Over the course of this project, I feel that I have achieved a lot. I did everything I could to the best of my ability and I tried not to cut any corners. There are things, such as actual drawing skill that I could improve on. This is mainly through lack of drawing practice after my three years of not drawing while studying photography. I did what I set out to do, I did a project without the use of photography. I did however pick up my camera to gather evidence on my blog, but it was set to auto, and no one was going to open up and check on my meta data.
I feel that it was very valuable to myself personally to embark on a project that encouraged me to draw. I needed to get back into the habit of being able to look and draw anything, an ability I was very concerned that I had totally lost. I also learnt a lot from talking and working with others, even though I didn't produce any physical work with anyone else, I still feel like I have been working with others to expand my knowledge and ideas. The cat photographs that I received from my facebook friends proved to be very valuable to me. They were the perfect way of working on something using something from someone else, and having the chance to make it my own. I didn't have much of a choice of the photographs that I illustrated, they were what other people wanted to share, they wanted me to illustrate their cats, because they wanted to be part of something interesting.
I learnt that I can't rely on people to be one hundred percent interested in a project, and sometimes people want to collaborate on work, but they really mean they want to call it collaboration and have the other person do everything. This wasn't my personal experience, but something I saw was about to happen and avoided. I also learnt that I can draw better than I thought I could and that I was able to create a set of work in my own style. I think I could have possibly learnt more about the history behind illustration and how it actually began, It was difficult to find a starting point. I can study this in my personal time to expand my subject knowledge.
I feel that this project went well and that I actually did more than I initially intended to do. I wanted to spread my ideas out more, so it covered more of an area. If I had stayed to my original proposal I wouldn't have done so much work, or learnt as much about my own style as I have. The sources of information that I found were fairly useful. A few of the illustration magazines and textbooks were disappointing with what they contained. I was hoping for more novice level instructions, and instead was faced with expert level instructions, and because this was my first attempt in my life at creating illustration, I was a bit confounded by it all. The most valuable source was a book by Key, about Line illustration from 1900. It explained a lot to me, and phrased everything in a delightful interesting way. I learnt about how lines can express emotion and personality from the way that they are drawn, this was a key notion in my work.
I made the difficult decision not to continue with the tattoo design that I had started. It was hard but there were too many variables for me to deal with for such a short project. It is also something that needs to be finished or it is worthless. Tattoo design would have been very time consuming and I do not feel that my drawing skills are up to that level yet, I feel like I needed a little test project, Like drawing these cats. As a way of building myself up to that tattoo perfected level. I have organised it so that the tattooist will have space to display and use my tattoo designs when I design them in my spare time. He wants to remove some old designs that no one ever has, and likes my style.
The most difficult thing about this project was finding the patience to sit and finish my illustrations. They took a long time, and for some reason I had decided on doing a lot of them. Each illustration probably took about 4 hours from start to finish, they did start to speed up the more practiced I became with drawing.
The most satisfying thing about this project was making the cards, when all the illustrations were finished and there was a moment of pure girly craftiness. I enjoyed taking the time to decorate and add to my own designs, gluing buttons and pieces of ribbon is strangely therapeutic.
If I could do this project again, there are a few things I would have done differently. I would have made it in a sketchbook, not as an online blog. I find it difficult to include all my little tangents of thoughts and its difficult to show actual artwork. I do accept that it is a good form of instant publishing though. I would have also started to gather more photographs of cats, I would have done this sooner so I hadn't left it so late to the deadline and wasn't so stressed this last week. My timekeeping has been well but I did underestimate the size of this project.
