This week has mostly been working on my essay draft. I’m up to draft number 4 now, and it is nearly there – I’m just struggling with the conclusion. It has been difficult as no appointments with tutors are available, I’ve booked one with Dan but it isn’t until the 7th! I just need to know that my format for the essay is working – it is difficult because the project turned into something so personal, I’m finding it hard to tell if I’m walking the line of academic enough vs. sharing enough to make the project make sense. It has also been impossible to do any workshops with other people or interview people about the subject either. In a peer to peer session we even suggested doing an interview with myself to include! I’m honestly confused at the lack of support we are getting for these essays, normally for a dissertation you would have a dedicated tutor and they would read it and give you feedback, but we seem to be left on our own with this one with just peer feedback. Peer feedback has been great, but it doesn’t answer any of our questions about what they are expecting from these, and the grading rubric is not helpful at all either.
We have been given some samples of previous student’s work, but I think everyone feels a bit left in the dark here.
One thing that helped was having a conversation about my project with my husband and recording it. It ended up lasting an hour, and I was able to articulate aspects of the project that I had been struggling to define in writing much easier in conversation. I then ran it through otter.ai and the transcripts have been very helpful.
Project Development
I made some vintage postcards representing every town I’ve lived in. I think I’ll print them out and put them in the book using photo corners.
I spent way too long doing individual postmarks for each one, and tracking down vintage stamps that felt appropriate for the towns as well. I think the text treatment worked well, I made the text in Illustrator and added the photo elements using a masking layer in InDesign. It doesn’t really want to do this, but I’ve figured out a workflow that works well enough.
No one will ever notice that they are all tagged for the years I lived there, or that they are all distressed individually, but everything I’ve made so far for this project is like that, full of hidden meaning that will only really apply to myself. I’m hoping these elements will add up to something that feels meaningful to other people, even if they don’t know the context. Maybe that is the design equivalent of homeopathy, but we’ll see how it goes.
For the Quincy card I dusted off Procreate and drew some dogwood flowers.
I still don’t have a clue what I’m doing in Procreate, things that I think should be easy are a struggle still! Definitely making progress though, but I’m thinking about trying some of the pen nib covers for the Apple pencil, as I’m finding the lack of feedback difficult when drawing. It is too smooth and you don’t get any tactile feedback, it feels different to using a tablet as well.