As you probably know, these last three weeks I've been working all day, every day prepping our stall for the New Blood exhibition, but in between I've been squeezing in any personal work I can, and this week I decided dinosaurs were a wholly necessary subject. I was a bit reluctant at first because I couldn't tell you the last time I'd drawn a dinosaur prior to this (which really is shameful due to how flippin' much I love the jurassic park films,) but surprisingly it all went very well, and I ended up with a couple of sketchbook pages that I'm pretty pleased with.
I've said it before, but I tend to produce my best work with just a pencil, a rubber and a relaxed demeanour, and I think it once again rings true here. I'm dog sitting during July while my mum goes on holiday, and I fully intend to whack my pencils, paints and whatever else out and see what throwing colour at some dino doodles produces (hopefully something of use!) It's been strange being finished with my course and yet still not having enough free time on an evening to sit down with my sketchbook and paintbrushes, so I'm gonna make the most of those 10 days I've got scheduled out as dog sitting/me time.
I thought while I was here I'd share some snaps (albeit terrible ones) that i've taken of our process over the last three weeks and talk briefly about the experience. In three weeks we've designed, planned, curated and executed our exhibition stall, meaning that everything within the stall has been carefully considered; we drafted different layouts, went through rounds of shortlisting artwork to be displayed large scale, measured out how big the shelving we were making needed to be and how artefacts/portfolios would work on them, etc. etc. in short: the whole thing was a lot more difficult than I originally imagined.
In total, there are 17 of us exhibiting our work, and a team of 5 of us put the whole thing together. While it's been exhausting and stressful, it was nice to feel like an integral part of a design team, because none of us could have done it without each other. Working on something like this has highlighted each of our strengths and weaknesses, and it's been useful to put those strengths and weaknesses to use throughout this 'project', and will no doubt be something I'll discuss in the future if I ever get around to landing myself an interview.
As well as planning out artwork and shelving, we also chose to create a catalogue to showcase everyone's work and a 'journey board' that discusses our fundraising process. A lot of courses have their exhibitions funded by the uni, but unfortunately ours isn't and we needed to raise at least £2,000 to make the whole thing a possibility. In total we raised £2,500 (which came in super handy because materials are expensive!) and we managed it through selling illustrated goods, having bake sales and setting up a kickstarter, mainly.
I ended up designing the journey board solo, and initially I was really uncomfortable with the idea of it. We intend to have the board at the front of the stall, and as a person who doesn't rate their design skills highly I was worried that I wouldn't be able to represent the course adequately. After a bit of roughing out and playing around, I soon found my feet and made something I was comfortable with by adding some hand lettering which I think gave the whole thing a bit more personality, and essentially made it feel a bit more like it was something that then belonged to me (visually, at least.) The group seemed to like the end result, so here's to hoping that it'll spark the attention of passers by, too!
The last three weeks have truly been exhausting, but I think they've also provided me with a really invaluable experience. We head down to London tomorrow before setting the stall up on Tuesday, and I can't wait to see how the entire thing looks in the flesh as we couldn't properly mock it up within uni. I'm planning on taking my camera down with me, so expect some snaps from the coming week on my blog in the near future.
For now, i'm going to retreat to bed and watch a couple of hours of skins (i'm now onto season 3, if you were wondering) before getting some shut eye ready for loading the van up tomorrow at 9am. Speak soon!
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