Hopes, Fears and Opportunities

As this is the third and final year of the course we had a group discussion on what some of our hopes and fears for this coming year and for post-graduation may be. We also talked about which events/projects/circumstances which will come up this year have good potential for each of us.

To start with we were asked what do you wish to achieve this year and after graduation. My three main hopes were:

• To develop and refine a consistent style of working; get to a point were my work looks more professional/polished
• To gain more confidence in my own work.
• Graduate and work as a freelance illustrator.

I hope that by the time I do graduate next year I will have gained more experience and knowledge in working in collage. I have found so far that my work can look very amateurish and needs to develop a more professional and consistent look in order for me to be confident enough to work in the outside world after leaving the college. This will only come about with me producing more working in collage and learning how to use my work in more sophisticated design pieces.

We were then asked what is worrying us about this year and beyond:

• The workload through this year.
• Becoming a lot more independent this year.
• The uncertainty of finding work after graduating.

The way in which i work, mostly in paper collage, means it takes me a long time to complete each piece. Through practise I hope to speed up in order to create enough work expected of me in the third year but without effecting the quality of my work. As i tend to just see the bad bits of my work and feel more confident i the direction I'm taking if I'm told that its good by others i am worried about becoming more independent through this coming year. Although i still need some reassurance of my work these first few weeks of semi-idependance in the Hello World project has let me follow a path I feel I want and my work wants.

Lastly we were asked about the opportunities which we feel will be most beneficial to us in the final year of the course:

• Help in promotion of myself and my work
• Gaining the advice and experience of working artists.
• Have the chance to work on project of my choice.

The help offered in creating business cards, portfolios and a website will be essential for me as I know I would be pretty lost if i had to do them on my own and they wouldn't be professional enough to be seen by the outside world. I hope that by working on a long project created by me will mean I make a lot more work and am more passionate about the subject than i would be if i was just given a selected brief to work on into the new year.

Hello World/Future Self Progress

Using the summer starting point of adoption I have widened this into multiple areas connected to it. What I'm working on at the moment could be seen as being about Identity in general. I have made many small collages so far, many of them ending up as portraits, these are just a selection of them i've completed at this point. I will continue down this route and just see where it leads to in the end.

Gurus Meeting

Today we were all assigned a 'guru' for this year. These are former student of Stockport who can give us advice and guidance as we struggle to complete our final year.
I was put with the illustrator Megan Thomas, who has visited us previously last year to help with portfolios. I'm glad she is my guru as she is great at promoting and presentation, her portfolio and website are polished and professional. She had lots of initial advice for the start of third year, here are some of the key areas she spoke of:

• Try to grow/develop a style, work on making it my own.
• Set up a website early on in the year as it takes a lot of maintenance and upkeep.
• Buy a dairy, schedule in time through the week to make work.
• Don't be scared to ask advice from working designers/illustrators
• Email potential clients with examples of my work and a link to my site. 
• The London trip later in the year is important for building new contacts

In Someone Else's Shoes

For my project over the summer break I chose the theme 'In Someone Else's Shoes' as a starting point. The brief seemed to link up with a previous project back in first year, Invented Persona, both were left open for me to develop and interpret in my own way and allowed me to work in a way I wanted. 
The brief was simple. Put yourself in someone else's shoes in a different point in history. Look at their experiences; the ups and downs of their life. I began with a rough plan of a story for my character, set in the early 1900s. I tried to think about what my character would be seeing in her day to day life. With so much happening throughout the century she is growing up in, how does her life change by its effects. I will now use these as starting points for my project Hello World.

Here are a few of my experiments using collage.

Hello World!

For the first project of the third year I will be working towards producing a unique piece of work which could either be used as a self-promotional device or be sold. The end product can be anything I choose and isn't restricted to what can be made using the facilities the college has.

I will use my summer project, 'In Someone Else's Shoes' as the starting point of this new project. By developing the themes and ideas I have begun during the summer I will hopefully come up with an unusual and uniquely me product which I will be pround to use after graduation. 

By the end of the project I will also need to have design my online (PDF) portfolio, business card and have conducted two external practitioners visits for advice on my portfolio.