During my
one-to-one tutorial we looked at my work up to this point, focussing mainly on
the Carmelite Prize brief. It helped to highlight changes that would benefit
current briefs as well as what I should be doing to improve my practice in
general. It was pointed out to me that the main character in the Carmelite Prize
text is supposed to be a sea otter but my illustrations don’t make this clear.
The character looked more like a teddy bear than anything else. I have been concentrating
so much on trying to illustrate a character I thought looked cute and cuddly,
that I have lost focus on what I was trying to depict. As soon as it was pointed
out to me it was glaringly obvious, but without being told I don’t think I
would have noticed. This highlights the importance of taking a step back and evaluating
work at regular intervals. More general suggestions to benefit my practice were
to:
-
experiment more with colour and create juxtapositions between warm and cold
tones
- experiment more with characters’
positions and poses which can feel quite rigid in compositions
- create a range of animal characters
to form part of portfolio
- look at how characters could be
used in advertising as well as children’s books
I have just finished my final piece for the North Bar and St Gemma’s Hospice
‘Tintin’ brief. I have enjoyed this brief and it has
been a useful side project alongside illustrating books. It felt like an opportunity to try out ideas
with more freedom and less commitment to a particular process or idea. I think
it is a good idea going forward to have small personal briefs running alongside
larger ones as a means of testing out both idea generation and process, with an
end goal to act as motivation but broad enough to allow experimentation. Aside
from developing my practice, briefs like this provide an opportunity for work
to be seen by a wider audience. As part of a portfolio, pieces of this kind demonstrate
my ability to produce work other than children’s publications. I think it is
important not to pigeon-hole myself too much. I am really enjoying working on
children’s books and I see it being the main focus of my practice going forward,
but there are a number of other possible applications of my work such as
advertising, animation, gift cards/stationary and editorial. I want to create
work that appeals to both adults and children and develop a greater understanding
of how to tailor my work to suit each target audience.
I have just finished a very last-minute brief for the
Templar Prize. I only found out about the prize with 10 days until the
submission but I wanted to take part in the competition as a way to experiment with
creating work to a very strict time scale. The main benefit I got from this
brief was a better understanding of roughing out compositions. I didn’t have
time to add much detail to the pages and found that having that constraint
forced me to think differently about my illustrations.
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