Hopes and fears

In this blog post I will be talking about some of my hopes for what I want to achieve post degree and some of the fears I have.

Unlike some of the others on my course my aim isn’t to go into editorial illustration, instead I’m building a brand which has been the goal even before I took this degree. The course has helped me come up with new ways to do this and has also let me see what alternative paths I could have taken. It sounds like I’m just set in my ways but I can tell you I have given each avenue suggested to me plentiful consideration. I have come to the conclusion building my own brand is the best way to get to get my work to its intended audience and maintain my artistic integrity while doing so. With my style of working I can’t wait around for art directors see that my style does have a place in their publications.

 One of my hopes is that I will become a better salesperson; it’s something I will need to work on. The course has helped me build confidence in my work, now I just need to become more socially confident. One of my fears is I could set up my brand in the wrong way since I don’t know much in terms of registering a business and how small businesses are taxed. To remedy this fear I intend to take a short course in business to help me market and properly set up my brand, since I’m not going down a more traditional illustration route there are gaps in my knowledge that need to be filled.

The course has also helped me step out of my comfort zone before I would have been hesitant to email people but now I find it a lot easier and know that the skill will be necessary to contact stockists.  Due to my anxiety I would often catastrophize things like sending an email or asking someone to give me feedback on my work but through repetition it’s getting easier. This takes me onto a fear of mine I’m afraid my anxiety will get in the way of potential opportunities, there are techniques I have learned to help with my anxiety through the past few years which will hopefully help me in this regard.

Another hope of mine is that through my brand I can help de-stigmatize mental illness and work with mental health charities to help fund services for people suffering from mental illness and raise awareness of what people can do to help those who struggle with mental illness. Mental health is a subject I have often brought forth in my practice and I fully intend to continue to do that outside of university.

I think a lot of people leaving art and design courses have a fear of getting sucked into jobs not related to their preferred field, I can say that in my case I’m not scared of having to pick up a day job to support what I want to do. If anything I’m actually looking forward to having that experience. I don’t think I will ever be able to stop making work which is why I don’t feel threatened by having to do other things to get by. Being an illustrator is not a stable job which scared me a lot at the beginning but I’m not limited to just being an illustrator. With that I don’t fear failure because I will never stop trying and that’s the only true way to fail.

The fear I have had is that my direction is a lot more fluid than others; it can come across as me not knowing where I am going because there is not as many boundaries to what I can do. There is no need for me to limit myself to just doing t-shirts, prints or books. The thing about creating a brand is you can explore many different outcomes under that umbrella instead of limiting myself to just illustrating other peoples book or articles. Creating my own content suits me better otherwise most of the time it feels like I’m forcing my style to match up with content that it doesn’t go with.

Client: Hang-Up Gallery Director Ben Cotten

The hang up gallery prides itself on helping young artists, and with big names like Banksy on their roster of artists who wouldn't want these guys to look at your work. In this email I'm trying to hard sell my work a bit more while still remaining professional and polite.

Dear Ben Cotten,

I'm Sophie a BA Illustration student in my final year at MMU. As part of our course we have been asked to seek out industry professionals which may be interested in our work. I have attached a PDF portfolio to this email it contains 6 pieces of my best pieces work. If you could spare a moment to look at it and give me some feedback it would be much appreciated.

You have an amazing selection of artists such as Takashi Murakami, Invader, Dsceet, Herakut and of course Banksy. And by looking through your roster of artists I feel like my work may interest you, it's in the same vein but at the same time something a little different. Just to make clear I'm not looking to display my work only for you to have a look and see what you think.

I eagerly await your response.
Sophie Stratton (RaelDanger)


I will update this post if/when I get a response.

Client: Phil Harwood ascot studio's

Phil Harwood seems like one of the more approachable art gallery directors I have contacted, he already has some of Chris Pegg's work in his gallery which is manga influenced like my work. So that's already a good indicator that he might be interested in my style of work. With the email I sent to him I thought I would try being a little more informal and making sure he knows I have looked at the work he has on display and what he is about.

