Persons of Note Final Evaluation

Skills and Development

In this brief I have continued to use Adobe Illustrator to produce my finished pieces, and I personally think my skills using the programme have noticeably developed to a higher standard. Working from photographs and my own sketches has allowed me to make my work more personal and sophisticated, as opposed to solely tracing secondary images found on the internet.
This has allowed me to grow in confidence when using Illustrator and result in my finished outcomes being of a higher quality.

Difficulties and Setbacks

I faced a few difficulties in the motivational side of completing the postcards, purely because they required a high level of attention to detail, and a lot of patience(something that I need to work on!)
I found having the brief extending over the Easter break a bit of a setback, similar to the way that I struggled with Visual Narratives being over the Christmas break. For me it is more difficult to discipline myself with other commitments I have at home, and find time to concentrate fully on my work. Also, just the different environment altogether being away from the city I study in and my peers in the studio, releases the pressure a bit for me. I have found that I work better with a little bit of pressure (not too much) for time, so that my full attention is focused on my work.

Things I would change about my work

I really wish I would have spent more time media testing. I am really kicking myself at this stage because I say this in every single brief! Although I am pleased that I chose to use vectors because I enjoyed them so much in the last brief, I didn't allow myself the full option of other possible media I could have used, that could have been equally as successful.
I have noticed that my problem is that in the early stages of a brief I get really frustrated that everything is at loose ends and that the direction that my work is going in is unclear. This means I have a tendency to just go with the first idea I come up with, rather than completely exhausting every option possible, having a restricting impact on my development processes.

What have I gained from this brief?

In all honesty, at the beginning stages of this brief I felt quite unmotivated because this project was really similar to something that I did at A-Level two years ago, and I feel like I have progressed a lot since then. However the difference from then and now is that with the help of group crits, I have been able to look deeper into the meaning of my person of note, Amy Johnson, and express how I feel about her in my work by using fact, language and symbolism. 
I look back and think that I maybe could have pushed my ideas further and tackled things with a more light-hearted, humorous feel but I am pleased that I have approached the subject in a more sensitive and sophisticated way, especially in my comparative postcards. I hope that introducing the issue of the suppressed lives of women in the 1930's in comparison to Johnson's short but exciting and ambitious lifestyle will have an emotive impact on the audience by using hands and colours as main forms of symbolism. The same way that the maps in the stamps will be informative about the progressions of her courageous solo flights, and that the use of powerful, one word language will capture the essence and feeling that flying brings in the poster.