Embedded Files
Final Evaluation
Final Evaluations are completed to look back on the completed product and reflect on your performance.
Please answer the following:
Explain your approach to setting up your portfolio - why did you complete it the way you did?
Reflect on your research and how it informed/changed the development of your final portfolio projects - how did it help you them?
How well did you manage your time? What methods did you use to manage your project?
What Universities did you research? What did you discover?
What problems did you face during this project? How did you solve them?
What have you learnt during this project? What would you do differently?
Reflect on peer and tutor feedback - what were you told to improve, what actions did you take to improve?
200-1000 Words Per Question.
One aspect I noticed in a lot of other artist's portfolios was the use of various albums to separate work and keep their displays more organised. This is something that I have incorporated into my portfolio arrangement, with separate albums for "2D art", "3D art", "College Work" and "Personal Projects". I think this has definitely helped my portfolio as it helps anyone viewing my portfolio to filter my work, making it easier to find specific projects and to subtly display the range of work that I am able to produce. In my planning, I came up with many more album ideas including "Concept Art", "Character Design" and "Pixel Art". I ended up going with fewer albums to ensure my work wouldn't be spread too thin across them as well as ensuring the number of albums wasn't overwhelming and difficult to navigate.
Something else I made sure to include when setting up my portfolio was a specifically designed thumbnail for each project making the contents of the project clear and visible before being clicked on. This not only makes my portfolio more visually pleasing than small compressed versions of images I included in the project, but also makes it more convenient when looking through my projects to understand what something is at a glance and to see an example of my work without even having to enter the page, allowing me to show off more of my projects to anyone viewing my portfolio. Furthermore, designing these thumbnails was interesting in comparison to designing other projects, allowing me to experiment with displaying my work in a much smaller space whilst also ensuring any text and fonts would be large enough to be legible whilst also appearing stylised and not bland. I think the thumbnails I ended up with work really well and I am quite happy with them.
I think the research I did during this project definitely helped in my final products and has certainly improved the final quality of my portfolio. For instance, one form of research I did in this project was observing how different artists presented their work in their portfolios, such as how they laid out their display sheets, their thumbnails and their cover banners across the top of their portfolios. Looking at how people had presented these to display required information in compact and pleasing formats is something I have attempted to incorporate into my work to make my portfolio appear as professional as possible and to try and make my projects enticing and interesting, considering where to place text and images and how to use colours and gradients to my advantage.
Other research I did during this project that aided my current portfolio was researching where I should actually host my portfolio and display my work. I looked over many portfolio hosting websites during this project, such as ArtStation, The Rookies and Wix, evaluating their benefits and downsides to presenting my work such as freedom to alter the layout of the page, visibility to others and pricing. I ended up choosing ArtStation to host my portfolio and present my projects as from the research I did, I found it to be the most suitable for how I wanted to display my work as well as information about myself.
I am not entirely happy with how I managed my time as I would have liked to have gotten at least one more project that I had planned complete by the end of this unit. I struggled to keep to my original plans for projects I would be creating to upload to my portfolio such as some weapon and pixel art designs that I didn't end up going through with, as my focus shifted onto other projects I had planned, such as creating character designs for some of my friends. However, overall I am not too upset with the final result of my portfolio as I was able to upload multiple examples of work I had done and I do plan to continue on the plans I came up with despite not being able to get them done in time for the deadline, as they will be valuable additions to my portfolio and will help me to develop my skills further.
Although, I do believe that I am improving at my time management as I was beginning to get more comfortable in setting goals for when I wanted to start certain aspects of work and when I would expect them to be done by. This definitely helped me to ensure I had enough time to finish my projects I had started working on and to not become overwhelmed by taking on multiple tasks at once. This ensured my portfolio would have enough projects displayed by the deadline, leaving no semi-finished or work-in-progress projects remaining undisplayed in my files.
When researching universities, something I discovered immediately was that there were very few universities close enough to me to permit me to live at home whilst studying as I would have preferred. This meant I would also have to consider accommodation in universities I looked at, ensuring I find the quality and pricing of provided or available rooms. This is one of the factors that drove me away from Leeds, which had quite small rooms in comparison to their price.
