HOPES, FEARS & OPPORTUNITIES (PART UNO)

At the start of the term we were asked to fill in a form about our hopes, fears and opportunities concerning ourselves in the ever looming future. It was a chance to really think about how we can take full advantage of anything that comes about in the forthcoming months that we can benefit from. I hadn't really sat down and thought about it before but think it was an important exercise that I have benefited from that needed doing.

My biggest hopes for the future were that I would push my drawing skills to the next level and generally try a lot harder when working on projects. As well as this I intended on boosting the publicity of my work. Not sure if publicity is the right word to chose but I wanted to showcase my work to a wider audience through the means of a website. Finally, I wanted to meet more people in the art world outside of uni by going to more organised art talks and exhibitions, especially ones that were in Manchester.

So far I think I'm pretty confident in saying I can tick these off my list now as I seem to be slowly making my way through them.  I have definitely put more thought and effort in to the way I work especially when concerned with the last few briefs. I seem to be putting in more time outside of uni and drawing because I want to rather then having too. Having done more independent work I think I am beginning to benefit from the time I have put in as my drawing skills seem to be gradually improving so it just goes to show that practice really does make perfect. However I'm far from perfect yet and there's still a long way to go but I've got the ball rolling now.

As far as websites are concerned I've got two on the go at the moment. One with cargocollective (a template based site that gives you the opportunity to network with other artists/photographers/designers) that I'm pretty happy with and then another one with a paid URL that a friend helped me make. Cargo is a good way to ease your way in to something that was very alien to me and pretty idiot proof but it still can be quite confusing ha. The other site that I'm using still has a lot of work that needs doing so I'm treating it as a little on going project where I'm trying to get my head around HTML coding and other techy bits. Hopefully in the next few months it'll be up to scratch in comparison to other peoples.

Over the last few months, I've tried to juggle the stresses of multiple projects with a social life that I can gain from as I think its dead important to take time out from doing work. I've been to a number of social events in and around Manchester as well as some in Preston and Leeds. These have consisted of BlabMini, D&AD Lectures, Portfolio visits to name but a few. I think that as well as this its highly beneficial to have more of a social life that involves the work you're making so I've tried to get to places like Common and Trof at least once a week to meet other people in the same boat as me that could hopefully lead to job opportunities and possible collaboration work. It's also a good chance to moan about stuff as well to people that can relate to what you're rambling on about as well.

My biggest academic fear was that my grade would drastically slip due to my journal not being very good. I'm not the most confident writer in the world and found it a bit of a struggle when it came to writing a large body of text. It's not that I'm incapable, the ideas are there they just don't sound as good when down on paper. It was a daunting task as the last piece of work similar to this I did was probably my GCSEs.  There was also not having a strong enough portfolio of work but more importantly the fear that I would loose interest in briefs and not get work done.

I think that all the work I've produced since starting back in September definitely shows my progression as an artist and that I've enjoyed working on them. I think if anything I'm enjoying doing what I do more so then I have. Its been important for me to stay motivated and interested in the topics that I've been working on and feel that I've landed pretty lucky with the work set. My portfolio is starting to become much stronger as the more I'm producing, the more early work that I'm not happiest with can be removed. After having portfolio viewings with various studios I'm also beginning to feel much more confident about my work but still and probably always will, think that there's always room for improvement. With the journal, I'm still holding my breath on that one. I've got no idea how well/bad I've done but as always I'm trying to keep a optimistic head on and try to not let it worry me too much. It hasn't been handed in yet but my draft has been submitted so I'm waiting on feedback now. Fingers crossed.

The opportunities that I wanted to take advantage of most over the course of the year were going to more social networking events (as I spoke about that earlier I won't bore you by repeating myself), taking advantage of any free time to produce personal work and the biggest thing for me was to make the most of having a studio at uni that's available pretty much five days a week.

