OUIL502 - Studio Brief 3 - Evaluation

I found this module to be the most helpful and I feel like I have improved massively since Level 4. Improving on my self promotion skills has made me a lot more confident with using social media, and has shown me how useful it is to create an online presence for myself. The Life's A Pitch brief helped me consider myself within a professional context and taught me to think about how I see myself working within the industry in the future. I had not done many presentations in the past that were as successful as Life's A Pitch, so I feel like I have definitely improved in that area. The feedback that my team received was very positive as our presentation was clear and straight to the point. I feel like I have learnt the elements of a good presentation and am a lot more confident in presenting to an audience. Looking back on my previous PPP presentation from Level 4 I can see how far I've come. I feel like I have a much clearer vision of what I want to become and where my interests lay; I'm a lot more confident in myself and my work and think that this module has helped me develop my self evaluation skills also. One of the most valuable aspects of this module was definitely creating the promotional packs. I had never considered how to promote myself as a creative person, I have written CV's before, but never thought about how different a creative CV would be. 

I think the personal presence I have created for myself throughout this year has become very successful. My 'brand', I feel, is very unique and portrays my personality well. I can see a fluidity between the work I do for different modules as I become more confident in my interests and the paths that I want to take in regards to my practice. This has also spurred me on to branch out onto different websites to try and make some money from my work. Throughout the summer I intend to focus on building up a body of work on websites like Etsy to get myself more noticed.

The few commissions that I have done this year have been a definite strength, as I've learnt a lot from doing work for real people, rather than just following set briefs. Trying to please both myself and a client was difficult but also extremely rewarding, showing myself that someone would want to pay actual money for my services has given me a lot of confidence and made me excited for the future.

Blogging regularly could have been improved upon. I feel as though the massive amount of work we had for each different module made me put PPP to the back of my mind, seeing as the deadline was the last out of all of them. I wish that I had paid more attention to PPP at the beginning of the year, as I have really enjoyed it and feel as if I had spent more time on it, I would have gotten even more back. I found the PPP tasks of collecting different practitioners and blogging about them to be a bit forced, I find it hard to analyse illustration and put my thoughts down onto my blog. I have struggled with blogging from the start, and although I have improved, I still find it to be a laborious task. 

During Level 6 I want to really push myself to go out of my comfort zone, I feel like this year my stubborness has held me back a little; I have always refused to work with photography and 3D illustration because I thought that I didn't have an interest in it, but creating my promotional pack and having to think about how to make my work unique and interesting, has made me see that I do infact have an interest in broadening my practice into new areas.

I am very excited about Level 6 and seeing how much I will progress through next year. I intend to blog more regularly and become much more organised by finding a way that really works for me. I want to explore more into 3D illustration and character and narrative by expanding my personal presence into a range of children's books. I know that I need to not slack off towards the end of a module, even if I get fed up of it, which tends to happen. I will set myself stricter deadlines in order to spur me on to get the work finished to a high standard. Focussing on the end product as well as development, I feel, will help me figure out how I like to work and the proccesses I most enjoy, I want to explore more printing techniques, as I feel like this will be a large portion of my practice when I leave university.