Foundation is finally over. It has been confidence building, exciting, productive and interesting - but also the most stressful, exhausting, testing few months I've ever experienced. For that I am so grateful. Out of everything I learnt this year the most important thing I came away with is that you get out what you put in. I surprised myself by coming away awarded with a Merit but I was utterly amazed that people actually wanted to buy my work - over the course of two weeks while the exhibition was up I made £164 just by selling my art. I now feel ready to take on my BA armed with all of the knowledge I have gained this year. 

Sneak peak of my developments in my final major project!

Last week I returned home from the most hectic and tiring few days in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, Holland. It was a University study trip so we had to work hard and visit galleries, museums and book shops as well as squeezing in the things we all wanted to do in the little spare time we had. I'd go back in a heartbeat, it is the most bizarre and exciting place I've ever visited.

We're now entering our final module at Foundation and for our final major project the word we have been given to work with is "Becoming".

be·com·ing  [bih-kuhm-ing]

adjective1.that suits or gives a pleasing effect or attractive appearance, as to a person or thing: a becoming dress; a becoming hairdo.
suitable; appropriate; proper: a becoming sentiment. 3.any process of change. Aristotelianism. any change involving realization of potentialities, as a movement from the lower level of potentiality to the higher level of actuality.

The brief for this typography project stated that we create our own typefaces using only the eight letters from the word typography. My sketchbook work consisted of a lot of experimentation and a wider range of media than I'm used to.

As a one-day workshop we were asked to sit and watch the 1985 film Legend and actively draw while we watched. Think character design, scenery, clothing, use of colour. If you've seen the film you will know just how totally bizarre it is and as you can imaging I had a lot of fun with this workshop. If you haven't seen it, google it now just to get the gist of what we were faced with.

A recent advertising brief we were given required us to create a new and different "Stop Smoking" campaign including posters, leaflets and other informative yet creative publications. Being the only person on Foundation to actually have applied for an Advertising BA course I felt under more pressure to get these pieces into my portfolio to take to interview.

I wanted to avoid the popular gory photographic take that uses cancerous organs and blocked arteries to persuade. I also wanted to avoid the other popular tactic of playing on second hand smoke and children as weapons.

As we come to the end of the second phase of Foundation and I have some rare spare time on my hands I thought I'd write a series of posts about my work so far!

As seen in a previous post I have been illustrating the book To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. My sketchbook work was all simple, picking out key imagery from important chapters. After lots of photoshop trial and error I produced several minimalistic title pages for the book, each displaying a recognisable silhouette. 

As we have now specialised in our subjects at Foundation we have been set our first project to work on over the Christmas holiday. The brief we have been given is to illustrate a chapter of a book we had to choose from a given list. I had never read any of the books on the list we were given so I got straight to it and bought myself a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. To my surprise it is actually a fantastic book and I'm really excited to illustrate a chapter.

For my photography project at Foundation I chose to make it a narrative of my Great Auntie and Uncle's home and their lives together. My Auntie passed away in February 2010 aged 86 and my Uncle passed away this year in July 2013, aged 92. My family have recently sold their house and we have since been moving their possessions and coming across a lot of interesting things, including old wartime photographs and belongings, special jewellery and old books. I took my own photographs and displayed all of my final images in a tan leather, old-fashioned, self-adhesive photo album and arranged them in an appropriate order. I chose to display my work in a photo album rather than installing it on the walls within the studio space because I wanted to run with the idea of family and family photo albums; I also wanted to have the complete piece of work personal to me which I could keep as it was originally displayed. If I'd installed the pieces in the studio I would have had to remove them eventually and they would consequently have no real home. Anyway, these are the three main photographs of my Auntie and Uncle that I used as the opening pages of my piece.

We have done a fortnight of 5 different subjects at Foundation since we started, they call this the "carousel". Fine Art, Visual Communication, 3D Design, Fashion Textiles and Lense Based Media.

I'm currently working on my lense based project and it's the only project I've done on this course that I've made personal. This particular project is a narrative of my Auntie and Uncle's lives together and I'm trying to make it quite a lovely story but I think it will inevitably be a sad story because they are no longer with us. 

I've retrieved a lot of old photos and some of their posessions to photograph such as my Uncle's HMS naval uniform hat and my Auntie's engagement ring.