What do I want (and need to do)?
What skills you may need to develop and help set a benchmark for what you want to do next.
Use this exercise to audit your practice to date, identifying practical, technical and theoretical aspects, forming an evaluative statement that maps and plans for a sustainable and professional way of working.
Starting with any previous reflective commentary, write a paragraph about your aspirations and ideals, do you have set goals or prefer to work intuitively? Include practical information such as describing your medium and processes as well as the ideas in the work and why you make it. Think about what you are trying to communicate to an audience and who it is intended for.
Initial ideas:-
My main aim for taking this degree has always been to illustrate books for children. I had specifically chosen to take ‘Illustrating Sketchbooks’ and ‘Creative Book Design’ units to help me on this path.
Through my time whilst completing this degree I have learnt so much about texture, colour, making visuals from words, book covers, sketchbook work etc. Also some courses I took alongside my degree, surface patterns design, running your own business, making products etc. that I have developed a uniques style with illustrating which I didn’t have when I started.
I have found a lot of professional illustrators that still use traditional mediums to illustrate their work, but they use digital means to layer, clean and prepare for art directors. This process sits with my practise as I do not want to loose the traditional painting and that extra feeling the paint strokes and texture gives, which is lost with pure digital illustration these days.
Through working on my last unit, I spent a lot of time working on making some illustrations for a story I had in my mind over the course of year 2. From what I learnt a lot about texture, colour, composition and had the idea of using surface pattern design in my process to make my style unique.
Illustrations I did for Folktale week ’22 Including surface pattern design.
The coat in little red riding hoods outfit.
The background wallpaper in Alice in wonderland.
The 3 flowers in Look for magic.
I find children respond well to texture and colour in books and they enjoy looking at the illustrations, and look for small details that can be hidden or add an extra layer to the story.
The age range I am thinking of is for children that love picture books, 4-8 year olds.
So what I want to do/ enjoy:-
Is to illustrate a story I have already written, use my mixed media style and include surface pattern design into my work, to create texture, colour and interest in the pictures, and have unique compositions that are exciting.
How:-
Looking back through year 2 I need to work on or work more on (practise) these elements below:-
- Composition
- IN DESIGN skills
- Words into visuals
- Word counts on pages
- Practise adding surface pattern design
- Learn steps a illustrator has illustrating a book
I like to have a clear process to work through, steps that I work along to complete a task.
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