Visual Narratives - Evaluation

Beginning with, the ‘One Week Map’ brief, I would say that whilst I enjoyed the day out wandering about Leeds looking for inspiration, I struggled to maintain enthusiasm for the brief after that, finding the collaborative element challenging. I appreciate the fact that collaboration is very much inescapable as a practicing illustrator and that that made the brief very relevant in its challenges, but the main problem seemed to be the fact that due to a lack of familiarity within the group, we were not confident in criticising, or even suggesting ideas, something I would assume is fairly at odds with a practitioner’s collaborative experience. In any case, I was not very keen on the prints we ended up with. The fact that, as a group, we were fairly unenthusiastic and reluctant to really share and evaluate ideas showed in, what I deem to be, a pretty lackluster set of outcomes.

I was not particularly bothered by this as it was not something I was very invested in and I had understood that one of the main aims of this brief was to serve as a screen print induction, something I had never done before and am now keen to try on my own terms. My only reservation is the length of the process and how involved it all seemed to be. I usually work in a spontaneous, instinctual way and will no doubt find it a challenge working using such a time consuming technique. Hopefully it might benefit my practice though, inspiring a little more discipline in the way I think about the work I’m creating.

I found the research brief to be a very useful segue into the process of creating my final picture book, the ‘Yorkshire Sculpture Park’ trip in particular. The observational drawings, looking through holes etc., were the most important step for me in arriving at the final themes I would consider in my picture book. It’s difficult, in fact, for me to separate the last two briefs as I felt my ideas flowed continually and consistently like a stream of consciousness. Unfortunately, the ephemera I managed to collect was fairly feeble and didn’t support my project, and likewise, the conversations I had were interesting and definitely could have lead somewhere, but didn’t end up being relevant to my final ideas. I think the processes of recording and documenting conversations and collecting interesting items from trips could prove useful to me in the development future creative endeavours but for this project, after the trip I had such a strong sense of where my project might go that they proved unnecessary. I think in the future I should perhaps keep an open mind for longer.

My picture book felt like it resulted very naturally from my research and I was very happy with how organic the flow of thought and work was that lead up to it. It was satisfying for me to have a project where the final outcome felt like the best piece of work I created for the project, as usually once I start working with the knowledge that specific pieces of work will form a final outcome, my image making becomes much more apprehensive and is often less authentic feeling than some of the preparatory work. This brief also introduced me to new ways of working (using cut paper and cut out shapes) which I enjoyed and will no doubt return to in future. It was also nice that these new ways of image making occurred to me in close relation with the developing themes of my book, so that these processes began to seem almost axiomatic. My thoughts and the conceptual development of this brief informed my exploration into these new practical avenues without conscious effort and I found the way in which conceptual developments informed practical developments and vice versa wholly satisfying. The only problems I’ve encountered really have been technical issues which I intend to remedy when I reprint the book in digital print on Monday.