ep: evaluation

This module has been long and enlightening, to put it shortly. I have learned so much throughout these months and my practice has grown and developed so much. I really enjoyed the freedom of the module and being able to choose my own briefs, this really helped me to pick and choose when to play in my comfort zone or branch out. I could choose whether to work more on personal briefs or keep entering competitions and I think it gave me an idea of what to expect when entering the world after university. It will very much be like how this year has gone, except with less blogging and essays. I was able to work on my interest in character design, through the Drawing My Friends brief, and figure out more about who I want to be as an illustrator, as I have always had this image in my head of being a concept artist or character designer. Therefore being able to work on these types of briefs helped me to shape my practice and work out what it is I want to do. It also helped me to discover how much I enjoy working on children’s books and children’s illustration. I love creating worlds and stories to tell children, creating characters who they can relate to or want to cuddle at night. I really enjoyed combining children’s illustration with my love for character design, because I feel like it gelled better like this, rather than me drawing characters for a game or animation. I felt more in control of my practice, and as someone who has always said they don’t want to become a freelance illustrator, it looks like that is where I am heading.

I struggled a lot this year with my mental health and this effected my motivation and my willingness to go to the crit sessions. I struggle badly with social anxiety and it has got gradually worse over the past year, making it difficult to gain peer feedback from my tutorial groups as I can’t bring myself to go. This is something I need to overcome when thinking about the future because my practice strives when I am being given peer feedback. Either online or face to face, I know that with my practice I need to be given feedback. This is one of the reasons why working within a studio environment in the future appeals to me, I just need to find some illustrators who live in Manchester who will share a studio with me. I really value peer feedback because it allows me to get different opinions and possibly notice something that I didn’t see before.

Out of some of the crit sessions that I did attend, there were positive murmurings when looking at Montgomery. I think my peers are so used to my drawings being cute and whimsical it was fun for them to see me push myself out of my comfort zone and try to draw something, or someone, pulling an ugly or contorted face. It was not only fun for them to look at, but fun for me to draw, and this brief helped me to push myself when it comes to my character’s facial expressions. Although this sounds menial, it is so vital when trying to make a story or a character with personality if they don’t have any facial expression. It made me push out of the comfort of everything looking perfect and symmetrical and have fun with expression rather than being scared of it. This is also true when it came to Biff, who helped me to develop facial expression drawings even on a dragon.

As this module was mostly self-directed, that gave me pressure to keep good time management. I think this year I did well with making sure that I was up to date most of the time, sometimes there were dips of motivational struggle, however I always brought it back and posted those drafts and worked on those sketches and I’m really proud of myself. For once in my evaluation I can say that I kept good time management. That truly is some growth if I’ve ever seen it.

Even though the module was self-directed, I really enjoyed working on competition briefs as well as my own briefs. Having the freedom to choose which one to work on made me feel more confident and professional. It also meant I could choose briefs to suit me and work on my own briefs at the same time.