my notes from the symposium talks
It's always interesting to hear about illustrators' professional journeys.
From this year's symposium, Robbie Cathro was the one that I found to have the most informative talk in regards to something that I am interested in.
This year I have been looking more at children's illustrations, so his work was particularly relevant to me for this time. I really liked his work and I appreciated how honest he was when talking about his publishing struggles.
However a lot of what he said was pretty off-putting. I knew that getting into book publishing was something very difficult, but the more he said, the more difficult and un-rewarding he made it seem ( at least to me).
Book publishing is not something that I would be thinking about right now anyways, but, in the far future, if I ever consider it, I might just have to think back and remember his talk and all of the struggles that Robert faced in this line of work.
This part of the symposium was reminiscent of one of the first tasks of the year, from the 'Ways of Seeing' project.
I kind of hated it back then but in this setting, it felt more interesting to observe all of how people opted for different ways to combine their work.
Some chose to only add small details to work that was already there (like the fish above), while others used the 2 colours to add to their own work (like the lion with the top hat(I saw him do it)), while other people were being much more disruptive and fully changing the drawings.
It was fun to take part in this experience and it made me think more about possibly doing interactive or installation work in the future. The exhibition made use of blank cardboard boxes, which are a very basic material, but over the course of the night they became much more than that, being reshaped into a myriad of different things.
