Reflective Journal 09/10

To save confusion (on mine and anyone else’s part) these are the summaries of the notes written up regarding the reflective journal over the year. The notes barely even made sense to me and I wrote them but I used them as memory joggers to do this.

Pictures to follow when internet stops messing about!

The Oxford trip, I know, was to see the Pitt Rivers exhibition more than everything else but spending most of the Friday morning sat in the main museum bit and drawing bits of dinosaur bones I found much more interesting. Not to say looking through the Pitt Rivers wasn’t interesting but from a drawing standpoint it was the bones. I’d bought a mechanical pencil shortly before too and found it worked very well with the bones, especially with the shading. Even had a man – Russian I think he was – come up to me and ask if he could show my drawings to his daughter and start asking me about iguanodons (which was the skeleton I was drawing). Thankfully, a childhood obsession with these specific dinosaurs meant I could answer most of his questions. Generally, a very enjoyable and useful trip. Dino drawings are in one of the drawing project sketchbooks.

Reading week: useful for the time, could have made more use of it personally but what I did get out of it, I think helped.

Introduction of the Monday Muse was very useful, though I came to find that certain ones were more useful than others. (Example of the ‘notes’ taken on Amelia’s Q&A to the left). Some were inspiring and some weren’t but then I feel not everything can apply to everyone so by the Summer term I only went to ones I felt would benefit me – or that I was interested in. Jamborees too, were interesting – notes and doodles taken during these however are in one of the sketchbooks I handed in for the Drawing Project.
The various workshops – it was unfortunate so few people turned up to these – the sentence workshop was a bit… degrading, to a point, but kind of fun. The first workshop was the sorts of things we’d learn in GCSE (which one would have had to pass to get through/into college in the first place) but the second workshop in the subtle uses of certain words or phrases for impact was a lot more useful. The more recent workshop of the extra 20% however did leave me a sense of ‘I’m not cut out for this’, what I picked up from the two workshops will help to develop those particular areas that they showed I’m lacking in.

I think the show was a huge eye-opener, both to how much organisation is needed and who to expect (or not) things from. The main thing was definitely the organisation, we seemed to do too much too late – for example the advertising arrived less than a week before the show started and we had way too many posters. Coming up with the name took too long too, beyond ridiculous, I think this could have something to do with too many cooks spoiling the broth scenario. We should have just come up with something and stuck to it. Same with the design of the posters – in the end the people in charge of doing it had their idea rejected because it was a lot different to what had been originally asked of them – I think this shocked everyone. The idea of judging the posters over Facebook seemed a good idea at the start but ultimately, didn’t work at all. Having set things like the name and over-all feel of the show set in the first 3 weeks of it would have worked so much better. Too much debate. Bad.
Next time, for the third year show, organisation – and sticking to it – is the key. I guess that much is obvious but – despite getting a show that was open and viewable – wasn’t happy with how it turned out. Need to be stricter with people getting stuff done and sticking to things. Had some chats with Alan after it as to possible ways of organising people next time, with the ‘top person’ just being the one who keeps all of the information in one place and making sure things are running smoothly and on time, and that’s it. Then there are people who ‘report’ to them who are in charge of specific areas (marketing, space planning, and so on) and then other people below them and so on. People seemed to suddenly realise ‘crap we’ve got a show to do!’ about two weeks before the end. Not slamming people here, certain people really showed what they were made of during the time, but we could have done so much better.

Debate: I’m never going to participate again. Enough said. Watch one yes, participate no.

The big stand out of the year was Picaresque. I learnt so much from Julia Manning – or at least she’s inspired so much and a change in my working method. Was a very amusing visit – she’s a local artist to my Somerset home and well known with my dad but, not wanting to sort of name drop, didn’t say that I was his daughter. This lead to some rather confusing conversations before it came out and after that she was very excited about showing me everything from work-in-progress, processes and all her collections. Although she was a more of a printmaker than a painter, this visit actually lead me onto wanting to move away from my digital work to watercolour – which I have built on, and will continue to. I’m also hoping to go and work with her over the summer and help with her printing.

I feel I may not have used my blog to its full potential this year, mainly I’ve been using it to store work on so that it can be digitally handed in at deadlines and I give it out of someone’s interested in seeing what my work is like but it’s not a full blown ‘show-off’ thing. When Nicole showed her work during the last workshop I was interested in the website she used for it, carbonmade.com, and I’ve set up something on that. It can’t have a large amount on it though, unless paid for, and I’ve only put my g2 work on there so far, hoping to get some of my drawings and personal work up there too at a later date. Over the summer maybe. Might start looking up other possible sites too, not sure I want to start paying for a personal website yet though I’ll put some thought into it.
Another thing that the blog brings up is my pseudonym, Alex Levin-Shawe, mainly made up because I was tired of people spelling/pronouncing my name wrong and it’s ambiguous. Despite the blog being ‘Alex Levin-Shawe Illustration’, I was thinking of using Alex for my written stuff, and my own name for illustrated stuff so I’d set up a new blog for starters and keep alexlevinshawe.wordpress.com for handing in digital work for projects. I’m terrible at keeping up-to-date blogs, need to work on that for sure.

Generally, over the year, I feel my work has changed a fair amount – continuing from developing my digital work I’d been doing over the summer to changing to watercolour. I still like and enjoy both, as the way I colour digitally lends itself to watercolour (i.e. building up of layers of colour and so forth) so if I need to do something quicker than it’d take with watercolour, I can get a similar effect digitally. Tried my hand at film-making, I agree with Amelia that wasn’t the best thing in the world, I think I’ll stick to doing that on a hobby/sparetime basis. I’ve already got an idea of the general feel of what I want to do next year.
One thing I do think I could be lacking is my storytelling, not done so much writing in my own time since I started uni so when I try, I feel I’m a little too rusty at it. I put this down, also, to me thinking more in images than words now so it’s hard putting things to paper. Over the summer I’ve set myself a couple of projects: one is just writing a story of indefinite length based on a computer game I’m fond of – it has the characters, setting and plot all sorted so I can focus on actual writing style – and the other involves planning out my own story using a storyboard sketchbook in the hope that something can be made clear out of the mess of an idea in my head, but also possibly developing some of the sketches to form illustrations that could go with the story when it’s done.
The latter of the two projects, however, is more of a long term (5-10 years) plan than something I could take forward to next year. I want to tie in with my researching on myths and develop my own mythological story that I’ll take to a short illustrated book, hopefully for my FMP. For this however I will need a lot of reference pictures of all sorts of trees, landscapes and plants – instead of leaving this till they’re needed, or when I don’t have access to them, I’ll be making up a collection of photographs and studies (in watercolour and pencil) of these things over the summer so they’re there for me to use when I need them.

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