so now that the illustration project is complete I thought I'd look back and see what was done and maybe reflect a bit.
A) I thought it was great. the fact that we had one week deadlines (with internal deadlines in those) meant that when it came to assessment, there was no last minute crazy the night before trying to finish stuff off. it all flowed quite naturally, no stress involved. and at the end of the four weeks I was even a little surprised how well it all worked out!
B) great opportunity to draw something proper again, I haven't had the chance to do this in a long time for some reason (projects upon projects, wanting to try new techiques and being overwhelmed by all the new things that were being discovered, etc). I felt as I completed each week's assignment that I had learned a lot about editorial illustration and my personal place in it, learned a lot about what I'd done right or wrong generally. personal development, yay.
C) the result was clear cut. there was room for experimentation but in the end there was a definite response we had to come up with. I kind of like that; too much freedom can be a bad thing in my case (I tend to never finish anything...).
D) integrating the blogs into the project was also a very good idea, it meant you could easily see what everyone else had done (for whatever reason). people could share easily and it was all a very open atmosphere.

now for the other side:
A) I wish the crit sessions were structured differently. The final one was pretty interesting (Catherine from Arena came and gave us her thoughts), but other than that it was generally quite... uninspiring. sometimes because there was nothing said, sometimes because everyone was just too brain-numbed waiting for their turn to contribute (the first session especially!). the positive-negative-interesting was a good idea but I really wish we had had small groups of students sharing work with each other and giving each other feedback and most importantly of all getting to know each other a little bit. it felt like people tended to shy away when it went through a third party (eg. the tutor). I think in smaller groups people would feel much more comfortable sharing their thoughts and starting discussions maybe. but hey.
B) thought the diversity of the articles we were given was perhaps kind of... bland. maybe too abstract? All Ears is fine but 4 times in a row it just gets a little boring. we were encouraged to experiment, and maybe it would've made sense to make the articles more 'challenging' (ie. with varying levels of information/content/theme/length etc) as we went along (so that the last one required us to use everything we'd learned already but still teach us something more).

that's all I can think of at the moment. generally it was a very enjoyable and positive experience! and I'm even quite happy with the outcomes, I feel like I actually got somewhere with this, so it's all good... I'm really interested in comparing the assessment outcome now, hopefully we'll get it back soon.

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