1ST PROJECT
1. How are you settling in - how do you feel about being part of your tutor group?
Fine. I can just get my head down and work if I’m on a good thread and I want to and don’t feel overly distracted or frustrated with other people, but I haven’t really gotten to know any one closely yet. I enjoy being in a space where all I have to focus on is being creative and especially doing work I personally enjoy making.
2. What are your first impressions of the learning environment?
Fairly self-guided, I could ask for certain materials if needed. Getting out of it what I put in, little direct tutoring so far.
3. What are the differences to your previous learning and experience at A-Level?
I didn’t take any art classes at sixth form, so being in a space just dedicated to art is what I was looking for.
4. What if anything, do you need to find more about?
-What we actually do and don’t have access to in terms of materials, spaces, and guidance from tutors/other teachers with experience relevant to what you’re doing
-What is actually expected of you in the sketchbooks- my tutor says that it shouldn’t be a scrapbook and yet every well-graded sketchbook I’ve seen is very much a scrapbook. Do I need to write this much? Or is this too little?
-How to try different materials and get taught how to use them (ceramics, textiles, woodwork)
5. Where do you see yourself currently in terms of art/design/media?
-I have interests in working in all three areas and like the overlap between them.
6. What are your current strengths?
-Concepts, coming up with ideas out of the gate and being confident with them.
-Eye for design/what works visually and what doesn’t.
-It doesn’t take long for me to pick up what I’ve tried so far in Photoshop.
7. What are the areas you need to improve on?
-Follow-through on ideas I like but am not sure how to do
-Explaining/documenting my process- big problem at GCSE. I usually hate writing down my thought process after the fact, but I don’t mind explaining it out loud, so finding a way to bridge that gap
-Working from home
8. Record some actions that will help you achieve this.
-Document my reflections/notes/creative process in a more natural, train of thought way as I work so I don’t put it off
Week 2 09/09/18 - 13/09/19
1. How did you understand the rationale for the project?
Broadly, I understood it as making work which was true to our interests/interpretations of a particular subject, which we derived from the initial conversation and brainstorm we had in groups.
2. How have you made use of your studio time?
Sketching and writing in my sketchbook, testing materials, making pieces unsure if they were going to be a part of my final piece or not
3. What is your understanding of the “Creative Process” and how it applies to your way of Working?
Basically creating, scrapping and elaborating on ideas as they come to you- actively making inspiration. Testing materials/ideas/recycling/borrowing concepts regardless of whether or not they will work and trusting your own intuition/taste. “Sketching and writing in my sketchbook, testing materials, making pieces unsure if they were going to be a part of my final piece or not”
4. How have the contextual references you have found helped you think about new approaches to your work?
The book “No Sleep” by Adrian Bartos has been a huge inspiration so far- seeing how nightclub and event promoters designed flashy, attractive and personality-filled posters considering the lack of resources compared to what I’m capable of in Photoshop has made me want to take advantage of the platofrm even more, and have more fun with the design. Design elements like dithering, blocky type, collage, and repurposing sha
5. How have the practical and material elements of the work gone? (a) have you kept Notes?
Working with ink is fun and something I’m used to, but smudging and miswriting can be frustrating considering the inital aesthetic I was going for was meant to be more clean and technical. Later, while I moved into digital collage, all of my base materials were physical, and working with plasticine meant that I was also able to experiment in how the texture of the clay turns into the black and white, dithered aesthetic of the collages that I was doing. For much of the early project, yes, I’ve kept notes, but I tend to forget to while working digitally
6. What could you do better in the future / what are your plans for next week?
Write and make notes in my sketchbook/blog while working, rather than having to go back and write them after the fact.
7. Have you started photographing your work, keeping the images in a relevant folder?
Yes.
8. You had a tutorial this week, how might you use that to reflect on your progress?
Figure out if I’m making the right kind of notes/how to make those right kinds of notes.
FURTHER NOTES:
There were certainly points during class-time where I had to find things to do and procrastinated, which has been a consistent problem for me in the past. This was especially true in documenting; while I was happy to go crazy and spend lots of time working in Photoshop on my collages, it was really mostly by chance that I came across that idea and from messing around with Adobe Capture on my phone, which is not the most sustainable model of working.
