About The Author: Self Evaluation

WHAT skills have you developed through this brief and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

• Lino Cutting, I have never used or been near Lino before and although they didn't play a massive part in my final I do think that learning the process was good for me and I can apply them to future work. 
• Mono Printing, I developed a lot of mono prints over this brief and I think they were really effective. They added a lot to my final pieces without me actually mono printing the finals but I also really liked the process, I found it easy and produced work I liked so I'll be using it again in the future. 
• Screenprint , I developed my screen printing skills more in this brief and they were very effective as I actually produced a good screen print (rather than previous ones that had come out misaligned or smudged) and learned more about doing the process well and dealing with problems. 
• Collaging, I initially hated collage but through practicing and developing my skills, I ended up applying them to my finals and they were very effective as they worked so well for the concept. 
• Adobe CC, My skills in photoshop and After Effects have really developed over this brief and all contributed to final pieces in some way. I can now apply photoshop to my works without the fear of it becoming too digitalised looking and I can now make stings in After Effects (although these skills were not so effective as I think my sting could be better I was still pleased I managed to make it)
• Scale was a big skill developed in this brief, I had been working small previously but with the introduction of a bigger sketchbook it allowed my drawing skills to improve and my concepts to have more room to grow so they were very effective. 

WHAT approaches to/methods of image making have you developed and how have they informed your concept development process?

I tried many different methods to image making as I found this project a hard one in terms of figuring out what medium would suit the authors style. A positive that came out of this for me was that I pushed myself to try out a large variety of things.

• A bigger sketchbook was one of the most important turning points in my project, I had been making all my images previously to a A5 format. Around a month and a half into the project I was getting really stuck with all of my work being centred around small fine liner drawings and water colours. I tried to get out of it by drawing in quick painted figures but something was just not working. Changing to a big A3 sketchbook really put me out my comfort zone but by doing so allowed me more space to work. 

• Painting wasn't a massive stage in the process but I did figure out after doing a few pages of paintings that it wasn't the right medium for me this time.

•  Lino cutting was a first for me, although I did not use it in my finals I now understand how it works and with that knowledge can use it more in my work in the future. It also means I understand what can be done with it. It didn't fit in the kind of feelings I felt for my author so I didn't take it further in the project. 

• Screenprint was an important process in the image making, it was my first successful print I've made and I really enjoyed the images I took from the workshop. At one point I was considering developing more for my finals but at this point I hadn't tried enough mediums to settle on it straight away. However i did use the image I made and placed it digitally into the background of another (into the woods, in the right hand corner) and it worked well. 

• Monoprint was another thing I had had little experience with in the past and it was a major part of my finals. When I was trying out mono print I was still struggling to visualise my interpretation of the author. I wanted that sense of vibrancy you get when reading the novels but combined with a sense of disconnection from the real world. From the mono print I got the vibrancy, the inks were fresh colours that I hadn't achieved previously and their textures added to images. 

• This lead me to collage. Previously I have hated collage, it is not something I am ever eager to do but as I was sticking in some scraps from the mono print session I realised something magic had happened on the page and I was finally seeing what I had struggled to make for so long. The collage allowed me to experiment with that sense of distortion and disconnection that is so often in Murakami's books but the mono print grounded it at the same time. Collaging was the massive key turning point in my project it. 

• I created the finals on photoshop but all of them were derived from scanned in textures and larger scale collages I had previously made. The use of photoshop allowed me to make the mono print textures different colours without loosing any of the vibrancy and allowing them to meet the brief's 2 colour limit. 
• After I had created 5 potential finals, I took one and turned it into a After Effects 15 second sting instead. The whole process of having a collage in photoshop made it much easier to implement objects to move around in After Effects rather than having to create the whole thing in photoshop. 

WHAT  strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?

• My photoshop skills have really improved within this project, I feel much more at ease with it now especially since I brought in work made manually and edited a fair amount in photoshop (although i don't feel it became digital looking). How will I capitalise on these in the future? perhaps instead of creating a background entirely in photoshop I now understand how to adjust colours and size better so that I can bring in more manually made paintings/collages etc to create something more realistic and less stylised. 

• Collaging as a process I view as being highly successful in this project. It is the one thing people have continuously commented on as working well for me. I have seen it in a new light and from this I will be more likely to  include it in my future work and take it forward with me and develop it into part of my style as an illustrator. 

• Organisation is something I feel was a strength in this project. In contrast to previous projects, I have invested my time better this year. I brought a white board to make a schedule for every week and from that I have had many more good days where I created  focused better quality work,  by planning my breaks/ how I am spending each day/what the focus for each day is. As well as this I made sure I had a diary on me at all times to translate from home to uni so that my schedule was always with me and additional things I needed to do could be put in. I plan to capitalise on this by continuing the method the rest of the year. 

• Using a variety of mediums was a strength for me in this process. I often get stuck in doing things a certain way once I am comfortable with them (working in fine liner often happens) but this time I made a conscious effort to step out of my comfort zone and try out a wide range of mediums and not settle on something for my final too early on.  It really helped expand my horizons and rather than knowing how to do one thing well, I now know how to do more things at a higher standard. 

