SEED BRIEF

When looking back at the past few months, at all the work which has accumulated from my hands since the beginning of the course, I can clearly see a major journey, of myself, and of my creative practice as a whole. The journey had its successes, but it also came with its hurdles and disappointments. Like Walt Disney Jr. said, "Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."(2016) So, I guess I shall just ‘keep moving forward.’ 

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Yet, one cannot keep moving forward, without looking back. I am not the artist I was almost five months ago, when starting the course. And so far, I feel I have grown, yet not as much as I had hoped at lengths, but still grown enough, that I feel that I am prepared to move onto the next chapter of my life in higher education.  

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In my creative practice, I can see from what I have created that there is more talent within me than I had originally thought, opening new routes for me to take in my creative practice, as well as revealing admiration and enjoyment for creative processes that in the past, I thought I would hate and not have a good relationship with. One of those being printmaking. 

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Before starting the course, I had tried a small amount of printmaking, in the form of lino blocks, during my Art GCSE. I enjoyed that form of printmaking, due to its slow methodical process, making sure to take care with each, individual carve I made into the smooth soft, and sometimes unpredictable, material. Yet when starting to use be taught new and different forms of printmaking, some I had never heard of, I began to love the processes even more, learning how each of them worked, and then, through my own time and care, began to research, experiment and trial the different methods in relation to the project I was currently working on.  

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In comparison to how I was as a creative at the start of the course, to the creative that I am now, I have carried these new skills, and not just in one form of art, but across the range that I have been introduced to on this course and have found interesting in my own self-directed study time, and no longer trying them once, seeing what I could do with them and far they would go before they either gave in or gave me a desirable result.  

Yet that comes with its flaws, and I can see those flaws with me. Due to how I see the world and function within it, I find it hard to pull myself away from something I come to genuinely enjoy practicing. Because of that, I do have an issue with time management and focus, as I can easily get pulled away from whatever I was working on and get started on something else. That can sometimes be useful, such as when I used a laser-cutter a lot during the Connections and Pathways Project in 2021.  

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Due to the length of time in which some of the designs I had made took to be cut or engraved, I was able to get on with other work whilst the laser-cutter was running, which worked half the time, yet the other half I was stood in front of the laser-cutter watching the design form on my chosen material, as I found it mesmerizing and relaxing. So, to stop this from happening, I made myself work near the laser-cutter so I could keep an eye on it and stop the material inside from catching fire, but out of sight so that it was not a temptation for me to stop what I really needed to be working on.  

All of those take time, planning and accounting for, each balanced with the other, if one weighs more heavily, the scales of the project or brief tips and I have to start picking up the pieces again, refresh the project almost from scratch in places, and rethink what I was doing. 

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Now, I genuinely feel that I have improved in areas, with my work and myself, but I do have a fair amount to go, and critiquing myself is another. Before joins the course, even before starting in college, I have been and still am hard in myself with a lot of things, but not as much as I once was. I have come to understand and take a look at the work in which I create, see what it has done for me and the purpose it was created for and then really decide what happened with it, and accept that fact.  

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But not in the sense of letting it go and forgetting about it, now getting to see different angles, and having a wide range of new skills and materials at my disposal, I can try what I imagine, see what works and what doesn’t without thinking of the consequences, even though that is a new aspect on my mind when planning my work. When something didn’t work the first time round, it might work another. When working in the SEED Brief, I cut outlines of buildings from card using a laser-cutter, and because of that, I continually had to check and recheck the settings which I was pumping into the machine, so that the laser would actually cut through my chosen material, which was a thick form of card, but also not set it on fire. Or even rearrange or redesign my layout of butterflies I had also laser-cut when doing a monoprint, trying to figure out how I was going to do the image I was envisioning in my mind. Having to retract my steps is no longer a barrier for me, even though I constantly want to move forward, I just have to take a few paces backwards, before starting my own one-thousand foot journey, whatever it may be. 

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Compared to the last course which I undertook before the one I am on now, I felt a lack of accomplishment and success with my work, especially with the forefront of the Covid Pandemic hitting my studies not long into the second term of the first year, and quite frankly it affects me a lot. Yet, with the help of others and talking to myself, I slowly began to adjust and develop myself, not just to handle this new strange world I was living in, but also new problems to face, one of those being university now. Before joining Foundation Art & Design, I fell in love with comics. Since I couldn’t go out, I needed an escape, and that was stories through the images in the comics. Without the captions or bubbles, there is emotion and narratives behind the illustrations which I was looking at, and want to express that now in my own work. With the map I created in the Connections and Pathways project, I wanted to convey a sense of wonder and fantasy, a world which felt grounded and real, being made of wood and made by machinery, and still not of our reality. Or the miniature city I created for the SEED Brief, a homage if you will to the Hades Landscape from Blade Runner (1982), having a sense or wear and tear, but also lived in and emptiness at the same time.  

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Through my work in the FAD course, especially more with the SEED Brief, I have come to learn, accept, understand and connect with the fact that illustration, isn’t just drawing just a drawing to me anymore, it’s so much more. Yes something may come from a sketch or a doodle, but that’s only a foundation for the structure to be built, and the grand expansions in the future. Illustration is about conveying a message, in a way that the artist can express themselves in which ever way they want, and still tell the audience what they are feeling or trying to say. For me, I want to continue making artwork in ways which I enjoy personally, be it printmaking, laser-cutting, sketching, digital/concept art or modeling/kit-bashing, and still tell my message to audience that will hopefully enjoy and remember it, and not because of me creating it, but what message it told them.