Dear Phil,

I'm Sophie a university student studying BA illustration at MMU. I am currently in my final year and we have been asked to contact gallery directors, art directors and other industry professionals to get some feedback on our portfolios. I have a PDF portfolio I could send via email it contains 6 pieces so it won't take up much of your time.

I stumbled across your gallery online and had a browse of the work you have on display and noticed you are displaying some of Chris Pegg's work and feel like my work is in a similar vein.  As an art buyer I would be interested in hearing your take on my work.

I hope to hear from you soon.
Sophie Stratton

I will update this post if /when I receive a response.

Client: Sam Thorne Director of Nottingham Contemporary

This one is pushing the boat out a bit, Sam Thorne is a very experienced as both a critic and gallery director. To be quite honest if he replies I am going to be scared of his response.  

Dear Sam Thorne,

I am Sophie a BA illustration student studying at MMU. I am currently at the end of my final year of my degree, as part of our course we have been asked to contact gallery directors and other industry professionals to give us some feedback on our portfolios. I can send my portfolio via email and it contains 6 pieces of work so it won't take up much of your time. I wanted to contact you because of the varying styles of artwork you display at Nottingham Contemporary and how the gallery is doing a fantastic job of inspiring young up and coming artists.

Kind regards
Sophie Stratton

Will update once I have received a reply.

Client: Richard Goodall Gallery

I had to contact Richard Goodall through the galleries website, this is what I sent.


Dear Richard Goodall

I'm a student studying Illustration at MMU. I am in my final year and as part of my course I have been asked to find gallery owners to give me some feedback on my portfolio.

I have visited your gallery before and I love the collections you have and feel that my work is in a similar vain, so I knew that I had to contact you.

It won't take much of your time I could either bring my portfolio to you or attach a pdf portfolio containing 6 pieces to an email if you would prefer.

Best Regards
Sophie Stratton


I will update this post with any correspondence I receive.

Future self: Grief Project

Future self: Grief Project 

My future self project is about grief and the grieving process and specifically helping children and young teens recognize where they are emotionally in the process. This will help aid parents and maybe even school counsellors.

My initial idea was to make a book based off a poem I was writing about the stages of grief, but upon further research I found breaking it down into a linear clear cut process for example

1. Denial 
2. Anger 
3. Bargaining 
4. Depression 
5. Acceptance

Can actually do more harm than good.

No one experiences loss in the same way. Some people might skip certain emotional states, some might experience additional emotions and some may revisit certain stages. I don't want my work to pigeonhole people into believing there is only one correct way of grieving. The only incorrect way of grieving is not letting yourself go through the process. So keeping this in mind I reconsidered the book and/or booklet idea because it is too linear, and I have been considering making cards instead. I am still fine tuning how they are going to work but right now I am thinking of having 3 types of cards.

• Character cards
• Tip cards 
• Blank cards

Character cards will have a personification of the emotion for example Anger on them with the name of the emotion. The child will pick out the card/s which reflects how they are feeling, the descriptions of each emotion will be listed in a booklet which will come with the cards. Parents can get their children to redraw everyday or the children can display the cards on the fridge, their bedroom door, on a notice board ect and change them when they feel the need.

Tip cards are for what the child can do to experience the emotion in a healthy way, for example anger can cause problems if not dealt with correctly especially with school age children and teens.

Blank cards are for if the child or teen is experiencing an emotion that isn't on any of the pre existing cards. I'm including these because as I said everyone experiences loss differently and I want to try and keep all bases covered.

What kind of grief are these cards for?

I wanted to keep the cards so they can be used in any situation that involves loss. This could be loss of a pet, loss of a friendship or relationship, familial breakdown (divorce) and the loss of family members.

Other outcomes?

The other outcomes I want to make are

• Booklets
• Stickers 
• Rag dolls
• Clothing/Textiles

Feedback from Fig Taylor

Yesterday Fig Taylor came in to have a look at out work and suggest directions we could go in.

