'ADD.LIFE & EXPLORE' - Reflective Statement

Overall I think it has been beneficial to my practice working as part of a bigger company / organisation, and seeing where my illustrations would fit in along a bigger production line. Figuring out my roles as the illustrator within a bigger design firm, how I can present my finished ideas and also to suggest ideas at earlier stages to the client. Communication with the clients and with other designers has been a vital part of the project it order to get the finished product. I was good to work on a well organised project with a a number of different people applying totally different skills. It has been really useful to realise how I can use my screen printing skills to within a proper professional payed brief, I enjoyed using the colour blend techniques I think it worked well to impress the clients - so screen printing is definitely something I will continue to push within my practice. I enjoyed seeing how I could maintain my personality within the artwork as well as making it suitable for a more professional and mass produced illustration. I was good practice for me too see how my work could be passed on to other graphic designers and let them work on the areas I was less informed in like the typography and the other graphic and web design, this meant I could focus all my time on my most valuable skills within the project. The after effects animation was definitely not my favourite part of the project, I overcame a few challenges whilst using it and learnt a lot about after effects and more specifically how it can be used with my illustrations. Last year I worked with animating a lino print, this year i experimented with animating a colour blend screen print (which proved to be a lot more difficult). I want to try and force myself to keep experimenting with applying animation to my artwork. Because of the success of the project the clients are still eager for more work in the future on the same project, I had a meeting with them to discuss the outcome from this and how they wanted to take the project further with some new ideas for illustrations. Its a good feeling to have a made a proper impact on the client with my work. I guess my aim if working as a free lance illustrator would be too build as many connections as possible with a reliable clients, and keep a constant flow of commissions/projects flowing along.