stress and mental well-being, so through the use of my statement of intent and on going timetabling, I have been able to effectively plan my time to ensure I do not push myself further than I need to this year. My first task this year was to create a self portrait, and I initially started this through drawing my face. However, on reflection, I decided that a self portrait wouldn’t actually include my face, so made instead a painting which included my main character aspects. This portrait showed my vitiligo, my growth over the past year, and my positive attitude, which I think really embodies me, and is a creative direction I am happy to be working towards. However, I feel I made a fatal error in that the image is facing backwards, and is not looking forward to symbolise the future development.
Don’t be afraid to leave it imperfect Another skill which I have been working on is my immediacy and drawing skills. I have always had an aversion to drawing people and scenes, and I felt that I wasn’t very good at it, and tried to hide away from it. However, for my comfort zones task, I decided to draw people in a setting, and submit it with no process or editing. The only thing I did on Photoshop was remove the middle of the sketchbook crease and add a background colour. I was surprisingly really happy with this outcome, as I thought it was a really scary task for me, yet I made something that I was actually really pleased with. Something which I learnt was the ability to ‘leave’ something once it’s finished, and not keep editing and refining it to become a ‘final outcome’. I think this is important to me to remember as I progress into my final year and life after uni. However, I need to ensure that this doesn’t mean I get messy with my work, and cut corners when I should invest a little more time to ensure it is still high quality.
The brief I have enjoyed the most so far is the Morley Newlands Academy Racetrack Mural brief. I knew I wanted to make something that was attractive and informative, so focused on the idea of growing vegetables and eating healthily, but used some funky colours to be more appealing to children. This taught me a lot about scaling up work, as well as finding both content and styles which are appropriate to different audiences. I also learnt to research more around the brief and create outcomes which address specific ideologies in a slightly less direct manner. I do think that the colours are a little too dull though, and if I were to do it again I would spend more time mixing my gouache. I am pleased however, that I have learnt more about using gouache, and feel confident bringing this media forwards to another project.