If I'm being truly honest, the spare time that I've had so far this year has been pretty sparse so any time there has been any free I'm usually trying to catch up on sleep. Come every September I seem to turn almost completely nocturnal and seem to work best after about 6pm. This had consequently lead to most of my free days being taken up with sleep, sleep and then some more sleep. In saying that I have had time to work on some personal work to keep me ticking over, perhaps just not as much as I would have liked to. There's plenty of time to do so over the Christmas holiday. I've been trying hard to get into the studio much earlier this year because I wasn't ready to work when 10am came around last year. The lack of sleep means that if I'm turning up to start uni at 10am I probably won't get started until about thirty minutes later. To turn this around I've been arriving usually a good hour before I'm timetabled in so that I'm fresh and raring to start the day. Having spent the last two years with a close group of talented and lovable people I've realised that it's not going to last forever (although I'd sometimes like to think it could). I'm trying to take full advantage of having a large desk with boards to work on whenever I need to for free and a good working environment. It can be hard work at home when your desk is in the same room as your bed to get motivated so I've tried to use uni to its full potential when it comes to enthusiasm. This lead me to thinking long and hard about my aims after I graduate.

My aims for the year were to have visited working practitioners with my portfolio and to think about possibly organising a group of chums together to get a studio together after uni has finished rather then leaving it last minute. As I mentioned earlier I love working in a social, friendly environment and couldn't think of many things better then getting a studio with my friends and working professionally like that. I tend to work best int he company of others so think it could have the potential to really push me as an illustrator.

As for the remaining months ahead of me, the most important thing for me to focus on now is my final major project. It runs over a course of 18weeks so I need to thoroughly think about the work I am going to set myself to ensure I don't loose interest during the long working period. I don't tend to work well on longer projects as I set myself too much work to complete so this is a chance to either overcome this difficulty or to break up the time through shorter pieces of work to keep my mind fresh. I'm dead excited about it and can't wait to start as hopefully it should be a collection of the best work I'll have produced so far. Bring it on!

D&AD FUND RAISER.

It would seem that D&AD New Blood can play a massive part in getting your fresh, post uni face noticed in the creative world. Having spoken to a good handful of graduates, there's been quite a mixed response when the topic of New Blood is brought up. The majority or people came to the conclusion that it can be hugely beneficial depending on the style of work you produce and if you put the effort into it. Having recently spoken to Lord Whitney about my portfolio they suggested I took advantage of the opportunity to go and really make the most of it as some of my work would benefit from it. 

Having got together with other members of the 3rd year illustration group that were interested in show casing their work, we decided we needed to raise cash, a lot of it, and as quick as possible. As far as I'm aware, college's funding has been drastically cut over the last few years so if we want to go down to London to showcase out work it'll be up to ourselves to raise the money needed. As well as us drawing folk, the graphics bunch are wanting to take part as well so are splitting the costs in half which is a massive relief on out behalf knowing we can share the load.

 After a short meeting we decided to take advantage of the festive times and make some lovely screen printed Christmas cards and a range of delicious hand baked treats. The group was split in two groups, specially delegated make sure everything ran smoothly. The cake sale made an absolute killing at college and I think we managed to make about £40 in the end. Just shows that Stockport people love cake.

The idea behind the screen printed cards was mainly that it wouldn't cost us anything other then the materials to print on. It was also a good opportunity for people to have a go at this process as quite a few people in the group hadn't really had the chance to play with it in the past. It brought us together nicely as a team and we had a dead good day in the print room helping each other out making the prints. We managed to get a successful little routine working so that everyone had a helping hand but we weren't getting under each others feet and overall it worked really well.

It was especially good to see how people's art turned out through the means of screen printing especially if it wasn't their usual means of working. It gave the final result much more charisma and life where you could see the process behind the images. Some designs were a bit of a pain to line up and others didn't print perfectly but I think that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. The mis-registration and broken tones played to the whole hand generated image making side of things and made each card much more personal. 

Doms card: first and second layers of ink.

On a whole, the coming together as a team and working on our own live brief worked really well. The people interested in D&AD showed real dedication and put lots of effort in to it to get the best result we could in order to raise funds. Once the cards were dried, signed and paired up with envelopes, we sent them off to a print fair with Mil in the hope that we could sell the bulk of what we'd made. It turns out that the weather was massively against us and not many people turned up unfortunately resulting in not many being sold. However, we didn't let this phase us so each took a handful and bullied our friends and family into buying them even if they'd already bought others. It was an nice eye opener to how we could do something similar in the near future and later for our final exhibition.

A selection of prints and my finished card.

