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Almost finished with the first three illustrations. I'm deciding if I want to illustrate the other three panels as they were meant to be backups incase I needed extra prints but I'm wondering if having six prints would look well together?

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Today's exhibition was a lot of fun and super helpful for my own making. I didn't submit my own work for this exhibition as I felt it wasn't yet at a place where it could be helpfully critiqued, as the semi-critique had only been two days earlier.

Despite this, seeing the progress of my classmates and the techniques they used in their own work was so hugely helpful - seeing the methods of other artists always inspires me and my own ideas, and I felt that the critiques I was giving and reading on other peoples' work could be applied to my own as well.

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The zine spread my group and I made from the semi-critique. It was really difficult but educational to work with another group of artists with diverse opinions and skill sets. We had to work fast and problem solve, but I'm proud of our work!

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Another design for a working class woman in my narrative. Her clothes are constructed for practicality with a built-in apron, and the material is cheaply-made cloth or cloth taken from excess fabric around the home.

She rarely indulges in hobbies like promenades or dances and spends much of her time doing labor around her home, on the land, or in the city.

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I'm beginning to sketch character profiles to give context to the women. Each vignette will have a portrait in the center with a singe-scene image above and below the portrait that gives context to the woman's life. I want to draw comparisons to our perception of women in the Regency period, often depicted with wealth, beauty, and luxury, compared to the reality of most women who lived in that period who lived conservatively and worked.

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Beginning to sketch how I want the characters of my narrative to look and if I want them to be stationary/active.

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I'm really happy with how the final prints turned out! The next step of my process is to cut them into their proper strips to be aligned in the form of wallpaper.

One thing I would change about this process is how I designed my print screens. I made individual films for each element (the circle and square vignettes, the floral frames, the extra adornments) and when it came time to print, I had to do a lot of assembling on the textile and it took a lot of time to dry. It was also much more difficult to properly align all the elements consistently across the six different prints. In the future, I would design one stencil of the vignettes, florals, etc and print that six times (which would save me a lot of time). Lesson learned!

Despite it taking more time than I expected, it turned out beautifully and I'm excited to illustrate the narratives.

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I began to print in the screenprint studio, and I initially spent a lot of time figuring out the placement of the pattern on the textile. The transition from paper print to textile has a bit of a learning curve, but I ended up hitting my stride and getting into the groove of printing.

I chose blue as the stencil color because it was most closely related to traditional Georgian wallpaper color and was the least aggressive of the colors I mixed. The yellows/golds I mixed looked really brown or mustardy as well.

The colors printed wonderfully, very solid and precise!

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Following my screen preparation session, I'm iterating color palettes to determine what colors I want to use. I don't want to use any exaggerated colors like pink or purple because it's a bit more garish than what I'm envisioning. I'm steering closer to the blue, or maybe a lighter version of it, because it's a similar color palette to traditional Georgian/Regency print colors. I've also made a beige/yellow iteration that I like, but might be too subdued.

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Ahead of my screenprinting session, I've mapped out how I want my designs to fit across the fabric and at what scale I want them to be printed. I'm finding it hard to estimate the size I want my stencils to be, but it was helpful to print on physical paper to see how it will appear.

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I'm beginning to flesh out the narrative that will go into my wallpaper and how I want the characters and stories to be represented. I've thought of creating stories around both modern and classical women and having them connected through the wallpaper.

I also want to play around with possibly incorporating pop-art and modern comic-art elements, like speech bubbles, which could create a super cool contrast and really tie in that modern element I've been looking for. Credits to my cousin for the inspiration!

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This is my first completed mock-up for my wallpaper narrative. The darker colored vignettes will serve as small narrative panels that will feature a portrait and two scenes. I still need to develop the characters and their stories, which is what I will spend my weekend storyboarding, but I'm immensely happy with the turnout of the floral design and the overall cohesiveness and symmetry of the wallpaper panels.

