Subject PDP

As with constellation, subject at level six presented a challenge I felt ill equipped to deal with. My intention before the year started had been to complete several short projects over the course of the year in an attempt to prepare myself for the possibility of working editorially, sharpening my abilities to complete projects to deadlines by imposing my own. My lack of preparation over the preceding summer led to a long period of searching as the year started and I felt rather lost for the majority of term one. I reverted back to the inspiration of TED Talks as that had been my most enjoyable project okay level five and I quickly became overwhelmed with subject matter as I searched for the topic that could maintain my interest throughout the year. As I started working I quickly found that the multitude of tutorials meant that constant progress needed to be made and I I felt a pressure to invest my time into one extensively developed project. Beginning with a TED Talk telling the story of Syrian teenager I began developing imagery to illustrate a poem that he himself had written. As I progressed I began to realise that I felt uncomfortable putting a face to someone else’s words and felt that it wasn’t my place to tell their story to the world. I expressed my concerns and quickly moved on to yet another project. Lights Out ultimately ended in the same manner, though the path to the realisation was much slower and ended up consuming much of my time. I was happy with the images I was making, and I still am to some extent, and had multiple designs and layouts for the book.

It wasn’t until the Viva Voce however that it truly struck me how out of my depth I was dealing with someone else’s story. I decided to look to a different project from level five, my charity project, and quickly began correspondence with multiple charities in the hopes that someone would respond in order for me to negotiate a live brief with them. The National AIDS Trust ended up being the only organisation to respond and their interest in working with me reassured me that my decision to drop Lights Out was valid. I negotiated a project to illustrate a pre-existing presentation that  the NAT used, telling the story of HIV/AIDS’ origins and the legacy it has left on modern history. Being able to work with external people gave me a sense of legitimacy as an illustrator and I found the enthusiasm expressed in each email spurred me on to create the best work possible within the timeframe I had negotiated. The work I created is some of my strongest, drawing from previous projects I utilised multiple methods of drawing to convey the narrative and found that having captions visible with images helped me feel confident that my images wouldn’t be misunderstood by the viewer.

Now that the end of my degree is in clear sight I have learnt the importance of trusting my own instincts and knowing when a project simply isn’t working as it should be. The majority this year was spent working on projects without finished, spent trying to force projects to completion that simply didn’t feel right, however I don’t feel that any of that time was wasted. I questioned my own position as an illustrator during both my refugee project development and Lights Out as I felt ill advised and out of my depth in trying to tell the stories of people whose lives are completely detached from my own, however I feel that working directly with the NAT has helped prove my ability to work in the real world. Moving on from university into the real world of freelance illustration is significantly less threatening and I feel that I have a good basis on which to build up an impressive portfolio.

Change of Direction

Lights Out began life as a short, several week project in order to get myself into the habit of working during the first term however the scope of the book soon saw it occupying the majority of my time. Deadlines to finish it before the second term went by and I still continued working on it so as to maintain productivity against my better judgement. As I hadn’t been working on anything else I had to focus on the project during tutorials and my Viva Voce and I had settled for taking the project forward as my final project. Reactions to my Viva were mixed and the lack of real-world grounding was a major point that I needed to address.

Lights Out was designed as a wordless narrative that aimed to communicate solely through colour change and composition however the lack of grounding meant that I would now have to include actual stories or at least use the project as a means of educating people about the statistics associated with prostitution. The prospect of now having to include text proved problematic as there was no negative space had been planned to accommodate text. I had the idea of creating two simultaneous books, one that would act as a narrative to humanise the situations and another to be read afterwards with illustrated statistics. This idea would require me to essentially go back to square one and develop a separate project that would run alongside the narrative I had created, this rethinking of my project brought to the surface my previous dissatisfaction with continuing with Lights Out as my final project and I looked back to last years Charity and TED Talks projects as the  projects that were most positively received.

HIV awareness is an important topic that is rarely considered contemporarily due to improved treatments and it’s maintained reputation as being something that solely affects marginalised groups. My initial ideas involve creating a book that combines statistics with stories from people living with HIV in order to present audiences with a a humanised version of events and in an attempt to develop a live project I had contacted several HIV/AIDS charities for help to develop this project into something that could actually serve a purpose.

Graham Rawle tutorial

Following the Viva I was able to have a one-to-one tutorial with writer/illustrator Graham Rawle in order to discuss my project. I had already established that my illustrations had several issues with communicating the wordless narrative and having the chance to have someone look through it was a great opportunity. The tutorial consisted of Graham reading the images sequentially, telling me exactly what he was able to read from the images before asking me the actual intention of each image in order to see where the differences lay.

From this information i learnt where the major errors lay and Graham also gave me instructions on how to make the images that work, work better. The issues that Graham raised generally concerned the movement of the characters through the book, keeping the character’s design consistent through different time periods and keeping movement leading to the right so as to direct the reader’s eye and to maintain momentum through the story. Being able to have someone unfamiliar with your work give you advice was a refreshing change and it was incredibly helpful to be told exactly what someone read from my images without prior knowledge of my own intentions.