LORD WHITNEY: PORTFOLIO VISIT NUMERO 3

Last week I went to visit Lord Whitney (see previous posts if you don't know who they are) in their cold but creative warehouse studio in Leeds. I was massively grateful to both Bek and Amy for taking time out of their busy schedule to have a look at my work so close to Christmas and a week before they were due to feature an installtion at the Dead Sea Mob night at Night&Day in Manchester.

The studio pre decoration stage and 70's style xmas tree.

As I mentioned earlier, the studio itself was situated in the top floor of a disused warehouse and man alive was it nippy. It was full of weird and wonderful costumes (including hand made signs, life sized landscapes and plastic pimped out crows) and props that made you feel that you could of been in the backstage of a film/tv set like the Mighty Boosh. There were a few gas and electric heaters to huddle round to keep warm but more importantly it was a good excuse to have cups of tea, which hit the spot. Thanks again girls! Having acclimatised myself to the conditions of the tundra like studio, like other visits in the past, I spoke about each project in my portfolio focusing on ideas generation and process. However, unlike the past two visits, I felt that I gained tonnes more creative feedback and left with lots of things to consider when working in future. It was a very relaxed few hours where we chatted about things they thought I might like/be interested in outside of the art world that could strengthen my work. This ranged from Victorian circuses, short stories, films and more importantly Hendricks Gin! It was dead nice that they did this as they could of quite easily looked at my work and left it at that but they seemed to get pretty excited about future prospects within my work.

As far as I can remember they were generally positive about my work and had nothing but kind words to say about it. It was a real compliment to hear that from a creative team that are doing so well for themselves and has made me really think hard about how I could benefit from working in a small team in the last few months of uni to prep me for leaving. They were also pretty pleased with the work I produced for the brief they set for us earlier in the month so this again has swayed me towards collaborating in the future as I worked with Jordan O'brien on it.

Overall, I had a most pleasant time with them (and their intern) and left feeling really positive and happy with my work but more importantly excited about cracking on with projects discussed. I've got a lot of ideas that I'd hopefully like to blast out over the Christmas holiday including a much more personal business all thanks to the creative input of Lord Whitney. I would like to think I could get in touch with them again about future work and they'd be just as welcoming about it. In conclusion, I feel like I gained a lot from this portfolio visit and can see why we're encouraged to seek professional advice about our work.

BLAB MINI 3.

On friday night, having rushed back from uni and grabbed a bratwurst from the German Christmas market I took a swift stroll down to Deaf Institute for the third BlabMini.

BlabMini is a monthly meetup where Manchester based creative types can meet up, have a drink and socialise with other artists (organised by Northern Digital). Its a chance to meet face to face with each other rather then via the wonderful world wide web and meet new people, clients and maybe land yourself a place, chance to collaborate or even job. They've also introduced guest speakers to come and talk about a designated topic for give or take 20mins. The £5 entry fee also entitled you to free admission for the 90's dance night upstairs and a free beverage of your choice. I had 2 though.

Anyway, this months theme was "Things I've Seen", where each speaker had to talk about anything the they considered to relevant to them.  Altogether there were five speakers consisting of Kate Towey, Simon Griffin, Jeffery Bowman, Katie Moffat and Jake Smith with sponsors of Eskimo Creative, Shillington College and Orchard. As well as this, they were raffles and competitions to win some awesome prizes (£50 of itunes vouchers won by Jordan O'brien) and the best competition was best christmas jumper where Dom came runner up. Sorry Dom. Yours was best the other guy just new more people. Back to the talks. Katie Moffat opened the stage with a short but moving presentation on the 9/11 attacks against the Twin Towers and how a competition was created for architects/designers to come up with ideas for a memorial site. This was followed up with Kate Towey making a clear point how much she disliked brown bananas then Jeffery Bowman's love for hill walking. Jake and Simon tied up the evening with a passion for film/music videos and how being unorganised and unprepared can work in your favour.

The whole vibe of the evening was friendly and festive, and an awesome chance to chat to working designers. What I enjoyed most about the evening was the generous turnout from current/post Stockport College students. It's not often that over the last three years we've met as a group outside of college so it was a great opportunity to socialise in the outside world. A few of us stayed around afterwards for a couple more drinks then moved on to another bar.

The fourth BladMini is to take place again at Deaf in the new year at some point. Overall, a brilliant way to spend a thursday eve with a good crowd.