OUIL502 Evaluation

Presentation slides

Creative Report: final report

I have gotten so much out of this talk with Laura. I feel really excited about my future practice, but I also feel I know a lot more about my plans and my practice now. I know that I don't want to confine my practice to just one niche subject in illustration, I want to tackle lots of areas with focus on product and print making. I also know that I want to aim towards having my own design studio and possibly doing a masters in something similar to printed textiles as to broaden my knowledge and practice.

Life's a Pitch: presentation & script

MEG:

• Hi, this is our Pitch for Life’s a Pitch, I’m assuming you all already know, but my name is Meg, Marnie, Annie, Kieran, Charlotte, Ruby, Jenny & Emma. Together we are the beanbag collective.
• We decided to name our group Bean Bag collective, as we wanted to make a fun brand, which is comfortable and based around bright primary colours. Our work tends to be colourful and shape driven, so we adopted the idea of a bean bag which has a friendly and accessible vibe. 

MARNIE:

• Current work combines traditional print, collage, and a mix of traditional and digital methods. Mainly our work focuses on print and shape based imagery. 
• We all tend to think quite carefully about our colour palettes and composition, and how the colours will work together as a whole image, especially when printing. 
• Something else we all work towards is a more light-hearted tone of voice, we feel it appeals more to our target which is young professionals with an interest in illustration. 

ANNIE:

• We are each moving towards our own individual practices, But collectively we would all like to start creating 3D work and sellable crafts - as that is what we are interested in buying and owning ourselves
• We all really enjoy hand crafting and creating tactile objects that have long lasting worth and treasure-like quality

JENNY: 

• (speech about our audience)

KIERAN:

• Since there’s a large group of us we decided to split the specific tasks between us 
• Management - orchestrating the group and deciding what direction to go with
  Promotion - posters, online presence, type, logo, instagram/twitter etc.
  Finance - costs, budgeting, finding out what is feasible for the group financially
  Communication -involved with organising and going out to potential venues/zine fairs
• Since we’re all students it’s important to be able to divide costs evenly and figure out what’s financially viable for the group. We’ve also realised for illustration fairs that take place over the course of a weekend or a few days, to divide time spent at the location, so we can avoid having to pay for expenses such as overnight accommodation.

EMMA:

• One of the possible places we would like to sell our work would be the DIY Art Market in London. We visited last year, and Ed Cheverton, Day Job, Nick White, Lucy Kirk and William Edmonds have all exhibited there. It moves venue across London, and sells varied crafts from rings and badges to stickers and prints, all at affordable prices, which ensures the work is accessible to everyone.
• At the DIY Art Market, there’s a real emphasis on 3D work and more craft based goods, which, as Annie said earlier, is the direction in which we want our work to head. And since a table is only £35 for a day, it would be extremely cost effective for us, as it would cost less than £5 each, and we would assume to make up costs from sales of our work.

RUBY:

• As well as selling our individual work at art markets, we are also proposing a collective zine and here are some mock-ups of the possible aesthetic. The idea is to have a different primary colour as the theme for each issue.
• We want this zine to be a lighthearted and playful platform to showcase our practices individually and with collaborative pieces as well. Again because colour and shape is really important to our individual practices we found this general theme to successfully capture what we’re about. 
• This will obviously be a great way for us to network and get our names out there, but it will also be a great reason for us to keep pushing our practices forward through making something in quick succession. It will also be a great project to keep us motivated and making post graduation. 
• As we want our zine to be as widely accessible as possible, it will be cheaply produced, possibly through risograph printing.

CHARLOTTE:

• Footprint Leeds website - 100 copies of a 36 page zine, black ink, cost about £129. This would work out at £1.29 per zine, so if we sold it for £5 (wide audience) and sold all of them it would work out at a £371 profit - but that’s not considering other outgoing costs. 
• Other places we could produce work with outside uni would be leeds print workshop, which costs £45 per year to be a member of + £3 per session. As well as this we would have to buy paper and inks - vary in price.
• Galleries such as colours may vary , they have worked with groups from uni before and they are approachable friendly people.
• Other partners we thought if we held an exhibition of some kind other collectives and creatives. Opening night music djs performers.

MEG:

• Thank you for listening, does anyone have any questions?

Creative Presence: following up on print stuff

I haven't heard anything back from the studios and people I met at Print Stuff so I decided to follow a few leads up and ask about future possibilities. I got in touch with Ding Ding Things asking about possible work experience or internships seeing as we have had small conversations over Instagram. Unfortunately I haven't heard anything back yet, however I know the studio is based in Nottingham so this again is something I can pursue over summer.

I also emailed the Archipelago studio enquiring about having a general conversation for advice about how their creative collaborations come about and if they have any advice for young practitioners starting out. We had originally arranged to meet this week, however it's been pushed back till after the deadline due to their busy schedule. It's a shame that I won't be able to discuss anything that comes up in the presentation however I'm still making connections and getting stuck in. I feel it also gives me more time to get a few things sorted, for example I could piece together some business card designs or starter pack for them to look through.