Work Experience Report

In this report I shall be summarising the events of the various work experience placements that I took part in, and also evaluating what I had learned from each experience and how beneficial, or not, each experience was to me and to expanding my knowledge of becoming an Illustrator or going into the world of Illustration.

My first taste of work experience in the illustration industry came in the form of stall manning for the Cheltenham literature festival. It was a good way to see a number of different types of illustration all from the University and the Pitville press, and was interesting to learn and see what different things people would look at and be more interested in.
It was also a good first step into becoming more aware of events surrounding the illustration world such as manning stores at events, and exploring these kind of events as a way to create more contacts and improve networking skills, although the booth we were in for the Illustration awards was small and all University related people so I did use any networking skills here, besides interacting with clients and trying to answer their questions as well as possible.
From what I could tell, most of the customers to the stall would look towards buying the more decorative or smaller items, such as the postcards and bookmarks on sale, rather than the small books and stories, this may be because there is less of an ‘investment’ involved when buying a postcard, you do not need to necessarily be interested in the story it represents if there is one. I remember that one lady was interested in supporting the students’ work and the university so she bought more of a variety of things that she liked the look of, but from what I remember most people (and there weren’t too many) went towards the smaller cheaper prints or postcards.

The larger part of my work experience was done helping out in the art department of my secondary school.
It felt strange being back to school as an ‘adult’ and having students call me by surname, it gave me a sense of responsibility and I feel that I did learn more about being responsible and sensible while in this placement.

On the first day I worked at my school, I spent the day becoming familiar with some of the classes and was helping out the teachers, by going around the classes and answering some of the student’s questions and giving them some suggestions to their work. The lower school classes were mostly starting new projects, so they were doing mind maps. One class’ new project was to do with Bugs and Butterflies, so I helped the students by suggesting ways they could compose their pages and where they could place the drawings of their bugs.
In the afternoon I also spoke to some of the Year 13s about their work and answered some of their questions about university and going in to an art and design based course. I felt comfortable answering their questions about foundation year too and recommended the course that I went on as well, it felt good to be able to help others with my past experiences and knowledge.

The second day involved similar tasks to those on the first day, helping out the teachers and classes, but I also had some more practical jobs to do in helping out the technicians such as organising boxes of fabrics and wool and threads as it is a job that’s often left for a while and so I completed these tasks while the technician could continue to do her regular tasks. It was a simple exercise, but it reminded me that some jobs shouldn’t be left to do until the last moment and that managing different tasks is an important part of being an illustrator.
On this day I was also drafted in to help one particular GCSE student with one of her artist studies. She was struggling to re-create some of the chosen images of the artist she was looking at, and so I helped her by teaching her different ways to use the medium (watercolour paints), such as tapping the brush to re-create the spotted effect her artist used in his work, and encouraging her to use colours more accurate to those used in his works as sometimes she would see that he had used blue and then had just chosen the first blue in the paint palette and used that rather than mixing one.

On the third day of my placement, I did some similar tasks to those I was given previously, namely a combination of helping out with old tasks left by the technician and also helping students in class.
The classes I helped out with today were all lower school classes, some Year 8s and some Year 7s. The Year 8 classes were producing mixed media images, with a focus on a figure in the centre with a head chosen from magazines, the classes were finishing off this project by adding more mixed media and adding related lyrics to their pieces. I gave some students suggestions as to where and how they could place their lyrics in a stylistic way, to flow across the page. It was good to go around the class and to see some students acting upon the advice that I gave them.
The Year 7 classes were creating a piece based from photographs of the school, and split into different sections. These sections had to be drawn to re-create the style of different types of art that they had looked at such as Impressionism, Cubism and Pointillism. With these students I helped them by suggesting ways of filling up the blank spaces in their pieces as well as how to re-create said styles if they were confused with how to do something. Again it was nice to see the students reacting well to the advice and treating me as a helper or a sub-teacher.
One Year 7 class was actually shown my online portfolio to be introduced to me, they were going to ask me questions about my work, however there was not time before the end of class.

On the last day at my placement in the school I began the day by helping out in Year 7 classes again, much like the previous day I gave advice to the students about their pieces based on different historical art forms.
For most of the afternoon however, I was given a more creatively productive project to do by the head of the art department. She asked me to create a sheet for AS Photography of how to use different photo editing techniques in Photoshop. As I am familiar with Photoshop from years of using it to enhance scans of my work and my own photos, as well as drawing directly into Photoshop to create work, completing this task was not too difficult and was actually quite entertaining to do something more creative and to use my skills to actually produce something.

Overall I have enjoyed my placements and believe that I have learned useful skills and information, such as gaining experience in manning stalls at the Literature festival and reinforcing the importance of organisational skills and generally improving on social skills by working at the school, and it felt rewarding to help some students by teaching them ways to improve their skills and also talking to older students and encouraging some to take art and design based courses if they were unsure.
However, as I am not necessarily interested in going into teaching after I leave university I feel I would have benefited more if I had worked harder to gain a placement in print studio or an agency. Luckily, I have been in recent contact with one of the people I had tried to contact during this period, Katie Leamon. Leamon created and designs her own stationary and she was recommended to my by a friend who stocks some her products in her shop. I recently got in contact with her and may be able to do a small summer contract in one of her studios that is not too far away from where I live and I hope I can gain an insight into the creation behind her products and seeing the printing process for some of the cards etc.
I also recently received an email from Jelly in London, whom I had previously contacted about possible work experience, which stated that they only hold placements for a 1 month period and would contact me if they had any spaces for them.
If I were to improve my placement experience overall, I think I would have spent more time contacting companies and places I was interested in and started earlier. I feel that I could have been more sociable with the students at my school when I was there as I did often find the results of helping the students rewarding.