First she gave a talk on finding clients. She talked about having a strong style with diverse subject matter is what art directors might look for in a portfolio, if an art director can't see in your portfolio you draw cats for example they won't hire you to draw cats. She warned us against buying mailing lists of clients and sending out generic copy and paste emails because it is a fast track to being blacklisted by those clients. She told us to only target clients who you think will be interested in your work, if you are contacting a client who is the wrong fit you are basically just wasting your time.

Fig talked to us about two different illustration pathways

Mainstream which is editorial which has a fast turnover, book publishing where your designs will be heavily shaped by the retailer, and advertising which is where you can make a lot of money but it has to go through a lot of people who will demand a lot of changes.

Gift industry which more about making products like greetings cards, wrapping paper and I assume things like t-shirts and apparel etc.


Fig's Feedback

After the talk she sat down with groups of us and gave us some quick feedback on where we could go with our work.

When she got to my work I couldn't help but feel she didn't know what to really suggest, she told me that art directors don't like manga influenced styles but she didn't know why that's the case because it is rising in popularity with consumers. So pretty much editorial would be hard for me to get into but there maybe some more quirky children's magazines like Aqila I could try. She kept wavering on if my style would be a good fit for children or would be better aimed a tweens and teens.

She suggested I could try and get into character design and if I was to include some of my roughs in my portfolio but otherwise stick with finished pieces. She also suggested I could try selling my work for tattoo flash.

Her biggest suggestion was for to try and sell my work online on sites like etsy and redbubble. But she also said hardly any artists get popular selling online.

My Thoughts

I don't think Fig Taylor seemed to grasp my work and it's audience. I have most success selling to people aged 11-25 yet Fig kept telling me my work was only for children, tweens and early teens. She didn't explicitly say I should go into the gift industry even though that seems to be the obvious best fit for my work. The whole experience was very de-motivating for me but I have to keep in mind my work is a bit out there and is very niche so I can't expect everyone to understand it.

Future self initial ideas

So future self is a little bit of a tricky unit for me, I don't have one set career goal, I want to give most things a try. So I don't see myself sticking to one path permanently for now at least. I know for certain I'm not really interested in editorial and I would rather illustrate my own creations rather than the creations of others.

So I am more drawn to authorstrator focused projects, I think that is why I didn't do so well in my last project. I focused to much in creating from existing material rather than responding to my own material. But after talking to Ian about where I went wrong and points he felt I should focus on I have a better idea of what I can do for this project and how to best make use of my skills.

Pathways which do interest me are

Tattooing
Fabric design
Book Illustration
Band Poster Illustration
Game concept design/Character design
Toy design

So for this project I want to combine a few of these and focus on making products which would be sellable.I wanted to make fabric designs incorporating, tattoo and character design aspects. I would then have  a seamstress make the fabric into dresses. I have also thought about making a book (possibly pop up) incorporating tattoo style artwork combined with character design, I would like to aim this book at 13-25 year olds.

I am concerned I have too many ideas since that was another downfall in my last project.

Doki Doki Festival

Saturday last week I sold my artwork at my first anime convention. DokiDoki before this year was held in Manchester every two years, but is now running every year in November.

This year was more of a trial run for me so I could see how others set up and what sells, it defiantly helped seeing how others dress there stalls and how I can improve on presentation. But I did manage to make nearly £70 (£69.50) to be precise which was a nice bonus.

I have a lot of friends in this community I had actually interacted with some of the other artists who were trading prior to the event. It was great to interact with my target audience properly for the first time, I got some great feedback on prices and what I should focus on in the future. 

I will defiantly be doing it again next year, it was a really enjoyable experience.   

The future

Recently I have been feeling the pressure to really find a definite route I want to take my art and I have decided after degree to purse a career in a tattooing, I considered this before I started this degree I was even offered an apprenticeship and I let the opportunity pass me by because I wasn't confident enough in my artwork.

Now I have had time to think about it I have something unique to offer when it comes to style and I want to try and practice specifically doing work which will computationally lend itself to tattoo's. As far as tattoo styles I like I am a fan of "new school tattoos".

Image from checkoutmyink

Image from oquevemporai.wordpress.com

Image from flickr

Tattoo by Autumn Tierney

Image from geeksaresexy

by Mina at Hawk and Sparrows in Malmö, Sweden.

