The Picture Book: Final Crit and Evaluation

The Book

Feedback

I was surprised at how positive my feedback was; I am really delighted that other people had an emotional response to the story, and commented on the presentation and colour scheme- something I was feeling under-confident about. Also the response to using one tool was positive, something that I thought would bear a risk paid off in its simplest form.

One of the comments mentioned 'more character development' which was definitely one of my consequences of struggling with time management; this is something I can work on in the next module.

Reflection

Looking at other peoples work in my class was extremely interesting in terms of viewing how each person interpreted the brief and how their work has blossomed from a simple starting point. Different people showed different levels of emotive language, skills using different tools, sequential narrative and presentation skills- which has given me something to aspire to aim towards as my work further develops.

Evaluation

The task of creating a picture book has challenged me in all sorts of ways. I was able to gain a wide body of research from the Visual Journalist section, however I discovered that not all research will result in success. Sometimes it is better to start simple or with something on a smaller scale and elaborate that, as opposed to researching on a broad topic and attempting to pinpoint one particular area.

I experienced having a ‘critical incident’, having to make quick decisions in keeping of the direction of which my work was going to produce the best possible results when I went with my instinct of keeping the theme of the book to its ancient Chinese origin. Working against time, I decided to keep things minimalistic by using one tool and one colour throughout my work. This allowed the audience to have a clear communication with the story itself, resulting in an emotional response-something which I thought I would struggle to achieve. 

Working with InDesign taught me the professional procedure when producing documents, and informed me about things I should always consider, such as keeping to margins, whether the book needs a bleed/slug, and more in detail about layouts e.g. readers spreads. I also worked with Photoshop at intervals during this brief, but perhaps next time I will allow myself more time to test and develop my drawing skills, for example if I were to use a wacom tablet to enhance my hand rendered images.

If I had time to make any improvements, or even tackle the brief again I would definitely allow myself to become less uptight when choosing a starting point, and consider choosing something more simplistic. This would allow me more time to gather valuable first hand research, and cause less of a panic in the production process, resulting in higher visual quality. I would also spend more time on the development of characters, this is definitely something that I rushed during this brief.  This would have an even higher impact on the viewers, allowing them to develop a better relationship with the characters in terms of empathy and understanding. 

To conclude, I am pleased with the way that I answered the brief accurately. I believe that I effectively told the untold story of The Willow pattern but there is certainly room for improvement and development in certain areas. This includes keeping research more specific, allowing adequate time in all areas for development and challenging myself further to embrace different tools and skills.