Magic Ladies

During the easter holidays I said I'd take part in an exhibition thats being held by someone I met on foundation, there was no brief for it I just had to submit or make one or a series of pieces to exhibit in any frame I wanted at a pub in Leeds. I said yes because partly because I wanted a little distraction from COP but also because when I saw her asking for submissions for pieces to exhibit I felt like I was ready for the first time to actually put my work in the public. This is definitely not something I've felt before and I think its down to this first year of the course and the last few briefs giving me a little bit more confidence in my own brain and my own practise (YAY)

The exhibition is to raise funds for Womens Aid which made me even happier to be submitting some work because a lot of the profits of anything thats sold goes to a really great charity (not that I'm actually thinking that anyone will buy my work, baby steps...). Because of the cause of the event I wanted to make some kind of pieces to do with empowering and inspiring women, and I'd been messing around with this witchy lady character that I've become really attached to. I started planning little sketches in my sketchbook at home as I already had an idea in my mind of what I wanted the final things to look like and the kind of feeling I wanted them to have, but I found that the combination of working from home and not having any real brief for once meant that I was really unmotivated and had to do so many pages of trials before I started making anything.

Look how many pages of roughs:

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

final page

What I found out from this:

• My brain can handle a task like this so much better if I give it a title and a rough idea of a brief on my own, even if it hasn't been specifically been given one by the person I'm doing it for it just helps my brain to organise it a little bit better and get to work on it quicker
• I'm really obsessed with drawing hands, legs, arms and female bodies in general at the moment, I had so much fun drawing the nude lady on the rock 
• Roughing really, really helps. It was really hard to start because I had no direction but once I started roughing, new visual ideas kept coming to me and I had almost too many elements that I wanted to add to the picture
• Simpler is better. When I started drawing this lady I drew her in copic markers with a black, fineliner outline like this:

I've realised now from some of the things we've learnt this year that things look better simplified and if you take a few of the lines out of a drawing people are still going to understand it. 

• Ladies are magic

The finished things:

I'm really happy with my time management skills because I made time to do this around finishing my COP which shows how much I actually wanted to make these things. I'm getting them printed at uni to pick up tomorrow before I give them in at the end of the month, the exhibitions on the 11th of May and even if no body buys the pictures I'm still really happy because I've entered an exhibition that wasn't mandatory, like this is the first piece of proper illustration I've just done because I wanted to and wanted people to see it. (although fingers crossed someone actually does buy them because I am v poor, hurry up student loan.)

Map Of Me

Yesterday our task was to make a mind map of ourselves and include all the things that make up us as people and also our practise. I quite liked this activity because the last few projects we've had have been a bit more personal and independent which I think has given me time to think properly about what I want my practise to be.



I identified the main parts of my personality and practise to be:

Sentimentality:

• I collect old things like books, photos and general nik naks
• I keep all my old birthday cards
• music is the biggest source for all my memories, I think this mostly refers to the lyrics in songs but sometimes its just the period of time when I was listening to a song triggers really strong memories
• I keep every book I've ever read and owned- I thought about this one and I think thats because I love each of the imaginary places the books have taken me to and the worlds they've conjured up feel a bit like they belong to me because I keep them after I've read them

Reflection:

• I think way too much about everything, to the point where I get myself down about things I shouldn't
• I have too many feelings
• when I need to make sense of these feelings I write them down to help them be clearer, sometimes in a list but often these thoughts end up turning into poems or stories, sometimes scripts
• I like to give these thoughts narratives because it helps me to remember them clearer, like you can remember how you felt in that exact moment (evocative)
• Its like a bit of a therapy to me

OCD:

