Beginning of second year
In the beginning of the second year I was asked what I would like to do in my professional future. This is something that I've always struggled to answer, so this year I hope that I am able to find some kind of personal direction.
Although this is my first time in a university course, I have experienced art school before, but I have always struggled to find something that I want to do professionally. That is mostly because I dislike doing the same things, which meant that I just kind of cycled through possible career options until now, without really settling on anything. In an ideal world, I would love to just do everything at once, but that's not really possible. I don't really know where to go from here, so this year I plan to just continue trying as many things as possible and seeing what I enjoy
This is also the time to remind myself of some of the reasons why I specifically wanted to go for an illustration degree, for example the employability aspect. I have studied fine arts before which was very focused on creating technically good artwork, but very little on any employability related skills, which is something that I would like to focus more on.
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As first year ended, I became more interested in editorial illustration, since it's an efficient way to get jobs consistently, while working with different from different places could be a way to get jobs that are different enough from each other to be interesting. Therefore, I hope that this year I will look more into editorial work.
This summer I started thinking more about children's illustration, which is something that I have was not really interested in before. I think this is partly because of the influence of the first year tutors and guest lecturers we were shown as they primarily did children's work. Although I have recently been enjoying looking at children's illustrators, it's not something that I have much experience with. Therefore, this is also something that I plan to look at during second year.
Furthermore, I feel like during first year I was not able to take advantage of many of the university resources, especially the printing ones, since it felt too intimidating. This year, I will hopefully be able to familiarise myself with the resources that we are offered to be able to enhance my university experience.
End of second year
Looking back at my aims from the beginning of the year, I feel like I have partially achieved them.
Some things that I was happy with this year was being able to try so many new ways of creating artwork, as well as getting better at coming up with ideas for the briefs we receive. I feel like after going through all the brief, I was able to get a better idea of how I can successfully communicate something through illustration. Moreover, since this year was much more hectic, I think that I got better at managing my time. I felt like this year I felt much less stressed about deadlines which I think is a sign that I gained more confidence in my abilities.
This year I also did much more than first year since I tried to be more involved in all of the opportunities we were offered. I also made an effort to try new things independently, such as using the printing/photography resources by myself, which I was scared of doing during first year. Additionally, I managed to become more proactive this year and gained more confidence to work independently.
I was also able to think more about my professional direction, but I don't feel like I reached any conclusion. As third year is approaching, we were asked to start thinking about the dissertation, and what we are interested in doing during third year. I am quite worried about this right now since I feel really unsure about what I can be interested in for a whole year. Something that made me struggle this year was that whenever we had to choose our own theme for a project ( such as Amplify or the case study) I was overly indecisive and very uncertain about my choices. This area is what I should mostly focus on in the upcoming weeks, since I'm not sure how long I can go on not really knowing what I want to do. I feel particularly pressured since, although we were told that what we do next year will not define us for the rest of our lives, it definitely feels like it.
I also want to continue getting better at reflecting on my work next year, since I feel like analysing it on a deeper level has helped me become more self-aware. Additionally, in the future, I should start reflecting right after something happens. This year, there were points where I stopped reflecting since I was busy with other things, which would result in me forgetting everything. It's also been more beneficial to reflect while a project is still ongoing when I am still able to improve on it. Therefore, I plan to stop postponing my reflections so much.
Learning outcomes
This year I've also been trying to get better at understanding the learning outcomes since that is something I pretty much ignored in first year.
notes on learning outcomes and reflective practices
