The last words about client studies module
I definitely grew both as a professional and as a person. I feel like I got to learn many things that will help me on my professional illustrator career. Some biggest things to mention here would be: setting boundaries and expectations, asking questions and expressing concerns. I think the two biggest things that I struggled with were time management and saying, that I can't do something. These things I will try to practice for the remaining of my time at my university, and I hope to see progress on these aspects.
I haven't mentioned this before, but I was supposed to complete three work placements over the summer, but as you've noticed, I have only written about two. I wanted to save this experience last, because I think it has an important lesson to be learnt from it:
I have a friend in South Korea, who has an industrial design company. He's very passionate about fine arts and illustration, but has seldom a chance to work with other artists. We had been talking about collaborating ever since we met, but have never gotten around to do it and now that I needed to find work placement places, I immediately thought of him and sent him a message. He was working on a new lighting line, and was elated when I offered to make illustrations and package designs for him, free of charge. He sent me images of the products and some of his inspirations and what he would hope the illustrations to look like, and I was already sketching ideas. However, things were too good to be true indeed, and he ran into some patent troubles with bigger companies. He sent me a long email where he apologised, and asked if this affects my grades. I was able to tell him no, luckily I had done other placements over the past months, and I said I completely understand. These things do happen. I also told him to contact me, if there's any progress on the project or if there's other projects he needs illustrations for. We're still in touch and working together on other projects. So, even if something doesn't work out as you hope, don't throw away the contacts and be hopeful for the future, because there might be other opportunities coming your way!
Another thing I wanted to talk about before finalising writing about this module is the Dippy the dinosaur exhibition. The exhibition opened in Cardiff in early November, and of course I went to see it as soon as I got the chance. As I stepped inside of the smaller room for the fast fashion exhibition, I instantly saw big, A3 size prints of my dinosaur portraits! This made me incredibly happy, as I imagined them as A5 and definitely not straight at the entrance.
They also had my tote bag with my logo design on the wall. For the slogans, they had used M’s illustrations instead of mine, and they had taken both of our silhouettes.
The posters me and M had done in collaboration were much smaller than originally planned. I don’t know, whether there had been formatting issues or maybe issues with printing, but it was nice seeing both of the posters up. I also spotted some of my donated clothes on the sculptures:
One thing that I did notice, was that there were no credits put on any of the illustrations... This had been something that we had been promised would happen, so seeing them not put our names anywhere to be found really angered me; I would have imagined an institution this big and trusted would remember to credit their artists! However, after the initial feelings I understood, that they too were only people I worked with, and people forget and make errors. They might have simply forgotten about it, but it would have been nice to see our names up there by our work. Especially, since there were children and groups visiting the exhibition, so it would have been a very good opportunity to be found. I want to end this post with a positive note though: right when I was walking out from the exhibition room, there was a small corner, where people could give feedback and leave drawings. I was glancing over at them, and then I saw this...
A small fan art of one of my dinosaur portraits! I remember I started laughing out loud, it made me so happy. This was enough of a payback and these moments are the most rewarding to me as an illustrator. I wish I could have given the child a big hug; this made my day. I left the museum skipping happily towards my next adventures!
