Summative Evaluation

This module has been invaluable in terms of preparing me for real life, moreso than any other year. Really the past two years of PPP have been preparation for this year. I've now got a full consistent promotional pack that I'm happy to send out to people, in tandem with an online presence that functions and acts as a front facing platform for my practice. As a result I've been able to contact studios and publishers, to some success, and can continue to do so after the course has ended, updating this presence when necessary.

My main success has been getting a placement at Hallmark for May, which before this module I don't think I would have got because I had no branding, no website, no portfolio and no impotace to contact people due to having none of these things. While I'm there I will be emailing other companies about placements to take advantage of my foot-in-the-door.

I have also been able to expand my contextual refernces to broader practitioners which has enriched my work. Through Big Heads I've learnt about the practises of many admirable people which has reaffirmed that this is a potential career path, as long as I work hard as hell and put my work in front of people. 

My strengths in this module have been my branding, which I am finally happy with, and my engagement with other practitioners work. Sometimes I enjoy looking at work more than making it. I think I've engaged a lot more with the outside world of illustration and my potential place within it than I have any other year, and the benefit of this is that I have a better idea where I want to take my practice after graduation. At the end of last year I couldn't have pinned it down if I tried, where as now I now, at the miunte at least, that I want to work in publishing and editorial (perhaps advertising if the oppurtunity should arise) with my personal practise on the side where I pursue self published work to sell independantly. 

My weaknesses have been waiting till quite late to start contacting agencies and publishers, and people generally, but I felt like I wasn't ready to do so until my branding was done and I had a portfolio I was at least partially happy to show. Now that I've started though, I can continue to do this thorughout my career as it will be a good way of getting in contact with potential clients and getting advice and befriending other practitioners. Over the summer I plan to build on this start I've made in contacting people and post out some physical promotional packs as well as make personal visits to art directors and companies I'd like to work for. This is something I haven't felt comfortable doing yet but with the end of this module I have a completed portfolio, promo pack and set of people to contact and thus am more prepared for the next step in networking. 

This is the first time there hasn't been a need to state what I'll do in this module next year, more of stating of what I will take from this module into the rest of my life. That will be most of it; what I've learnt about the business end of things, like invoicing, copyright, licensing and costing work, the promotional aspects of having consistent and functional branding and getting people to see it and engage with it, and the engagement with other practitioners and what is happening outside of my deskspace, which I've come to think is very important or ones practise becomes very insular and ignorant of what's happening in popular illustrative culture. 

So basically PPP is a practice run for all the bits of an illustration career that arent the actual drawing, which has turned out to be heck of a large portion of it.