I had a blast researching posters from New York’s nightclub scene in the 70s, 80s and 90s, pretty much completely incidentally when we were asked to pick out books at the library at the beginning of this week
MEDIA - THE RIGHT KIND OF WRONG
Week 3 - Art/Media/Design Projects 16/09/19 - 20/09/19
First project, personal directions:
1. How well did you respond to the first project brief?
Considering the brief was (I believe purposefully) vague, and with my understanding the first brief was mostly about thinking in the creative process and being open to radical shifts in direction, I thought I fulfilled it well.
2. how well did you use your time this week?
I was really happy with the notes I made initially, and the idea of indiscriminately writing down every idea relevant to the project. I became kind of latched onto this idea of creating colourful, noisy gifs or short videos and I spent a lot of early class time working on the sound bytes for them, none of which I ended up using for my final pieces. A similar thing happened with experimenting with physical animation and a phenakistoscope, and it was frustrating feeling like I wasn’t really going anywhere with those ideas. However, I felt like they are getting me closer to my original idea.
Week 8 Art/Media/Design Projects 21/10/19 - 25/10/19
Third project, identifying future directions:
1. Identify overlapping themes, particularly in your personally directed work:
a. are there connections between ideas, approaches to materials or attitudes
that you have you used in all or any of these projects. If so, what are they? If
not, what are the main differences?
-Digital collage has ended up being something I used a lot more than I anticipated I would, since most of the work I’ve made independently before the Foundation year has been gouache and physical collage. I definitely follow the same process of sketching out mostly complete final piece ideas and doing extensive research, but I’ve also found that both projects have had a pretty radical change half-way through.
-I think research being a big part of my projects is a consistent theme for me, but I also consistently have a hard time documenting all the progress, since I’m not sure how to in most cases.
-In terms of consistent themes, all three were relatively different in themes; Media had to do with the supernatural, which is a theme I’m familiar with and interested in, and involved dipping my toes into animation and sound design; Art was based off of an idea I had had well before the project, and involved participatory art being being in a more curatorial role.
Compare how you have used your time between this project and the last. Consider
being open to different ideas and potential changes in direction.
exploring and evaluating different material possibilities.
creating more complex or unexpected outcomes.
developing an understanding of different artists and designers working in a similar area.
creating a better understanding of the different approaches to practice in each area.
presenting and/or explaining your ideas to others.
-I think organisation and note-taking has been a problem on both projects, I want to make the split between in-studio and at-home work more proportional, with time management being more of a problem with this project especially.
-I definitely haven’t been afraid to change direction, almost to a fault, since I closely documented every thought/decision that has gone through my head
Looking back over the last eight weeks are there patterns emerging in how you manage your project work?
-I definitely either latch strongly onto an initial idea, or don’t have one at all and do research, and I have a hard time working in that in-between stage when I need to develop an idea (especially if it’s one I don’t feel strongly about, such as with this current project.
Begin to outline your own particular strengths and weaknesses in relation to all of these approaches. Consider where/ how you fit into these different ways of working.
-I enjoy the research and
-Documentation in general is difficult for me, as it was at GCSE, especially since I have been tending to do all my digital work and research digitally. However, I really enjoy doing research for my work (something I have been doing for a long time, looking up references/inspiration/learning about the subject) the problem is just in getting my thought process and research down.
-I tend to treat the prompt or brief pretty flexibly, which hasn’t been such a problem on the first two projects since experimentation and being open to ideas was a major part of them. Despite the specificity of the Design project’s prompts, and my confidence in how I was going to approach my second try at that project (Switching from the Train Station to the Selfridge’s prompt)
List some of the artists, designers, photographers and filmmakers that have had the most influence on you in the last eight weeks.
what disciplines or areas do they work in?
what subjects did they study?
-Stephen R. Johnston
-Charles Freger
-Mason Lindroth
Use this week’s reflections to identify, or confirm possible future career directions.
-This last project has gotten me thinking about Illustration as a career differently. My initial difficulty with the Design project, criticism I received from my tutor about approaching the Selfridge’s brief by design rather than brand, and the fact that I changed briefs halfway through all of this project made it more frustrating than the previous ones, which is slightly discouraging because it was apparently the most “illustration-y” of the three, and illustration was the pathway I was considering choosing.
Ensure you have your Digital Portfolio updated.