Day 1: Monday, December 4th Work began at 9:30 on Harcourt Street, Dublin. The woman taking care of me for the week was called Julia Fraia, she showed me around the building and helped me set up my laptop and security card. I was working in the BSC (Business Support Centre). She began by assigning me a project to complete, this involved designing a Christmas jumper according to a theme she would give you. I had a choice of 4 themes, Scandinavian, Flat Art, Art Deco or Pop Art. I decided to choose Art Deco because I had never heard of this style and it looked interesting. My first assignment was to create a mood board. A mood board is the colour pallet and pictures that inspire you to come up with ideas for the jumper. I collected these photos and colours on Pinterest. I created a board and then printed out the pictures in order to stick them on the mood board the following day.
Day 2: Tuesday, December 5th When I arrived in on Tuesday morning, my mentor Julia had organised for me to cut and stick all of my inspirational pictures onto my A3 mood board shown below. This took quite a while because of the planning and organization of the board it self. After I had completed my board and was satisfied with it, I then had to present my idea to the ‘client’. I had to explain every detail such as, the shape and colour of the jumper, the main design and the other little details. I really enjoyed creating this mood board and think it’s an excellent idea to begin to be creative and to get many ideas and inspiration from something other than your imagination. In the afternoon, I work shadowed some of the people working in the BSC. I learnt how to create an animation on PowerPoint, I learnt how to create a leaflet/book using InDesign and I watched a woman photoshop a car out of a photo. This experience was very interesting to observe and learn new skills.
Day 3: Wednesday, December 6th Today I had to look up and download photos from shutterstock to form my jumper in ‘real life’. I combined 3 photos together to complete my jumper. I then photoshopped these photos to make them perfect for my design. I printed them out and cut the to shape to fit my model. I had to glue down the pictures to make my design come to life. I really enjoyed this whole process of creating my own jumper according to a theme. During the afternoon, the manager of the BSC had a job for us to do to take a break for the jumpers. She had us pack ‘reindeer food’ into little pouches for all the children that will attend their Christmas party on December 17th. This was a nice break from the jumpers and also a chance to be creative with the bags.
Day 4: Thursday, December 7th We spent a bit more time on our jumpers this morning to get them perfect and make sure I was happy with how my design worked out. After that, I watched a few videos about drawing models and applying clothes to models. This was an interesting thing to learn about because I have always struggled to draw a person and to learn how to do it really helped my artistic development during the week. I enjoyed watching the fashion and drawing videos as a relaxation coming to the end of the week.
Day 5: Friday, December 8th Today, I continued to learn about drawing, painting and painting with watercolour through watching tutorials. Own tutorial I watched was by Shantell Martin, she is an artist that really uses her creativity and draws on anything and everything. She really inspired me to get creative and use my imagination more. In the afternoon, my mentor asked me to play this game on the whiteboard, one person would draw any random shape and your would have to develop it to make something and continue it not o fill the board (shown below). This exercise was really fun and enjoyable as it was different and challenging for the side of the brain used for arts and creativity as working doesn’t normally involve that side as much as the other.