End of course reflections
What this course has taught me is to test and refine ideas and to do more with the many drawings I create than just stick with them as they are. What this means is that I have a huge library of starting points ready made in the sketchbooks I have. The course helped confirm my prefered working methods. I did experiment, but perhaps not enough. I wanted to go back to printmaking several times but never got around to it (my printing press is holed up in a room cluttered with my daughter’s ‘stuff’). This, I regret, but I will go back to it. However, my use of bold colours and scratchy pen and ink drawings is what feeds me and will always be my hallmark. What I have begun to learn is how to push my confidence in using the regular familiar tools (pen and paper, iPad) in other directions when the brief demands it. I know I have a way to go in pushing myself to morph my working methods according to the brief, but I feel that I have started to do this, albeit, on a small scale.
When I reviewed everything I had done, I targeted two images I felt were unsatisfactory and re-did them, with better results. It was interesting to see that time, stimulus, reflection (and a deadline!) helped me to improve things. These were the Animals of the World book cover and the Milan book cover. My lack of certainty about these two images makes me think I should consider studying graphic design to get a richer sense of design rather than focus on illustration, but that just feels like hard work! What I do know is that I want to do more animation. It gives me a huge sense of satisfaction to achieve something in animation, and I very much enjoy looking at contemporary animators and trying to work out how they have achieved things. Visiting the artists’ book exhibition in Sheffield recently also made me think that I would love to produce one, so I have plenty of ideas to go at.