The Creative Industries & me - Study Task 2

I think the areas of the creative industries where my work fits the most is Character & Narrative and Publishing & Book Design.

In my work, I primarily focus on character, narrative and humour, and putting that into physical comics! However, my work could potentially (and has in the past) expand into Editorial & Reportage, as there is opportunity for studying people/characters, or making comics as editorial pieces.

My work could also expand into Retail & Merchandise, as in the future I do hope to expand my practice into saleable products, such as mugs and T-shirts for example. In Responsive, I'm doing the UK Greetings brief, which involves producing not only greetings cards but also accompanying wrapping paper and a gift bag, so I'll need to consider how my work will work in those formats. This also comes under Product & Packaging.

I could also envision my work in the Advertising & Promotion category, perhaps in the form of gig posters or other event advertising, as that is something I'm personally interested in.

The only area of the creative industries I'm not sure my work fits in is Object & Environment. I'm not quite sure what this category actually entails (I don't like to draw either of these things really), but I guess perhaps how my illustration would fit in an environment such as a shop window, or on a large-scale mural? A lot of these industries seem to overlap!

I guess my work could fit in that industry, but I think comic strips (and graphic novels) work better on paper/the web, rather than blown up to a larger scale, but I could see a character-based piece at a bigger size in the environment.

Rob Hodgson Big Heads (and other ramblings)

Honestly the only thing I really took note of from Rob Hodgson's Big Heads talk was right at the end when he said no-one really cares in the industry if you went to university or not, or what grade you got.

Sounds like I'm being cynical, but I have thought about this quite a bit before. Creative subjects like Illustration, Graphic Design, Animation etc., can't really be graded or quantified. Creativity and talent is so subjective. In some respects, Maths and Physics are a lot easier than doing a creative subject (or at least that's what I shout at my brother every time he tells me I'm not doing a real subject) because there ARE right answers. You can look up the answer and it's easy to quantify. In the creative industries you can't really be right or wrong! Some people will like your work, some won't. If they don't, it doesn't mean it's bad work.

But back to Rob; if you don't succeed at university in a creative subject, it's not necessarily representative of you talent and passion. There are so many boxes to tick and hoops to jump through in order to try and make sure everyone is graded fairly, but in the end, once you get a job or go freelance, all consumers (and bosses) care about is the end product. They don't necessarily care how you got there and how many hours it took you, just that they get a pretty picture out of it.

Again, not being cynical!

However, university does obviously have a point. I've already learned so much only being here a year and a half, things I wouldn't and couldn't have learned on my own, but sometimes I do find it stressful constantly ticking boxes and jumping through hoop after hoop. Sometimes it takes the fun out of drawing.

I do think I've picked the right course for me though. I do love it, even though it kills me sometimes, but if things are worth having, they shouldn't come easy. I hate to be cheesy and add a quote, but, 

"If your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough." - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf


(and I'm scared every day!)

Thought Bubble!

OUIL502 Study Task 1

5...

...things I've learned on this programme so far:

☼ ROUGHS
☼ To take more risks in my work
☼ Less is more (sometimes) - e.g. reductive image
☼ To draw things over and over
☼ It's okay to make mistakes

...skills I think are my strengths:

☼ Comics
☼ Humour
☼ Character
☼ Narrative
☼ Academic writing

...things I want to improve:

☼ Digital skills
☼ My self-confidence
☼ TIME-MANAGEMENT
☼ My 'visual signature'
☼ Blogging

...things I want to know more about:

☼ Animation
☼ Comics industry
☼ How practitioners stay motivated/avoid procrastination
☼ How to network
☼ Digital drawing

...practitioners that demonstrate my interest in illustration:

☼ Bryan Lee O'Malley
☼ Kate Beaton
☼ Rubyetc
☼ Ellen Forney
☼ Luke Pearson

...websites/online resources that demonstrate my areas of interest within the creative industries:

☼ juxtapoz.com
☼ imagecomics.com
☼ nobrow.net
☼ vice.com
☼ drawnandquarterly.com

Banana Magnet

Today's collaboration mini-brief was... interesting!

Mine and Bronte's idea of an app called Hangry Hi-5 was selected. The concept was an app where you could order food and also meet new people to eat it with, like a combination of Just Eat and Tinder.


The day started off well, with lots of ideas and brainstorming, especially once we teamed up with a few other pairs to become a team of about 10 people.

However, once the whole room of about 40 students got involved, things started getting a bit more stressful! 

I really enjoyed working collaboratively, not just in a pair, but in a small team too. It's useful to get different perspectives on your ideas that lead to other, better ideas that you wouldn't have come up with alone. However, I think with a larger team of about 40, ideas start to get lost in translation.

Perhaps this was due to the fact that neither Bronte or I felt particularly comfortable being leaders! Thankfully we had Josh from Graphic Design acting as a spokesperson who conferred with each smaller team of students working on each aspect of the app (marketing, branding, the advert, the pitch and the presentation).

We had a bit of a dispute over the slogan - 'You might like me when I'm hangry' vs. 'Meet, greet, eat'. Bronte and I felt that the first one was better, as it captured both the hangry element of the app and the humour behind it, as well as relating it to the target audience of university students by referencing a well-known film. However, a lot of people chose the second option because it was shorter and snappier. But many people had trouble remembering which way round the words went anyway, and it felt like too serious a slogan for 'Hangry Hi-5'! But we took a democratic vote and the latter slogan won, but we were still going to use the first slogan as part of the voiceover in the animation.

Unfortunately the animation was lost because After Effects crashed, but we managed to salvage the basic points and still make a decent pitch.

Overall, I think today was an incredibly useful exercise in teamwork - listening to each other to get the job done! It was personally useful to me too, to build up my confidence a bit and to not take constructive criticism personally.

I do think we were the group that took this brief the most seriously!

LCA Illustration magazine?

Today in the studio, a few of us were talking about the possibility of an illustration magazine? Nest already exists at LCA but some of us feel that it's much more graphics/photography based, and we'd like something a bit different to showcase the talent of BA Illustration! And maybe perhaps branching out into disciplines like animation/fine art once we got a bit more experience with being editors.

The kind of thing I was thinking was like Nobrow magazine - where we set a theme (similar to Nest too), and get students from all levels of Illustration to submit things in relation to that theme.

I went to the Vernon Street library to have a look at their display of Nobrow books.

Or, on the other hand, maybe just showcase work that students have made in other briefs that they're proud of? Or both?

First day back! Summer projects!

Today, we looked at what everyone on all levels of Illustration had been drawing over summer, and identified a few of our favourite pages:

There were a few pages in this sketchbook that I loved, all with different approaches to image-making: