evaluation

This year has been very important to my development as a designer and a person. I have discovered that I am a lot better at things I thought I was rubbish at, and rubbish at most of the things I believed I was good at. My biggest regret of the year was buying a PS3 at Easter, as this greatly inhibited my working and social life for a month or so.
As a designer I have discovered a lot of new mediums in which I enjoy to work. Primarily animation, or more accurately design for animation. This brief was one of the most influential and possibly contains my most successful resolutions.
The majority of this years work has been illustration and character based, these are the areas of design that I want to develop my skills in, as this is the direction I wish to pursue with the most interest. I have learnt how to develop a character instead of a picture, which was an important step for me as a designer. I have learned a lot about my drawing ability this year, and I have being improving and refining my ability, as I do not want to be restricted by an inability to draw outside my comfort zone.
The skills I have developed most prominently are defiantly my software skills, I have become capable of using most of the important programmes and now I am actually efficient at using Photoshop, which I hated last year. These skills have being developed due to the design process module and my use of Wacom when I work at home, I do still work mainly with drawing an am not a designer who can develop and resolve work on screen, I have combined the practical and digital approaches with much more success and comfort than I previously could.
My strengths lie mostly in my drawing and ideas development this is the area I produce most strong work in because I enjoy the development process, although I am not very good at producing the best resolutions, my final pieces are still a bit unfinished looking. I would benefit from taking a more direct approach to generating my resolutions rather than focusing most of my time to developing the ideas and possibilities.
This year has also seen me improve my organisation considerably but not to the level it should be at, I have being a lot more prepared and planned ahead to make sure I have worked most of the time as well as preparing for crits etc. but my organisation is disorganised, I am still a messy person, I like things to be chaotic and scrambled rather than neat and organised. All my planning has been done in sketchbooks and on scraps of paper rather than on timetables or in a diary, this is because I am constantly reassessing my plans by adding to them and altering them. I may or may not change this aspect of my personality.
In crits and the studio I haven’t being taking a particularly professional approach, generally I behave in a very informal manner and tend to say things I shouldn’t. This is another aspect of my personality I struggle to repress, maybe next year I will be as quiet as the rest of the group when it is appropriate. I also struggle when presenting this issue is shared by most of the group and I hope there will be some seminars/lessons to help us improve in this area next year.
I would like to work in the character and narrative field of illustration, as this is the direction I feel I work the strongest in, and I have the most interest regarding. In order to get into this area I will have to vastly improve my drawing and my ability to refine my resolutions. I like to work with a mix of both printed and screen graphics and I would like to work more with animation next year, I have a growing interest in this field and I want to develop my ability to work in it.

studio 4 C

studio 4(degrees)4 are a well established animation collective in japan whos work is clasifyed as part of the postmodern superflat movement. they are responsible for a fair chunk of the animatrix 'kids story' and 'beyond' as well as some of 'second rennaisance' most of them have experience of working on features by acclaimed director Miyazaki.
one of their most recent productions 'tekkonkinkreet' shows brilliant use of illustrative geometrical drawing and good variation of animation techniques. tekkonkinkreet is a strong example of a superflat animation with its name alone almost meaning reinforced concrete. the protagonists are a twisted modern metaphor for yin-yang.