ntujuice:

A lovely Screenprint sent over by Crispin Finn, cheers guys!

Some beautiful pieces of design and illustration will be auctioned at the Hopkinson Gallery next Thursday 6th Dec opposite Nottingham train station, 7-9pm. Everyone is welcome to come along and invite anyone along who’d like to put a bid in, which would make some lovely xmas presents. Just have to decide which ones I want, I can’t get them all unfortunately! Plus Juice’s own merchandise will be on sale too! Check out the NTU Juice blog, FB and twitter pages, all the info is there :)

(Source: ntujuice)

Some more photographs from New York. There are just so many I took to choose from, but hopefully this will give at least a bit of a snapshot of what it’d be like to be there, although nowhere near as incredible of course! I’ll definitely be back there soon to have another even bigger bite of the Big Apple…

A small selection of photographs I took of the work on show at the Pick Me Up graphic art fair that was showing at Somerset House in London. I was fortunate enough to catch this before I went to New York, I really enjoyed my time spent there, being my first trip to Somerset House and the Pick Me Up fair, where there were so many interesting workshops that you could take part in, and I certainly will be returning in the following years!

Specialising - Visual Communication - Foundation Portfolio

This is the portfolio of work I produced during specialising at Chelsea College of Art & Design, with which I applied to several universities and gained a place at all, including Chelsea itself. After much deliberation I decided I wanted to go elsewhere, and Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art & Design was my choice. I was quite surprised at how much work I managed to produce during the Foundation course and the range of work that it included, even though it was a very intense and stressful time with discovering what I actually wanted to do for the rest of my life, preparing a portfolio to get into a good university/art school and the Final Major Project. Overall it was an incredible experience, with great surroundings, tutors and students, and I’d recommend it to anyone thinking of going into a creative career, you learn so much from it and I don’t what I may have ended up doing if I hadn’t gone through that process. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity.

The foundation process

Going through the several rotations of the foundation course, with a taste of the main 4 disciplines they teach there, I tried my best at each, trying to find out what I wanted to do. Although I enjoyed fine art and knew I was fairly good at it, I never saw myself persuing it as a career, for the fact of it being hard to earn money, but also knowing I’ll have the pressure to produce work that was commercial enough to sell but also knowing that I may not be able to create the work that I wanted to produce, so I kept an open mind. Also, having studied product design at A Level and gaining an A in that, I did well and enjoyed that too, with my drawing, visualising and ideas skills coming in useful there, however my heart wasn’t into it as much. Product design at Chelsea came under the title of 3D/Spatial design. The textile design rotation was the only one that made it clear I didn’t want to do that, although it was useful in that they introduced me to continuous line drawing which was quite fun to do. Fine art was quite different at Chelsea, it was a lot more abstract and conceptual, not being totally sure what was expected from you and what was considered good and bad, we were mainly left to our own devices. I ended up for my main piece making more of an installation artwork, combining paintings with ready made objects, creating a statement about how commercialism has become so ridiculous in certain aspects, but I didn’t really know what I was doing, and it confirmed to myself that it wasn’t the best option for me.

This left me with the other remaining rotation of Visual communication, which was actually the first rotation I started with. This was very broad but intriguing, as the closest thing I’d done to this before was Graphic Design during GCSE but was still completely different in many ways. Visual communication was about ideas, visual language, composition, narrative, opinion, saying something, and I found myself quite enjoying it. Before we had to decide what we wanted to specialise in, after merely 8 weeks of being on the course, we had the task of producing a piece of writing of 500 words to explain our journeys and to state what and why I wanted to specialise in it. Through this and talking to one of the staff for the feedback and assessment of my work, it was decided that I try Visual Communication, and if after a week or so I decided I didn’t like it, I could try out fine art. From here, we were given our first tasks (40 in fact!) to complete over the Christmas break, and I haven’t looked back from there..