I plan to print the panels onto A4 paper and place them against a wall to get a sense of what the sizing will look like in real life and determine if the vignettes are too small. I don't want them to be overly large as they're a piece of the overall wallpaper and not the main focal point. They're meant to be subtle, like illustrations on Georgian wallpaper typically are, and the message of the narrative is only supposed to be noticed when studied closely. The purpose of that is to call back to the suffering many women experienced in the time period that was either hidden, normalized, or brushed off.

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Talking with Mireille today was hugely helpful in understanding how I'm going to present my physical piece. She gave me a brilliant idea to use my multiple screenprint copies to create a segment of wallpaper with each group of "comic panels" holding separate but thematically similar narratives.

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I did some further research into the significance of color and design in wallpaper and found really interesting opinions from the mid to late 19th century about the impacts of wallpaper in a room. The type of color used and complexity of design can heavily impact the feel of the room and the emotion it evokes from its occupants, with one article going so far as to say, "color is able to introduce an element of unrest, to refuse healing to tired nerves and overtasked energies, to stir up anger and malice and all unseen enemies that lie in wait for victims of weakness or fatigue".

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Feel like I've had a GREAT breakthrough in how I want to shape my work. I was digging through some old ideas I'd had for my project, which centered around character profiles and narratives. Meanwhile, I found some interesting wallpaper prints that reminded me of small scenes from a story in how they were illustrated. I tested it out on Procreate and really, really enjoyed the way it ended up looking. I like the way the traditional wallpaper designs with foliage serves almost like a comic panel to the small three image narrative for this one faceless character. I want to get into the screen printing studio and see how this would work on fabric. I think I'll print the backdrop and foliage frames and hand illustrate the narratives on top with paint/Posca markers.

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Thinking about how I want to present my narrative. Doing digital mockups is helpful while I'm in the stage of figuring out the specifics of my project, but I had a really helpful conversation with a peer about method. I know I'm focused on screen printing and my original thought was to print onto paper, but she suggested doing it on fabric instead. I hadn't considered that method because I've never printed on fabric before, but now I'm kind of in love with the idea. It adds even more depth into my project and calls back to the traditional form of wallpaper used in the late 18th and early 19th century, which was in fact printed onto fabric rather than paper.

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A wallpaper sketch I did, figuring out how I want to blend my composition of narrative and symbols. Here I use a pattern inspired by Georgian wallpaper, which takes inspiration from neoclassicism. Scattered throughout the pattern are small symbols representative of different themes. While I like the idea of small motifs scattered throughout the wallpaper, I think these motifs are too underdeveloped and aren't unified with the wallpaper in the way I envisioned. I need to continue thinking about the ways I can incorporate a narrative into the wallpaper.

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Sketches of potential narrative characters and styles.

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A quick digital collage I threw together, combining wallpaper and regency-era drawings and designs to conceptualize the arrangement I want for my print. I think it's a little too busy for what I want, but something about the wallpaper as a backdrop is really attractive to me, particularly because of the connection with wallpaper setting the tone of a room.

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Today's Wednesday session was about creating our project briefs, analyzing what information it should contain, how it should be written, and what you, the writer, want to communicate to whoever will read the brief.

It was helpful to know that briefs should be ever-evolving and that one brief can go through six different iterations before it's formally published.

I'm spending the weekend working on my brief and putting as much detail as possible because I think it can help me hone in on Part 2 of the Independent Study. I also had a really helpful conversation with a peer about my artist's block and I'm going to spend my time just throwing everything at a wall and making as many ideas as I can instead of worrying about the final product.

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My tutor recommended this short story to me the other day and I took the chance to read it. It's interesting to read the progression of this narrative through the eyes of the narrator being affected, particularly because you're connecting themes together through her observations rather than objective descriptions.

I really enjoyed reading this story and gained a lot of inspiration. The author used the designs of wallpaper to create an imaginary prison the character would identify and place herself within, a reflection of her world around her and the way her husband imprisoned her within the country estate. It makes me consider how narrative can be told through image without dialogue or a story.

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Now that we're entering stage two of the Independent Project, I need to get into creating, which is easier said than done. Over the course of break, I've sketched and considered my project, but I'm not closer to discovering how my theme will manifest. All I've nailed down is my interest in print, but how do I make my theme of modern women in 19th century spaces manifest? I have worries of my work seeming to forced or obvious, but this worry is what's blocking me from making what I really want to make.

My plan is to just MAKE. Throw some things together on illustrator, sketch in my sketchbook, paste things I find, just purge everything in my head until I narrow down what I want.

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I got the chance to iterate in the print studio today! This session was to learn the process of preparing a screen and, if possible, actually make something. I really enjoyed the progression of making and experimenting. I feel like I've learned the limitations of what screen printing can do (more solos + more designs = a LOT more time) as well as the best ways to work around those limitations (simplify?). This also gave me a chance to play with some print styles I was interested in for my project and while I wasn't satisfied with the final project, It's given me a lot of ideas of what I'd like to try in the future.

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Feeling pretty stuck in my concept. In trying to narrow it down again, I'm not sure what aspects of it I'm most drawn by. My biggest issue is thinking in terms of the final product rather than the process of getting to that final idea. What's making it especially difficult is the way I'm conducting my research - by going to museums and taking in a lot of visual stimuli, I'm not getting the narrow view I need to focus my concept. I need to get some ideas out by making and seeing what I like rather than ideating at this stage.

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One of my first screen prints, in a series of six. 

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I got the opportunity to take a screen printing induction class today and I enjoyed it significantly more than I thought I would...as a digital artist, I do relatively little with physical materials. Despite my lack of experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of screen printing and the potentials it could open up in my work. Screen printing deals with multiples, so I would need to consider how exactly I would format my project around this medium.

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I got the chance to see the "Women in Revolt" exhibition while at the Tate Britain - I was especially excited about it because my concepts revolve around femininity and themes of womanhood, so I wanted to see what ideas I could glean here. There were so many interesting pieces, like this photography series. However, I did feel that so much of the work revolved around pain and sexuality and while I appreciate many of these pieces using the female nude and sexuality as a tool to liberate from patriarchal ideas, I also felt myself wishing there was better representation of feminism and freedom outside of sexual displays. As a female artist, I didn't feel that my concepts of liberation and feminism in art were really represented or recognised in this exhibit, which is completely ok - liberation and feminism manifests in many different forms!

This did give me inspiration into exploring feminist concepts at the opposite end of the spectrum - how can femininity be represented in a more modest fashion, as well as playing into the ideas I pulled from Henry Moore's "Draped Seated Woman" like peace and serenity.

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The sculpture that gave me so much inspiration. I brought her up during group discussion in my coaching session and Mireille recommended I consider the gaze of the artist as it pertained to my inspiration. Henry Moore is a male artist and it's important to consider the lens through which he's creating. Keeping that in mind, I do think the feeling this piece evoked in me holds a lot of weight and shouldn't be ignored because it was created by a male artist.

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We went to the Tate Britain today for class. I've never been before and was honestly shocked a the scale and collection of the museum. I felt like I had so much to say looking at all these pieces and one in particular really stood out to me. It was a sculpture of a woman reclining with a dress draped around her - "Draped Seated Woman" by Henry Moore. Something about her was so tranquil and soft, particularly amidst the rest of the sculptures which seemed to focus on melancholy and isolation. This sculpture stuck with me the rest of the time I was at the Tate Britain and it's made me reconsider what I want my project to focus on. I was just so enchanted by the woman's femininity despite the lack of shape or quality that indicates modern womanhood, like a small waist, wide hips, and long hair. The woman just seemed so content in her own presence and I really gravitated towards that. 

