Assignment 1: Feedback

 I had my tutorial for this assignment on Tuesday and received my first feedback. It was good overall, with a few things that needed some attention. I was really pleased with the words like ‘exciting’ and ‘promising’ and that my tutor likes me using mixed media and that she also likes making books  

The things that need attention are:

Firstly, referencing. I was anticipating this as I knew I hadn’t referenced everything I should have. When I did my research I just jumped around the internet and didn’t keep proper track of where I had been. I did a certain amount of trawling back through tabs and pages but I didn’t capture every reference I needed. To remedy this in future assignments I’m going to keep a running bibliography as I go, keeping note of everything I look at as I look at it, rather than have to waste time and effort trying to re-find the references and not doing a thorough job of it. 

Another issue was this blog. For some reason the posts were not feeding down from the top to the full sequence of older posts, as any self-respecting blog ought to do without needing to be told! The only way to find each post was by a specific link. I’ve been back into the themes and settings and things are somewhat better. A portion of each post is now shown on the home page and can be fully accessed by clicking on it. However, having clicked on it, it’s then necessary to click back to the home page to see the next post. It’s not perfect but it’s an improvement. I may come back to this and see if I can get a more satisfactory outcome from one of the other themes. 

So then my tutor spoke about the written content of my learning log and sketchbook. I was worried that I’d written too much, but my tutor wants me to write more. 😊 Specifically, to write about why I’ve chosen the images I have in my visual research, and how they are similar to or different from my own style. This is interesting. In the past I’ve considered my drawings in the context of others working in the same genre and looked at what their style and ways of working are like, but not really looked from the other direction at how my style is in relation to theirs. 

An issue that wasn’t specifically in my feedback, but that I need to consider, is that my tutor gave me feedback according to the OCA learning outcomes for the course. I had entirely forgotten about these! Afterwards I ran across them again in the course introduction. I think it would be a good idea for me to print them out and stick them in my sketchbook so I can easily refer back to them. 

So overall I’m really happy with how it’s going, and the next assignment looks more interesting too. My only concern is the time commitment. There is a lot to do! However, I did give myself quite a tight deadline for this first assignment so hopefully I’ll now be able to pace myself a bit more easily.