Exploratory Stage Evaluation

The exploratory stage of the Foundation has been incredibly useful to me as it has taught me so many new skills that I can take forward to the pathway stage. Many of the things that I have done has changed the way I work, from working in my first sketchbook, to making grounds to work on and quick continuous line drawings. As a result my working process has become much quicker and I now don’t spend as much time trying to take every piece through to a completed piece of work, I simply develop certain areas that work. An example of this is the barcode piece where the fairly average drawings were developed and pushed further to create a final piece that I never would have thought of had I not gone through the process behind it.

The first taster session in visual communications allowed me to learn more about the different areas involved like illustration, animation and graphic design. There is a lot more to each of the disciplines than I would have previously thought as I believed that much of the work done in visual communications would be done digitally so finding out that much of the work is hand rendered was a nice surprise as this is the kind of work I am used to doing myself. Researching the work of Noma Bar and Olivier Kugler was a good source of inspiration as they are both so different in style yet work under the same title of visual communications so are great examples of the wide range of work that can be done and also acted as a source of inspiration for some of my pieces. I was also able to transfer the line drawing skills into drawing typography which was a really interesting part of the week. I have never looked at typefaces as something to draw before but now I see type everywhere which is something I’ve never noticed before.

The week spent in the 3D taster was really enjoyable as the activities we did were informative yet entertaining at the same time. Most of the 3D work I have done before has been ceramic or garment based rather than made in paper so this was a totally new experience. The task where we had to feel inside a bag and describe it to another person encouraged us to visualise things in our heads and allowed me to communicate my ideas through something other than drawing it out. This was quite difficult but made me feel as though I had become better at explaining myself and ideas I have verbally which is always helpful for group projects. The last day that we spent in the silver smithing studio was my favourite as I learnt so much in an incredibly practical and hands on environment. I was really happy with the piece I made as it was so spontaneously done that I don’t think it would have the same effect if I had planned it out beforehand.

The week spent in fashion made use of skills from other weeks, like the colour barcode I did in the river project as the swatches I made from the stimuli image related to this. All of the garments that I have made previous have been from fabric, with only small elements being tested in paper beforehand so to make a fully wearable piece from paper was a new experience. I enjoyed the challenge of making something that could be worn in a variety of ways but still wasn’t a typical garment and I feel that the piece I made had strong links to the original image I looked at. I would have liked to have experienced more of textiles as opposed to mainly fashion as I have always done fashion and known that I wanted to specialise in it so to experiment with something else in as much might have changed my mind. However as it stands I enjoyed the taster so much that I do not want to change my mind from specialising in fashion as it is still something I wish to pursue. Researching fashion designers and textiles artists was very helpful as it gave me so much inspiration for ways of working that I can take forward with me to my specialism stage.

The fine art and photography taster week had quite strong links to fashion as the photos that I took to start with to then change into tactile imagery can be used for other things such as developing prints. I enjoyed the creative process in this week as it showed me how to push a piece further and further until by the end of the week I had made tactile images, 3D paper pieces and a 2D drawings all from the same photograph. The research that I did in this stage was also helpful as the work of Noriko Ambe and Zadok Ben-David was so different in the process with one being hand carved from paper and the other being lasercut from metal yet both ended up being slightly similar. The freedom within fine art is an interesting concept but for me I prefer more of a structure to the way I work.

Although I enjoyed each week thoroughly I still haven’t changed my mind from wanting to study fashion. I hope to improve and build upon skills I have already learnt like observational drawing, experimentation and idea development as well as continuing to work in a sketchbook. I hope to move away from the work that I have done at A-level which was quite rigid in the sense that artists were merely researched and imitated rather than being used to inspire which is what I would like to now do alongside my own ideas.