• I have all these rituals and superstitions that seem normal now to me but I know they're not, like very particular ways that things need to be done (OCD) but that also feeds into my practise
• The list making helps me tackle and rationalise my OCD too because it gets it all down and out of my head
• I fear messiness both at home and in my work, I'm too afraid of making a mess by experimenting to actually change things up in my practise
• My mind tells me that mess equals failure and as I'm scared to fail I wont make a mess and just stick with what I know
• I find it comforting to work with illustration with a narrative because this follows a chronological order and storyline so therefore "makes more sense" and seems less messy to me
• I actively try and give everything I do a narrative or back story, building little worlds behind projects makes things easier for me, but also harder because then I get lost in them
• I need to experiment more in order to develop

Home:

• I've moved house a lot of times (15 times to be exact) and this means that I'm really used to change
• Although I don't like mess I do like change because it makes things fresher and easier to look at and make sense of
• I get bored easily if I'm stagnant for too long in home and work life, in terms of work life this means that I can be really enthusiastic about a project at first but quickly get bored of it if it goes on for too long
• Experimenting with materials is one way I've found to help this because it gives me the challenge of working out how to use the materials as well as focusing on the project
• This also explains why I feel so passionately about finding home in yourself first before you call anywhere else home

Feminism:

• I like to encoorporate feminism and feminist issues into my work
• A lot of this is influenced by the media I consume whether that be books, films, TV shows or podcasts
• All of this media which I consume could be considered escapism, I am a big reader and watcher and I think I do a lot of that to take myself out of myself sometimes. This escapism is something I really try to feed into my practise, I love that idea of creating new worlds
• Listening to podcasts that look at the world through a feminist lens and also those that talk about sexuality have spurred my interest in feminist issues and the human anatomy and sexuality in my work
• This subject also goes hand in hand with the body positivity movement which I've become more interested in through feminism, I really enjoy portraying bodies in general in my work and think they're something that we shouldn't be so scared of showing 
• This is maybe where my penchant for more graphic styles of illustration comes from, I think penises, boobs and bums make illustrations striking and normalise them/ start a conversation
• I also feel the subject of feminism goes hand in hand with the subject of reflection, I write a lot of my poems etc through a feminist view and also watch a lot of feminist poetry on Youtube

Although I think I can see some links starting to form here already I think I need to work more on how these things all match up, I also need to review which things in particular are the most central to my practise because the lists quite long at the moment.

Learner

Learner:

Weaknesses:

1. When my stress levels are high I lose momentum and often stop working on a project for a few days which isn't great. I can sometimes put off the things that I’m really not looking forward to doing and hope that they just go away, which obviously doesn't work and has the adverse effect of actually making things more stressful. I need to remember that if something is stressing me out the best thing is to make a start on it and then talk to someone when I start to struggle
2. I find keeping up with reading and writing really difficult, whether thats in COP essays or researching something for a brief. It does take me a while to unpack and retain the information I’m receiving which both panics me and puts me a little bit behind
3. I find it hard to ask for help if I’m finding something a struggle, in terms of going to a tutor anyway. I can always ask my peers but sometimes what I need is just a one on one with a tutor just to clarify things, I think this is generally just down to me being a shy awkward person (always have been)
4. I would work a lot better if I got to sleep at a decent time each night, I am starting to see how much of a struggle I find it to make myself motivated enough to do a full day at uni if I haven't slept properly but the lack of sleep could also be partly put down to the noise at my place. Maybe this one will get better next year?
5. I compare myself to others a lot. This is such a bad quality to have as I realise theres literally nothing that can be gained from doing this as much as I do it. And its not like I look at other people and think “If I worked a bit harder or put in more hours I could be like them”, I do in the way that I look at other peoples work and think “I could never have come up with that”. 

