Reflective Summary

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Although I have experienced many struggles throughout this unit, I have really enjoyed having the freedom of exploring my own brief and creating a piece that I think I has worked very successfully about a subject I am interested in and is extremely relevant today. For my final piece, I wanted to create an outcome that would fit into what I had aimed to do for my career path after university. This being editorial illustration and perhaps design, therefore creating my own short magazine is very relevant to my future plan. The final magazine, ‘Solitude’, indicates the subject of loneliness in the city very well and explores all aspects of it. These aspects being what it is, how important it is to bring light to the subject, people’s opinions and experiences on their loneliness and isolation and what can be done to manage it. I think that these areas all needed to be spoken about to help with the relatability of the magazine and also not create such a negative feeling after reading about a difficult subject that can affect many people. To help with this more positive approach to loneliness in London, I chose to use the title ‘Solitude’. Solitude can be seen as a positive thing as it is the choice to be alone, however solitude can be caused by both positive and negative reasons therefore it is a good title for the magazine. Moreover, I used a strictly warm tone palette for the surrounding area and strictly cool tone palette for the lonely/isolated people and objects to create a stark contrast between the two, so they are easily differentiated at first glance and also to heighten the emotions that the audience takes from the pieces. I think it really brings the whole magazine together by consistently using a cohesive colour palette throughout. Additionally, there is subtle symbolism to loneliness throughout the titles. The dots of the I’s are coloured in blue, contrasting with the pink tone writing, to indicate and reiterate the feeling of isolation that can be seen in the illustrations. Within the final magazine, I also thought that it was important to make the illustrations the main focus of the piece and almost have the text accompanying them, as they in themselves follow a story and show the subject with emotion and empathy more than the factual text ever could. I made sure that the text was clear and did not blend into the illustrations too much, which I think works well for a magazine where the illustrations are so bold and large scale. Some of the struggles I experienced throughout this unit have been the uncertainty of a final outcome from early on, which led me to not always have a point

to be working towards, however this was not too crucial at the research stage so I was able to overcome this. Furthermore, I changed the direction of my project twice throughout this experience, which was definitely the best thing to do, however at the time, I had to rethink each final outcome and the new illustrations that would be included in them. This did limit my time, however everything I had done before had led up to that change of direction so it was all still relevant. Most importantly, the change in dynamics from working in the studio to being limited to only working from home without outside resources available to me, meant that I had to plan and design my work around the resources I did have, which was mainly digital and transferring everything to online. However, I think that I was able to overcome the circumstances very well and work to the best of my abilities with what I had. Despite this, I had many more successes than struggles overall. For example, my quality of work has improved from the beginning to the end of this project and my direction and aims for the project have also become a lot clearer as time has gone on. I feel as though my work has become much more confident and professional and fits into what I really enjoy creating. independent publication in physical print, however it would also work successfully online, like how it is currently. Due to the size of the magazine being only 30 pages, I could imagine it being seen in a pull-out feature magazine inside a larger magazine or newspaper. This is exactly how I had imagined it to work, especially because it is a magazine based on one particular subject instead of a range of topics that a reader may usually buy for.