Throughout the year, Extended Practice has been the most integral module to my development as an inidivudal and a practitioner. Having the freedom to choose and create my own briefs that suit me and my working style has allowed me to have full creative control over my practice for the past few months. This has made me a lot more comfortable with just letting myself work how I work, I haven't felt the need to conform to a specific idea of what illustration is and feel that my work has progressed for the better over the duration of this module.
Over the course of the module, I think one of the most important things I've kearnt is what kind of area I want my illustration work to be heading into. At the start of the year, I was floundering around abit, trying to figure out how I can get my work to fit into commercial sections of th ecreative industry, without really having much passion for any of them. Throughout 603, I've worked on a few briefs that have related to music and designing work around that. This is something that I'm extremeley comfortable and happy doing, having recently got my first comission to do band merch for an american bands new album release, its a direction I can see my work developing further into and a route that I'm happy going down.
My proccess and production skills have developed throughout the year as well. I've made sure that, although I've worked mostly digital, I've varied my process, tried new things out, and found various ways of working to build on within my practice. I've also developed a lot of confidence this year in terms of my practice. I've worked on Print Fairs, contacted clients and managed to get some of my work archived at a Museum. All of these things have led to me having a sense of confidence in my work which has allowed me to take myself a little bit more seriously as a practitioner.
I've had some trouble balancing time for this module and havent managed to complete everything that I wanted to do before the module ended. This is due to different health problems over the year but also down to my own time management. This has been a consistent issue for me throughout university and is something that has got better but that I still struggle with. The problem with writing my own briefs was that there was no external deadline for me to hit, so throughout the year 603 sometimes took a backseat while I was sorting other things out. I've learnt from this that the best way for me to work is quite quickly, finding that I prefer shorter briefs witha quick turnaround, to longer briefs that drag on for weeks/months. This is because of me struggling to manage my time when faced with a longer project and also down to me having the tendancy to get a bit bored of a project if it goes on too long.
Overall, I feel that regardless of everything else, 603 has simply allowed me to develop and hone my practice in a way that Studio Practice modules haven't allowed me to before. Considering where I was at the start of the year and where I feel I am now, I think I've progressed a lot. I'm happy to be ending the year with a body of work that I'm proud of and with my first comission in progress, this is more than I could've hoped for and something that I'm incredibly proud of. While compiling everything for submission, I found it difficult to justify whether or not I'd done 'enough' work, but I think that being content with the progression of my practice and with the work I have produced justifies the work I have done this year completley.
No comments:
Post a Comment