Reflective Blog (Week 11)

This week we were continuing work on our groups animation and having everything done and complete for our upcoming presentation on the twelfth of December and our end of semester ten deadline. Our task in class today was to review the work we had included within our blog up until this point and to analyse them and review them with a partner.

The idea of a blog although I think it is a really smart idea of keeping all your records of work in one place and allowing others and yourself to express some thoughts onto your work, how you created your art and to help others understand your art and the work ethic behind. However I have always been a person who kind of gets straight into their work and has no real plan or strategic and organised way to begin it. I enjoy experimenting and finding my feet and having the trials and errors of my work show me what I am doing right or could improve on whilst I am currently working. Although this is an energetic and favoured approach for me, I do find sometimes that a good and detailed plan before you begin your work, can really benefit your final outcome.

This can really help you save some of the time that you would be wasting on trial and error and allow you even more time in finalising the completed work you admire. This time and ability when not having a plan , leaves no room for first or second drafts of work and kinda just means your left with your first idea and this can become not the best quality of work when at university level.

So I have grown to enjoy and respect the tedious activity of keeping a blog and was intrigued to see how the quality and style of my blog, favoured in the universities standards and with the students in my class. We had been given a piece paper that gave us a marking scheme to what standard of blog we were writing and what each type of blog would include or be lacking within. After reading the analysis page I was both confident in my blog posts and also unsure, as I had gathered that my blog is okay in standard, but lacks a high quality of certain things that can really improve a blog for what it is and give the audience and myself the benefit of which a blog can bring.

I thought within my previous blog post that I had good methods of sticking to the point in hand and giving a accurate description of what we had learnt in class and was a good in helping the reader be aware of my work and what the purpose of my blog was about. However I vastly recognised that I had a negative habit of wording and directing my blog maybe too much to the audience and not having enough self reflective and critical analysis of my own work. I did bring in some external references and talked about my favourite parts of the lesson, my references and why I really wanted to include them in my work and even sometimes including what I could have done better in my work and how next time I wanted to draw a different character or create a certain animation.

So some good points of self reflect, but I then again changed it quickly back to the audience and even when I would bring in an external link, it became less expressing my desire and interest in the topic and more trying to allow the reader to catch up with my thoughts and include them what the external link was, why I was using it and what it is about.

I also noticed this in my groups shared blogs as even upon first glance I noticed how they included every little thing they had drawn within this semester, may it be for the task or even just what they felt personally inspired by and had created on their own time. They showed all their favourites and errors of their work and showed how they were always experimenting and thinking about how they could explore the world which they were in, add to it, change and were always creating the world of ‘Dream World’. They almost used it as a self diary, expressed and were able to document and empty their mind of all their thoughts onto this one blog post. I genuinely found it inspiring and right away felt like I had been looking at creating a blog post all wrong. It inspired and encouraged me to task the blog posts as less of a requirement and structured piece of final semester course work and more of a self expressive diary for me, my thoughts, feelings and to create and aim this blog series less to who is reading,

My blog should be to only me, whenever I needed a place to vent, express my thoughts and concerns about my work or to verbalise the ideas and confusions I had about what to do next in the coursework that would be spiraling around in my head. I should instead share all my doodles and creations onto my blog, express my thoughts into words and may even find a new method to analyse my work, helping me to improve my work and any difficulties I might have. I should be just enjoying the process all together, like my artists scrap book of my thoughts and creations.

This the page we had been given to help us in analysing our work, I hope to improve and use my blog more effectively for my next upcoming posts and what we continue to do within the next semesters. I hope to use my blog the right way for me to improve and to encourage my self growth and experimentation within animation.