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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.