The Crit-chen

We decided to set up a crit session at home, in the kitchen, hence the title ‘crit-chen’. 

Five of us spend two hours talking through things we were struggling with and needed advice and opinions on, and also giving feedback to others about their work. 

For me, it was my zine that I was struggling with the most and an idea for a more specific topic for my context of practice module. I received some really good feedback and ideas for my zine and this session was crucial to helping me decide what I am going to do for it. 

The others looked through my simmer sketchbooks and I tried to pick up on which drawings and themes sparked the best reaction. 

• The cat silhouettes could be used on their own for a really simple zine just about cats. 
• It might be good to combine the cats with something else to give the zine more substance - cats wearing hats? something silly. 
• I have used some of my drawings over summer to make patterns and I could maybe look more into this - this could be easily combined with my drawings of fashion models because I could insert patterns into these on photoshop. 
• A colour scheme of black and white could be restricting for pattern and it may not have the impact I desire. 
• I have drawn a range of different subjects over summer and drawn the same thing over and over again, particularly in my tropical world sketchbook. Maybe look at the ’20 ways to draw a tree’ book and other similar books for inspiration about typologies based around different themes.  
• The collections of bits and pieces from Budapest, Vienna and Prague are detailed and impressive but it is quite  a big task to fill so many pages with this much content in the amount of time I have. 

This was all really good feedback and it made me feel like the work I had already done had a lot more potential in it already. I agree that what I had been doing so far was too much work, and this coincides with my feedback from Ben about my work. However, I came out of my crit with Ben thinking that I would just make a book of drawings of fashion models out of magazines but the more I thought about it, I wasn’t happy that this zine would have any impact or encourage any connection with an audience. 

I’m not quite sure how it came about, but somewhere in conversation I combined the cat and fashion ideas which sounded like a silly idea but I thought it could make some interesting imagery. 

I don’t like cats. I don’t like things with cats on them but I know a lot of other people do so therefore it would have a more specific audience it would appeal to. I think this brief is the chance for me to do something I wouldn’t normally do, its a bit of a silly idea but I want to have a bit of fun with this zine and I want it to show in the final outcome.

I need to start drawing. 

I think having a crit at home was really beneficial to a lot of us and it cleared up a lot of the things we were stuck on or getting stressed about. We need to keep doing it to make the most of living as a house of illustrators!