I am pleased with my work and happy I did the course at Stockport College. It has been a journey and there have been ups and downs with developing my style over the three years. I think I have found my style, which is making things out of materials and photographing it and working to a large scale. However, I do like trying out different methods and I do need to make more progress on my work and after university I don’t want to stop or take a break, I will try and stay motivated as like Mr Motivator.
My next aim after university is to do masses of work experience, with companies who create music videos, set design, prop making, window displays, creating festivals and have fun and enjoy what I do.
I also have fears about what to do after university; having no tutor to look at my work and give me guidance, I will find it hard at first but through my Personal Development Programme I have realised that this will be my guidance with contacts and artists in the industry, to help with my work and vice versa.
London was a confidence booster, on our first portfolio visit I was nervous but, after a few visits I got a bit more confident with displaying my work. When at university you are in a bubble and it is great to hear comments on your work from other people in the industry looking at your work and giving you advice.
The opportunities so far are, I have been offered a few work experiences in London and, to keep up with my work/portfolio, I will try and get a job in a creative environment to have the money coming in, such as a visual merchandiser or a creative assistant in retail head office, to further my career and to keep my motivation going.
My three major projects which I have done this year are Touring Cubes proposal for D&AD Awards, Book Illustration and Fish Tank proposal for Music. The Touring Cubes and Fish Tank proposals were a different way of working, more on architecture and locations and also were song based. I really enjoyed working on these projects; I worked in my style by creating the handmade props and tweaking them in Photoshop. I understand Photoshop now but I still need to discover how to use more of its tools. I know when the image looks right, because of what I am trying to communicate and then I take a photograph of it.
With the Touring Cubes, they were based on two tracks from an artist. I based it on the images of the meaning of two songs and was influenced by a science artist called Will Burtin His work are scientific models, some contain in glass boxes, with flashing interactive installations. A visual artist, Annette Messanger, with an installation of an inflate/deflate human body, also influenced me. This project was scientific; I would like to work like this again.
The Fish Tank I art directed the same way as with the Touring Cubes. The image was photographed and I created the pieces myself. In the future I would like to be an art director. I had to work on the designed to be displayed on three panels for a meeting room. I based the imagery on a track called ‘fish’ by Mr Scruff, an artist, and, because the song is quirky and humorous, it fits my style of working. I interpreted the song and focused on the two vocal samples. I did find it hard at first to communicate the mock up. I thought of sticking the element to the glass but that was a bad idea and also I thought of fishing wire. I got this idea when I went to Common, a bar in the Northern Quarter of Manchester to see window installations by two artists, called Lord Whitney Installation.
I am pleased with the outcome and, as this is for a live proposal, hopefully the agency will say yes, so I can install it. If I did it again I would change my time keeping; we had a two week break and I should have had the confidence to make my own decisions; however, I waited to speak to my tutor and he had the idea of actually making the elements and taking a photograph and I already had that in mind over the Easter holidays, therefore could have worked on the project sooner.
I based the book illustration on “Soulmates” by Marian Keyes. I used a different working style with this book illustration. I enjoyed printing the colours and will use this technique in the future but I am not a standard illustrator, thinking within four lines and I don’t think this image complements my other images. I tried to think of the word ‘Soulmates’ and I did lots of research and I came up with the science behind it, as a chemical reaction.
I’m looking forward to my experiences and personal development next year; this is a new beginning to further develop myself as an artist.
