Assignment 2

Presenting your work

Go back through the work you have produced in this part of the course, especially the seven outcomes of the exercises.

Make a presentation, slideshow, speech or powerpoint that you feel reflects the interesting and varied collection of work you have produced.

The slideshow could be a selective sketchbook or portfolio review that shows the processes and decisions you have made so far.

Show examples of your work, respond to your visual responses, and reference previous work.

Flick through your sketchbooks, show different stages of development, be creative.

Slideshow should be around 7 minutes long, the Pecha Kulcha model is good to structure your work, use so slides, shown for 20 seconds each.

To start this assignment I started to look back through my sketchbook so far, and read back over my learning log for things to talk about and show for the presentation.

I have already decided to film the presentation on my camera, I have done a few You Tube videos and know how to edit for these, so I’ll use the same techniques here for this, I’ll also be using Premier Pro on my computer for the editing software.

My next thoughts are should I have a script to work from? I don’t usually script my You Tube videos, but I have bullet points I follow to talk about.

I need to research the Pecha Kulcha model as I haven’t heard of that before, but having 20 images and show for 20 seconds each makes sense when pacing the video.

Then I decided to go for a mind map to plan out my thought process to deliver my presentation, and how the images relate to the bullet points.

Generating ideas

My idea consisted of going back over all 7 exercises and using the images to explain my process through the section and how I can use the things I’ve learnt in my process and day to life as an illustrator and my goals for the future work.

Bullet points

I gave myself 7 bullet points to coincide with the 7 exercises, then broke it down into how many images I would use from each exercise.

Presentation set up

I set up my presentation area in my home office/ spare room, I was using my camera for filming.

After filming most of the presentation I had a day or twos break, then all needed to do was film the images I had chosen and edit it all and put it together, but unfortunately my camera decided to go wrong at this point! so I couldn’t access what I had already filmed, nor could I film the rest!

But I think luckily for me this was a good thing, as I read back over the assignment and realised I was going at the presentation from the wrong angle.

So I re-sat down and thought about what it was asking me to do, so the new way forward is to pick 3-5 exercises that I had the most connection with and could see taking forward to use in my practise, to help me to think of and generate ideas for whole scenes for children’s illustrations.

I also went back to the drawing board with equipment too, and decided to use my phone camera instead.

Editing

I used Premier pro for editing my videos and images to make into my presentation, it didn’t take to long to upload, and as I have used it quite often before I found it easy to use.

I had to up-load it to You Tube to create a link to the video, as I couldn’t up-load videos directly to WordPress unless you up-graded and paid £84, which I was not going to do for this one video.

But having the link to You Tube did the job just as well, it took a little longer in time but was fine.

The finished presentation

Here is the link to my finished presentation on You Tube:- https://youtu.be/l2gFn9hBjZU

Reflections

On assignment 2

What went well?

Overall I didn’t have a huge problem with this assignment, it was well within my comfort zone, and having used editing software, talking to the camera and making a presentation is fairly normal for me.

The only thing I had initially trouble with was what the assignment was asking, but after re-reading the brief a few times, I was able to gauge the outcome that was wanted.

Hopefully I was able to put this across in the presentation, and you can see what I was saying I had learnt from the section.

I found the assignment interesting and good looking back on the work I had created and what bits I had taken from it to use in my own practise, and how I can develop more as a children’s book illustrator, by creating and generating ideas for whole scenes. I feel these ideas would also help with creative writing and art block, as they give you pictures that you can base whole story around to develop further.

What could have gone better?

My camera going wrong was not the best, it added extra time to my work, and I got a little behind time wise to submit the work, but overall In a roundabout way it was good it went wrong, as I feel the feedback wouldn’t have been that great as I missed the point originally of what the assignment was asking for.

It’s a shame WordPress doesn’t let you add videos for free, again this added some time to my work, which I wasn’t anticipating. (this seems to be a new thing, as I have up-loaded videos before with out having to up-grade!)

Section 2 overall reflection

What have you enjoyed the most and the least?

I enjoyed setting down from the start my comfort zone and non comfort zones, this really helped me to pin point what areas I need to work more on to develop to become a well rounded illustrator.

I enjoyed the mind mapping and using a thesaurus for finding words, although I already do this this in my practise, this way of doing it took it that one step further.

I enjoyed drawing all the words, although also found this challenging and I felt stretched when doing this, but really benefitted from these exercises.

The collage was the craft I least enjoyed, it was too time consuming and not something I would choose to do as an art form, but I did get a lot out of the process, and think this would be a good practise to take forward if I had art block or needed something totally different and new to focus on or work on.

Overall all of the processes worked in some way to help me generate ideas, and how to bring together pictures to make whole scenes.

Which pieces of work do you feel have been the most successful and why?

I think the drawings from exercise 5 were the ones where I really started to see the individual illustrations come together to create a new whole picture spread. This exercise was a turning point where I could see the process working and how to take ideas in a new direction.

Also this collage from exercise 7 I found the most benefiting for my work, it took new ideas into another realm that I hadn’t thought of, and could see this working for writing stories as well as illustrating them. My imagination was really sparked by this college picture.

What areas would you like to develop further?

I would like to use the process from this section in my practise and get used to using them when I need them for work or projects, to see how I get on with them. Then from that I want to develop and make more whole illustration scenes for my portfolio, and see where this takes me.