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More doodles of what I see when out and about in London. I've become a lot more aware of the people around me and feel like I get little glimpses into their lives. It's really fascinating and has become my primary (and favorite) mode of research. I did my best to sketch down the things I've seen - I need to be better about carrying my sketchbook around and drawing as it happens, but it's so hard to abandon my perfectionism and just draw.

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Logging onto orb to see the sheer amount of workshops is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand - YES! I'm so excited to experiment with mediums and techniques I've never used before, especially because I've toured a lot of the facilities and they're amazing. At the same time, the possibilities are overwhelming and my time feels so limited. I think I need to section the workshops off into what might apply to my Independent Project and what I personally am interested in.

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Writing...writing...more writing...but writing helps me work through my ideas nearly more than drawing. It helps me sort through the jumbled mass of ideas in my brain and continue through my process of narrowing my ideas. This sketchbook page asks questions and receives answers - I'm beginning to play around with the form my project will take (even though we technically shouldn't be thinking about that...oops). Reading these entries again, I realize I'm drifting towards themes I've considered in past works but which haven't turned out how I'd envisioned and were subsequently abandoned. I wonder if I'll go through with them this time...

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I got the chance to take an introduction to creative coding class today! I don't have an intense interest in coding per se, but I think it's a useful skill to have nowadays and I felt like it was a manageable first workshop to attend.

I will fully own this - it was HARD. The amount of patience creative coders need to have, as well as understanding their systems to the point that they can create their own coding languages is incredible. I admittedly feel intimidated by the scale a coding project can take, and how much of it seems like two steps forward, and three steps back, but I'm still happy I took the introductory course.

Will I use coding in my project? Mm...probably not. My intention of this whole thing is to reconnect with physical media and making, to abandon the digital world for a chance to indulge in getting my hands a little dirty. I also don't think I have the patience to code a project at this point. However, I'm still happy to have taken it!

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Talking with my coaching group today felt enormously helpful. I got to bounce my ideas off other students who could give me input on my making process. It was a little difficult for me because I didn't have anything nailed down that I wanted to make a project about. I got the same sense from my peers, which made me feel A LOT better.

I also got the chance to look at some work that people had made last term to get a sense of what LCC expects out of my making process as well as see the creativity of my coaching group. I always love looking at other people's work - not only is it inspiring and helps me generate ideas, but it's also insanely interesting! The breadth of technique and skill blows me away!

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Exploring my concept even further! This was all about talking through my idea with members of my coaching team and getting a third party perspective into what I should consider/inspiration. Developing my idea has been a lengthy process so far - just like my coach Mireille warned, my idea narrows, then expands, then narrows again. I feel like I'm struggling to pin one thing down, but I'll continue to experiment and iterate. 

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This page focuses on creative explorations of the female form using primarily black, orange, and blue. There wasn't significance to the color choice except that I purchased markers with opposite tones. I felt like most of what I was doing here were insignificant doodles, but flipping back to that page is making me consider why I chose to doodle the female form and the androgynous figure...

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After the workshop today designed to help us explore our concepts on a deeper level, I felt frustrated. I think the concept I'm circling right now, "Love", is incredibly broad and it means I can't pinpoint what elements to put through my analysis chart. When I tried to flip it on its head, I wasn't very happy with the result I came to - it felt too far away from what I was interested in. A positive is that I'm beginning to understand how I can narrow down my idea and what research I can follow to help me with that.

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This page in my sketchbook dissects and reassembles the concepts I had for my Independent Project topic. Through reverse-thinking, I broke apart my concept to see where its limitations lay and how I could reform it into something more compelling. This process gave me a lot of ideas, but none really resonated.

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My first page of exploration. It includes a snippet from a coaching exercise (Motivated!), some thoughts and brainstorms on potential topics I could research, and a quick sketch of a friend's jumper covered in hearts. At this stage, I wondered if exploring love through fashion was a path of interest.