Another university I found that I am quite interested in was the University of Hertfordshire. This university is currently my top pick due to multiple factors that have made it seem quite appealing to me. One reason I am interested in Hertfordshire is that it is only about 2 hours away from my house, meaning I will be able to visit home on weekends and days off. Additionally, the university provides accommodation very close to the main buildings with fairly spacious rooms. Furthermore, the content I've seen from their courses seems very appealing to what I want to be studying and working on in the future, with informative and professional tutors.
I had also been looking at the University of Portsmouth, and was quite confident that it would be one of my top choices with great features such as guaranteed accommodation and a course on games art. However, once I started to look closer into it and find more details, it started to look less appealing, with units in courses being quite uninteresting to me as well as very little content that I would actually want to be studying. Therefore, Portsmouth is no longer one of my top choices.
One problem I faced during this project was that my drawing tablet stopped working halfway through. This was very detrimental to my workflow as it essentially meant I was no longer able to create digital art from home. To resolve this problem, during the time my tablet was broken and in the process of being fixed, I worked on anything else I needed to do that didn't involve a tablet whilst at home, such as photobashes, silhouettes, moodboards, my personal statement and my blog. This ensured that I didn't fall behind too much and actually helped me to focus on some aspects of my work that I might have put less time into had I not been forced into working on them more. Once I was able to use my drawing tablet again, I compared the amount of work and time I had left and planned out when I would be working on and completing different projects, making sure that I wouldn't miss the deadline despite my interruption.
Another problem I faced during this project was that I struggled to keep Unit 11 and Unit 12 up-to-date simultaneously as I was completing tasks from both at the same time. This resulted in both projects progressing quite slowly which certainly hindered the amount I was able to produce for Unit 11. However, I started prioritising Unit 11 over Unit 12 before I missed the deadline and ended up being able to finish my projects and upload them to my portfolio whilst still making some progress on Unit 12, giving me enough work done to not fall behind and now I should hopefully be able to finish it on time as well.
During this project, I have learnt various tricks and practices when creating a portfolio and presenting my work, such as elements of an effective thumbnail and banner or how to make my work more publicly visible through the use of tags and themes. These have helped me to make and improve my own portfolio and share it with others to try and get more eyes on my work, which can hopefully lead to new opportunities and feedback to improve my skills further. If I were to do something different, I would have used custom tags and thumbnails on my projects earlier rather than adding them on a later date after they had been uploaded to try and get more people to see them before they are lost in the many other projects being constantly uploaded to the website.
Something else I have learnt in this project is what to look for in universities and different factors I should take into consideration such as accommodation, pricing, location and course content. Looking at various universities that I might be interested in and researching their courses has helped me to pick out 5 options that I would be looking to be accepted into next year. One thing I would have done differently however is to look at more universities to try and find a wider range of options available to me, as until recently I wasn't very aware of Hertfordshire University, which is now my top pick. I also would have looked more in-depth at some of the examples I found and asked more questions as further research I have done has revealed to me that I might not be as interested as I thought in some of my original options.
Feedback especially helped during this project with my personal statement. With my first few drafts, my personal statement didn't feel very personalised or unique, not showing much of my personality or interests. After asking for feedback from peers and tutors, I was able to clean up a lot of my existing paragraphs as well as including a new paragraph speaking about my current Unit 12 project, that I hope is able to showcase how I approach projects and describes more about me as an individual, whilst also displaying some of the skills I have in relation to ideas generation and character design.
Additionally, the feedback I received from my friends when designing their character sheet projects was very important. These projects were being designed for them and as a way for them to represent themselves online, so it was imperative that they were happy with the designs and had their personalities sufficiently represented. An example of how their feedback changed these sheets was running through some roughly drawn poses I had designed to find which they were happy with, as my initial designs had much more expressive poses that would have ended up being far less satisfactory than the designs I ended up with.
Report abuse