• Working to a bigger scale was a strength in my work. It added more to my work and made me work harder to figure out how to fill the space (or how to use the negative space that I gained). It also gave me room to expand out ideas and to try out new mediums. I'm going to capitalise on this strength by not returning to my former A5 sketchbooks (apart from personal sketchings) and keep it big for the rest of the year. 

 WHAT  weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?

• I think quality of work was perhaps a weakness in my work this time, I was making a lot of prints to test out the mediums but they were only testers. Perhaps I could have gone back with a more focused idea (knowing what the mediums were like) and planned pieces to make so that there was more intent behind them. 

• There wasn't a lot of typography used, I'm not sure whether that is a weakness or not but I definitely think I should have invested more time in trying out placing words into the finals. There was some work on typography (when I looked at calligraphy) but I really didn't take it that much further and I wonder whether I should have done. 

• Another weakness in my work was that I wasn't around for many of the feedback sessions and I missed out a lot of the mega crits too because, in all honesty, for most of the project a lot of my work was just testers and nothing final so I really didn't like what I was making and when I don't see anything I like in my work I struggle to hear people criticise it even more than I already am. Next time around, I can only try and be positive towards my work and try to find something I like in there and not let myself hating it hold me back from showing it to everyone. Most of what I have made has come from personal decisions alone. I think this was both a weakness and a strength, as the author Murakami's characters are very isolated, it allowed me to get into that mindset without too much of an outside influence. However I think that the feedback sessions I did attend were beneficial and that by not getting to them all, I may have missed out on some constructive feedback that might've got me to the answer I was looking for sooner or might have produced a more rounded outcome. 

• I think another weakness was my After Effects sting, although it is good I still think it is one of the weakest things I've made in this project and if I had spent some more time on it, it might have come out better/smoother than it has. In the future I now know how to use the programme so I can have more time to play with it and I understand the basics. 

IDENTIFY  five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

• I will make sure to attend all the feedback sessions and mega crits, these are important and I hope to gain more confidence about my own work and try not to feel bad about the process. 

• I will contribute to the group more, this module I have been by myself a lot which was fine for my project but I should have been around to add my contribution to class feedback sessions and mega crits. 

• I will try to produce a higher quality of work, even in my testers. I expect to gain better end results from this (although I wasn't disappointed this time, I do think that by testing out the mediums to a higher quality could have improved some of the end). 

• I won't hold back, I think that this project has really opened me up to seeing that I have been holding back and staying comfortable in the past. In this project I have tried more things than ever (even things that I never thought id enjoy doing- collage) and I can only try to apply this to the next projects I do and to keep experimenting with new things. 

• I will blog more efficiently, although I was organised this project I think that my blogging could have been far better. It is improving but when I'm producing a lot of work I tend to forget to scan in most of it. So I plan to make a "scan in" day once every week/two weeks to make sure that my blog is constantly up to date. 

Overall I don't think there is that much I would do differently, this project is one of the most productive modules I've had so far so I'm going to try and continue this on with the rest of the modules I am doing and will do in the future. 

                 

.How would you grade yourself on the following areas:  (please indicate using an ‘x’)   5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
	1	2	3	4	5
Attendance			x
Punctuality				x
Motivation			x
Commitment				x
Quantity of work produced			x
Quality of work produced			x
Contribution to the group			x
The evaluation of your work is an important part of the assessment criteria and represents a percentage of the overall grade. It is essential that you give yourself enough time to complete your written evaluation fully and with appropriate depth and level of self-reflection. If you have any questions relating to the self-evaluation process speak to a member of staff as soon as possible.

ATA: Final Reflection - Visual Enquiry

This is my final reflection on my work over this project. It goes from my smaller A5 work up to my evolving work in my A3 and how I picked out themes before turning them into collages.

ATA: Final Response : A Cross-Platform Collection - Printed Pictures

These are my finals for my Printed pictures section. Each piece is made up from mono print and coloured paper collage (one does have screen print in). In the end I made the decision to digitally print the pieces on matt paper in the digital dungeon. I discussed printing it on sunset paper but everyone discouraged me from doing so as they all felt it would work better on white paper. 

I'm very satisfied with my outcomes although I do wish I had had more time to experiment printing onto other papers. 

"swimming pool"

"Train line"

"into the woods" (screen print in top right) 

"lonely room" 

ATA: Final Response: A Cross-Platform Collection - Moving Pictures

KATIE WADE - ILLUSTRATION - SECOND YEAR - OUIL504 - STUDIO BRIEF 2 from Katie Wade on Vimeo.


This is my finished sting! It took me around 6 hours to make this overall. When I was making the collages for my final pieces, I originally made 5 to reflect the different scenes from Norwegian wood, After Dark and Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage. However after I had made the five, one of them didn't fit in as well as the rest. It still retained the same aspects as the others but it wasn't quite the same composition and not as intimate as the others.

