My final evaluation for my whole Location project..

My evaluation for the second unit of level 5

The second unit of this year holds the title of 'Locations', the project has been split up into two sections or briefs to be precise.
A self initiated brief that we wrote up ourselves, a project I based on the word 'locations' and what that means to me, the idea of home, something close to heart, and what a more perfect idea than focusing this part of my unit on the beach, or what components make up the beach to be more particular. The second part of this unit is a live brief working along side a weave based design partnership called 'Wallace and Sewell' a company situated in the heart of London.

To say that this unit has been a simple one, would be very false, having two projects on the go at once has been a big challenge for me, managing my time for this task hasn't been as successful as I would have liked it to be, I felt I had a lot of things to do in the last few days leading up to the deadline, maybe things I could have prevented having to do if I had maneged my time better, by having gone through this procedure, I have learnt by my mistake and know that next time I need to start planning, researching and getting stuck into something as soon as its necessary.

I am very pleased with how the project finally pulled together and how my final outcome has been presented. I feel a lot more confident in myself, especially when it narrows down to the technical side of both projects, not only moving forward by going from a hand controlled table top loom to a floor electronic loom, I am now able to comfortably use the electronic floor loom along side mastering a number of new structures to weave.
I am pleased with feeling more content about my place on the course and looking forward to facing lots more challenges over the next few months.

I enjoyed working in a slightly different way than to what I was used too, for both briefs in this unit I began by taking time out to do some thorough research, this allowed me to get a good body of work together before I started anything more practical.

Moving on from my research, I then had an equal amount of time on my two projects, when all of the research was fresh in my mind, drawing from my groundwork was very important, this was the area of my work that I continued to develop all the way through the projects.
Both projects consisted of two completely different outputs of drawing, mark making and development work but all very highly valued to keep working on my project. The most important reason for me doing this was so I could refer back to my work to start producing my samples. By doing this I had allowed myself to be able to choose the most suitable yarns for both my warp and my weft for the two individual projects.

I also took part in a three week Illustrator workshop, a very exiting yet challenging task as this was a programme I hadn't ever used before, along with Scott weave sessions and a number of drawing tasks I gave myself.

Something I told myself I would like to do more of in this project was in depth artist research, so as I mentioned earlier on this was the first starting point for me.
For my Wallace and Sewell brief I looked very closely at Guy Rose and his painting work, his painting 'Poppy field' had inspired my colour pallet the most for this area of my work, I had also looked up a little bit about Paul Cezanne and his painting 'small forest'.
For my self initiated brief I looked at not only artists, but practitioners and designers too, the work by Richard Long, Sue Lawty, Poppy Binns, Jessica leclere, Juliette Hoffman and Zoe Howarth all inspired my depth of this brief.
The sampling part of both projects was my favourite as I was knee deep in new experiments, keeping my artist research close to mind as well as my own drawings and development I was highly satisfied with each and every outcome.
Both warps that I made were 6 yards long and 10 inches wide, my Wallace and Sewell brief was made up of red, blue, jade green and marine green 2/16s cotton and the self initiated was a plain cream wool yarn, I threaded them both up across 16 shafts, and on a block point threading.
I choose to do two completely different types of warps and selection of yarns for my two individual projects because I wanted two diverse outcomes, my cotton samples are flat and pressed, my woollen
samples chunky and textured both to link in with my brief.

The part of the unit that hasn't worked so well for me is the computer based work, including Illustrator and Photoshop, I found both of these programmes very difficult to get my head around, that is the reason for the lack of work in this specific area, and not fully completing this task another section I also found difficult as I have already mentioned was my time management, but by struggling with this, I know no what I will do to change this for my next brief.
If I could do this project again I would like to build up a better weave structure plan and work more on Scott weave so that I continue to build on my technical file and technical weaving sample structures. I would also like to challenge myself to working on a bigger scale again as that is something I have missed during this unit.

I am pleased with how I pulled things together by the end of this unit and look forward to taking part in a new challenge for Unit X as i have chosen the Pass it on, educator brief.