Image from poundedink.com

by Kelly Dotty

I like new school tattoo's due the the vibrancy of the colours and how bold an beautiful they are. And I feel it really fits with the style I have established.

It maybe seen as a trend in tattooing but I am also really fond of the look of watercolour style tattoo's.

Image from huffingtonpost

Image from 1337tattoos.com

By Gene Coffey

Image from www.cuded.com

I love the fluidity of the linework (if applicable) in watercolour tattoo's, and again I love the vibrancy of the colours they use. The line's in watercolour tattoo's are varied some lines are think and bold, others look like brush and ink and some are swift and wispy.

Difficulty getting interviews

I have lost count of the amount of artists I have tried to contact just to name a few who have not replied Erik Jones, Glenn Arthur and Camilla D'errico who said she would answer my questions and never got back then I contacted an artist I have bought artwork form before called Destiny Blue  and this is what I got back.

Any responses other than answering my questions was pointing me towards a previously done Q&A or an FAQ.

Also a lot of artists I wanted to contact didn't have a contact email that I could find and on there facebook pages had taken off the option to inbox them. I am starting to feel very apprehensive about if I will get my final interview and if they interviews I have done will be seen as being suitable. I have tried my best in interview people who's work inspires me but they seem quite hard to get a hold of. 

Doll test how ingrained is racism?

I just watched this video and the video really made me feel uneasy, which I think is what it is supposed to do.

This video is entitled Doll Test and in the video the people conducting the experiments ask children from varying racial backgrounds questions about two dolls and a diagram with different skin colours. What really pulled at my heart stings was watching the children of colour pointing to the "black" doll and labeling it as the ugly doll, with most preferring the white doll. And when asked to give the researcher the doll which looked like them they handed over the "black" doll which they had earlier categorized as the ugly doll.

The fact they considered a doll with a similar skin colour ugly just shows how much the stereotypes made by white people have been rooted within coloured children. I felt tears come to my eyes several times no child should think that their skin colour makes them ugly or untrustworthy.

Police Cadets and Ethical Issues

While doing the anti bullying animation I had to reconsider a lot of the content I wanted to cover. I wanted to focus on the aftermath of bullying which would be that kids who are bullied are at more at risk to mental health problems such as

Depression
Panic disorder
Anxiety especially Social Anxiety
Body Dysmorphia
Paranoia

and more
Serious cases of bullying have even lead to the victim taking their own life.

But due to the 10-11 age range it would not be suitable for them, I got around this by hinting at it by using metaphors in my animation.

Instead I made a zine that would be for the parents that would talk about some of these issues.

Cyber bullying and anti bullying briefs

Today is my deadline for my second unit which included two briefs. One on cyber bullying and one live brief on rasing awareness in schools about bullying.

For my cyber bullying brief I made two posters and a zine. I am not happy with the quality of content I produced and if given more time I would have restarted it all. The cyber bullying bleed into my live brief, I used one of the characters I had made in the first project as the main protagonist in my animatic/animation. I was much happier with the outcomes in this project, I feel project 1 just got turned into part of the process of project 3 (the anti bullying brief). This could have been avoided if I had chosen a none bullying related subject for project 1.

There is several things I wanted to include in my unit hand in but I may not have the time.

1. A booklet full of helplines an what each one deals with.

2. A page on Lucy (my main protagonist) to help the kid empathise/sympathise with her.

3. Some talking points for the cadets to expand on during their presentation.

4. To have more finished animation.

I felt very strongly about both briefs because I have faced both regular and cyber bullying. I always wanted to find a way to share my stories and have them benefit others. What concerns me about bullying is that a lot of adults view it as character building, severe bullying is not character building it is character destroying. I really wanted to make that clear to parents.

Writing

Recently I have been writing quite a lot probably due to my growing unrest as to where society seems to be headed. I have always identified more with being an authorstrator than an illustrator, the thought of illustrating other peoples writing never really fully appealed to me even though I have tried it (more like wrestled with it) and was proud of the results. But I didn't feel like the results were really me, and I find that expression of self very important in my work.

