In school, the art department were all super supportive of developing our skills as artists but also as people making sure that whatever we learnt in class could be applied to not only art but other spaces in our educations and lives. Discussions ranged from social history and personal style development to the best workflows to ensure we got the right experiences for our future careers.

First sketchbook of year 9 - looking at basic techniques and most focusing on technical skills. Two months was allotted to this which I’m impressed by the amount of work considering how many other classes I was taking.

Reflections

The first project of my GCSEs and I was floundering with this one so bad. I focused on self portraiture as it was a topic that seemed safe to deal with and I could play around with it as an experiment as it wasn’t an official mandated project by the exam board.

Past, present and/or future:

The second project was semi-inspired by the portrait studies of the first project as I started to look at cultural influences which I didn’t have that much of a connection to. It also helped that I had a huge collection of clothing that was stuffed away at home. This experimentation with materials and self is something that also continues throughout my A levels.

Events:

Clothing and shoes are a huge thing for me as a disabled individual as they are mask to navigate the world as a “normal person”. This project didn’t focus on that interpretation though, but rather the interpretation of occasion related need for different shoes like sandals for outside and sunny days and wellingtons for the rain etc. This project was disrupted by COVID majorly and i was unable to come up with a conclusion however this set a precedent for the amount of work that satisfies my technical research needs in order to come up with a reasonable conclusion and final piece.