Sending emails to other illustrators has shown me the importance of getting my work out there, and has helped me feel a lot more at ease with contacting potential employers. I have a better understanding of who I should be contacting and when, I feel like sometimes, getting a reply is just a matter of when you attempt to contact someone and partially luck, which has definitely spurred me on to keep up with contacting people and to not be disheartened if I don't get a reply straight away. Although I believe that I would have benefited more from contacting people earlier on in the year too, I wasn't confident enough in my work and my ability as an illustrator to approach professionals asking for feedback and advice, but feel like I have made a solid start on building up a list of contacts which I can use in the months to come. Rather than printing my promo pack myself, I intend on sending it to a printing company in order to achieve as professional an outcome as possible, although this may end up being costly if I need to be constantly updating it with new work. I think I've taken better advantage of social media this year, starting with my website, which is a huge improvement to only using my Facebook page.
My website is the main hub of my social media, and contains links to all my other sites, including Etsy, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I found creating my online presence and personal branding one of my favourite aspects of PPP, and didn't have much trouble creating my logo and my websites. I tried to tone down my ideas for my promotional pack and business cards and feel like my pigeon book is a good showcase of my talents, while trying to demonstrate my personality too. To make all my social media recognisable and work well together, I started to use my Pigeonsaresick logo to try and create some uniformity, although I think my work, despite being quite different at times, is unified and recognisable through the similar colour schemes that I use. Some feedback that I received on my work from Tiger Tea illustration, was that my work had "ethereal use of colour", I was pleasantly surprised by this comment, and think that this was a turning point in my work, in that I know what some of my strengths are, and can work hard to capitalise on them. I think that my entry for the Secret 7 brief which combined texture, collage and a limited colour palette.
Although my PPP presentation itself wasn't extremely successful, a lot of good thought did come out of it, and I received some feedback that helped me do some decision making. Focusing on publishing, and sending the books that I already have to publishers, will benefit me in that it gives me direction and an end point to work towards, narrowing down my field of vision in terms of what I want to do in the future has cleared things up in my mind and motivated me to crack on, although there are a lot of avenues I want to explore with my practice, I think it's good to have a main focus and a unique selling point, which I think I am doing well developing.
Overall I'm pleased with what I have gained from this module, even though at times I became unmotivated and put PPP to the back of my mind, especially during COP, the push over the last few months, and really getting my teeth stuck into PPP and constantly self evaluating, has really helped clear up my busy mind and set me on the right path to a fulfilling career. I intend on keeping up with keeping some form of blog and really creating a hype around my social media, especially using Twitter and Instagram, I think that keeping a blog will help me to keep my creative juices flowing and help keep me in the creative loop, which I will have taken for granted with being in a constant creative environment at University.
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