I have always enjoyed writing and was often highly commended for it back at school. I took english language as an A level thinking I would enjoy it and it would be like creative writing. OH BOY was I wrong! I ended up dropping it as soon as I could. I felt unwelcome in that world, people looked down their nose at me because of my unconventional taste in literature and just my interests going against the grain in general. I remember the most demoralizing moment was when the tutor asked who plays Halo and being an avid Halo fan at the time my hand went up like a shot, the tutor sighed with exasperation as I wrecked his example. He then asked the class who read sci-fi again my hand went up, he basically told the class to ignore my presence because I didn't follow what females were supposed to like. And after that the class continued to look at me as if I didn't belong. That is when I decided that studying English was not a good idea.

But it has always been something I continued to do in my spare time regardless, it may not be as well polished as someone who had continued down that root and my tense maybe a bit wonky at times but recently I feel what I have started to write has reached a new level.

The thing I like to write about most is people and their interactions, I feel it's a my strong point. This is the first time I have felt really proud about a written project. I actually can't help but laugh at bits of it because it reminds me of interactions I have had with my friends.

In a way I wish that it fit in with my university projects because I have gotten quite into it.

Astigmatism

This is a more personal post but hopefully an insightful one, on Monday the 3rd of November 2014 I went to the opticians for the first time in 8 years. I left it 8 years because up to the age of 12 I had eye tests regularly and never had any problems, up until the last few years when I noticed I was having trouble with bus numbers.

So I booked an appointment and found out I have an Astigmatism. Astigmatisms are common and most don't need any correction but my astigmatism requires correction in the form of glasses or contacts. My astigmatism is 180.00 in my right eye and 5.00 in my left, the optician said this is something I have probably always had but it has gotten worse without correction.

In primary school the teachers were convinced I had dyslexia due to issues with reading, spelling, maths and to some degree just communicating in general. Most of these things I have found through my excessive amounts of googling maybe typical for people who have an uncorrected severe astigmatism. The more I thought about it the more everything fell into place.

• Teachers always commenting that I wasn't paying enough attention.
• My terrible hand eye coordination and balance.
• My troubles with stairs, uneven ground and jumping from small heights.
• How hard it was to focus on reading books and subtitles.
• When my friends pointed out something right infront of my face I could never see it.
• How often I would just feel like all my senses were overloaded.

An astigmatism is caused by the eye/s being more rugby ball shaped rather than spherical, this causes the eye to focus on two different point instead of both eyes focusing on one point. This makes it harder to process information because the brain is taking in two completely different points and trying to fill in the blanks.

One of my first reactions was one of anger, I had been put through so many tests to try and prove I had some form of learning disability, I was put in classes with children who needed extra help which brought down myself esteem. I was told in primary and my first secondary school they didn't expect me to pass a single GCSE due to my unidentified "learning difficulties". And then it turns out all a long if I had been given a proper eye test and an early age that could all have been avoided. People I have spoken to who have the same thing had glasses for it when they were barely out of nappies.

It was a smack in the face in a way, I had been struggling all these years to find out I didn't have to struggle at all. As much as it is a relief to have my glasses and to finally be able to function correctly, it still angers me that none thought to check earlier. Why would you not think to check? If  you think a child isn't taking in information as they should that maybe the eyes could be the key to the problem. 

Now for the exciting things about having my astigmatism corrected.

• I can pay more attention rather than  have my brain trying to make sense of everything I'm seeing at the same time.
• My hand eye coordination and balance will probably get a lot better.
• I have noticed already stairs don't swim around like they used to.
• Reading has become a lot easier.
• I have been a lot less fatigued at the end of the day.
• I have no idea how this will effect my drawings I presume it will effect them in a good way or there maybe some regression before I get the hang of it again. I have already drawn somethings but they haven't been overly complex so I couldn't see much difference. 

I think it will be very interesting to see how I progress now I have my glasses, I have heard people like me who have only had their astigmatism picked up as an adult say that glasses changed their life. I guess I will find out over time if that will be the case.