Response to Tutor Feedback Part 1

The first part of the course focused on getting started, overall your response has shown an understanding of the requirements of Assignment 1. You have made a good start on some referencing and a bibliography. On your blog you have also shown descriptive text and some analysis of your process and findings. This is all shows a thoroughness to your initial approach.

You have presented final designs that combine a range of mixed media and you have clearly shown this part of your design process on your blog.

Beginning this course I was quite unsure of my abilities and skills but was very excited to explore and see how things progressed as the course went on. I was really pleased with my tutors feedback overall.

For the first exercise I was quite unsure of how we were to interpret the brief of using other artist's work to create something of our own. My tutor picked up on this and suggested

It would be beneficial to see:

• a range of initial ideas and thoughts including mind-mapping

• some alternative idea developments

• how far can you push your illustrations so that they visually reference the 2 artists but aren’t such direct copies?

I am still unsure how you visually reference someone else's work? So need to explore this further. I put a lot of effort into research E H Shepard and really enjoyed learning more about his life.

For the next exercise we were to illustrate keywords from an article. I found this exercise interesting and also challenging. At this point my ideas weren't being explored far enough and I needed to work on more mind mapping and trying out ideas before committing to the final illustration. This is something I took on board for future work and continue to develop.

My tutor commented on it being useful to include the article with the work I presented and the keywords I had chosen. I had included this and my tutor had just missed seeing it initially, this was addressed and communicated via email.

Feedback on my first assignment was overall positive and my tutor liked my efforts to film part of my process and made suggestions on how to improve the video through editing it down to highlights to keep it shorter in length.

Again, the overall comments were about developing my ideas further during the research stage. This is something I wasn't used to doing but fully took on board for future work.

I included some sketchbook work in this first part and my tutor encouraged me to use my sketchbooks more, especially for idea development which again I took on board for future work.

For my learning log my tutor suggested adding links to the exercises so that they could be found easily, this is something I put into place right away and have maintained through out.

My tutor gave me some resources to check out to help me to improve my sketchbooks. I purchased 'Sketchbooks' by Richard Brereton and took a look at the links provided. These gave me more insight into how other artists were using their sketchbooks, which helped me to think how to improve my own.

My tutor offered me some pointers to consider for the next assignment:

This is an opportunity for you to develop your sketchbook process by showing lots of alternative ideas and starting points and visual experiments that then lead to the final designs. Don’t rush to end results quite so quickly – the journey that you took to get there is the most important aspect at this stage of the course.

This is something as mentioned above that I took on board and aimed to apply to my future work.