Strengths:

1. I am dedicated. This is the only course I’ve ever wanted to do and the fact that I put it off for a year has given me some more time to think about it and realise how much it means to me. I am willing to put in the hours and stress because I know this is what I want to be doing
2. I am self motivated, again probably due to being so sure that this is the subject I really want to do. I know when all my deadlines are and I do really want to do and hand in the work on time because the grades matter to me
3. I am organised. This is something I never did at school mainly because I hated it so much that I didn't want to do the work anyway, but with his course the work is enjoyable (mostly). I have learnt that writing to- do lists works well for me and so does setting reminders, but that keeping an academic diary doesn't as it means I then have to remember to look in the diary to see when my deadlines are
4. I am interested, which in turn makes it easier to stay motivated, organised etc. I consume a lot of media around illustration and think about it in terms of my own and other peoples practises a lot of the time. 
5. I am competitive (with myself more than anyone). So if I do badly at something once I try not to let it put me off now, instead I try to challenge myself to beat my own high score and do better. This is sometimes a massive draw back as it means I can often be unhappy with the work I make as I can tell I could have done better and therefore know that I’ll beat myself up about it, but it also means that I know what I can achieve so if I could have tried harder and didn't then I can think about why that happened and put it right

Practitioner

Practitioner: 

Weaknesses:

1. I am a perfectionist, and whilst this means things will be done well it has also meant that sometimes my work doesn't develop as much as it could. Sometimes I’m so scared to make something imperfect that I don't like but will help me to develop an idea further that I chose to just stick with what I know instead and create something that is within my comfort zone but probably a bit boring
2. I am easily panicked, whilst I admit I do work well under time constraints sometimes a lack of time in which to complete tasks can panic me into not doing anything at all and hating every idea that I come up with but being too scared to go another direction because then I wont be finished on time
3. I am not good at simplifying things. This one has been really problematic in the last few very short briefs we've had, where we've needed to get a point across but in a restricted frame. Its in my nature to make everything look really embellished but I think this course is making me realise that I need to spend more time and effort developing my ideas and making those complex and meaningful but simplifying the way I chose to portray that
4. Trying out new ways of working is something I really struggle with. This course has pushed me to try new things and mostly they've payed off and are techniques that I know I’ll definitely use in the future. But actually applying myself to learning those new things is something I find hard, I think its the same thing of struggling to be out of my comfort zone
5. I don’t have enough trust in myself, my abilities and my ideas yet. This is something I’m learning to develop for instance during the latest brief I was told by everyone that the wet media approach I’d been taking was stronger than the digital but I knew that was just because no one could see how I was imagining it in my head. So I persevered with it and managed to make it work where I might once have gone with what everyone else preferred. That was a huge step for me but is definitely something I need to do more and also quicker in my practise so that I don't waste time by being indecisive.

Strengths:

1. I am a skilled crafts person. For the most part I can make an image look the way I want it to look and I am consistently surprised at how well my images turn out
2. I also think I have pretty good visual language in that I am capable of translating something that I’m seeing and putting it onto paper, but more than that I am good at communicating an idea through my work. It was one of my goals in the last module to make my work more evocative and I think I’m getting there
3. My way of brainstorming and creating a response to something is exhaustive and I wont stop trialling until I can look at what I’ve made and say that I am fully happy with it. Whether thats a side effect of my perfectionist personality or a sign that I am truly a good illustrator I’m not sure (can it be both?)
4. My sense of humour and generally the way I look at life seem to come through quite well in my practise. I think as my sense of humour is such a huge part of what makes me up as a person its always been something I’m keep for people to see in my work and I think I’m only just getting that right now. As well as this its been nice in the last few briefs to be able to talk about and make art about something that interests me as an individual (the sticker brief) and its made me realise that if I carry on talking about what interests me in my own practise then I will likely always find it easier to carry on being motivated to make work
5. I am a very reflective person, I didn't realise until starting this course how reflective I was. At first I think I was scared of using the blog to be honest about my thoughts and feelings, but after writing my evaluation for narratives where I literally just poured my heart out about how stressful I’d found the project, I can appreciate that it was partly down to how self reflective I’d been that I’d got such  good mark and positive feedback. So now I can see the point in reflection and how it helps me make sense of my own practise and to help others understand the process I went through to get to the outcome