I could have gone back and arranged it to make it more of a scene but instead I decided that this was what I would use as my background for my sting. It was inspired by the book After Dark so it still kept in with my idea of a city.  Up until this point I had not done too much on my sting other than decide some basic animations for it, and planning to include a cat within it. I found it hard to make the sting before or during my making of the final pieces so waited until the end to make it so it would fit in better.

The concept I had before worked well with the collage. At first I tried to create individual bits that moved within the collage and take it into after effects but it wasn't matching up very well and it was hard to animate them in a way that was believable.
Scrapping this I then went on to make it more stop-motion animation by moving the objects in photoshop, saving them as individual tifs before bringing them into After Effects.
This did make the process longer and I think that there are probably shortcuts around what I did eventually, I ended up with a lot of layers to manage but luckily I gave them individual names so I didn't loose track of what was going on.

Once I had finished the sting, I started looking at the music to put to it.  For my Murakami playlist I have been listening to a lot of jazz and blues on spotify (as it's something that influences the author heavily and reflects on his characters/mentioned numerous times in his work) over the course of the project. The only problem with this was that if I used a song from that playlist, it was most likely not free and I would have to put a disclaimer on my work and risk it coming down in the future.
If I could have picked any song it probably would have been Five Spot After Dark by Curtis Fuller (1959) as it was mentioned in the novel After Dark.
My search for the perfect song for the sting continued, I trawled playlists on Soundcloud for artists allowing their jazz performances to be downloaded. There were quite a number of these I considered but none of them matched the animation well. I moved from Soundcloud onto the Free Music Archive and listened to even more free music. I thought about using some exerts from the audio book I had found in my work but they didn't match up so well and were hard to edit. I stumbled across a really catchy song, that wasn't as dark as I would have liked but it worked so well with the sting I decided to choose it. This song was called "ain't misbehaving" by the Quartet Barbette.

I'm pleased with how the sting came out, it fits in well with the whole project. If I could change anything I think it would be the transitions on the type (make them longer for the viewer) and perhaps I would have translated some into Japanese for an alternate audience.

ATA: PROJECT PROPOSALS

My Project Proposal Sheets for each. 

ATA: Feedback Sheets

These are a collated collection of my feedback forms over the module. In each one I took away something from it and added to my work. 

ATA: Elevator Pitch

My Elevator pitch bullet points 

• My author was Murakami 
• I chose to read After Dark, Norwegian Wood and Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki 
• His work has strong themes of time and isolation 
• I wanted to portray this in my work 
• After lots of experimentation I chose Collage as my final medium 
• My collaged pieces show my interpretation of the books and I have tried to carry through that sense of isolation through the characters placement and the disconnection from reality comes from the layered collaging style 
• After creating my finals I went on to create this sting that came from the original 5 concepts 
• I wanted it to be a little bit strange, happy but with dark undertones 

I found the elevator pitch an interesting experience, the people I tested my pitch out on said most of them were interested to find out more. 

ATA: Introducing cut out characters

I attempted numerous times to draw in characters into the scenes but after trying and failing to get them to match, others advised me to collage them and then photoshop them in. It took me a while but I finally managed to do it.

ATA: Creating the last piece

Eventually I decided on just making four pieces, the fifth piece I had been experimenting with went on to become part of my sting. 

"Lonely Room" was the last created out of the set of four and was also the most troublesome. At many different points I came close to giving up on this piece. It scanned it badly and no matter how much I tried to change the resolution it stayed unfocused on some sections, this even happened on my final but the print room technician helped me the best he could so it is very unnoticeable in the final. 

This piece is less distorted than the others, I found it harder to make it look like a room with the strip style I had been using so instead cut shapes into the mono print textures and created a room from that. I brought in a lot more in photoshop this time around. After my crit everyone agreed that the tissue paper carpet in the centre of the piece distracted everyone from everything else. 

I then scanned in more textures and created a carpet in photoshop. This works far better and I do agree that it was distracting from the piece before. 

I placed a orange hue over the top and brought in my famous secret cat into the picture. The last thing to decide is where I am putting the character. 

This is something I will bring up in my next lesson and hopefully gain some more opinions on the matter.

ATA: Swimming Pool

Having an A3 sketchbook for this project really helped me expand my skills and made me realise I have been limiting myself working in A5, this piece was created at A2 and had to be scanned in in halves and then brought together in photoshop which was a personal first for me! 

Working at A3/A2 really helped me think more about composition and it let me really push my collaging (which is something I've avoided in the past). 

Out of them all this was probably the easiest to change the colours in photoshop, I already knew I loved the orange tiles the most when I was creating the piece and all was left was to change the centre so it was all blue (so it was more obvious that it was a swimming pool). 

The only problem Ive really had with this one, was that when I was creating it I didn't want to cut out a person and collage them in so I decided to draw them in instead, so at the moment I'm trying to find the right pen tool to use and where best to place the character composition-wise. 

Ive asked around for this one and most people think I should change the ladder to the top right and have the character on the bottom left and leave the pool alone so the details don't go unnoticed.