Viscom Illustration Exhibition

The exhibition that's being organised by Paul, Jodie and Holly is a really useful opportunity for me to get some of my work shown so when I received the email I began thinking about possible work that I could submit.

'Work can be old or new'.. well considering I haven't really done any work on this course so far that could be classed as illustration I'm definitely going to have to produce something new.. The work has to be submitted by December 9th, that gives me a week... Then I had that horrible I-can't-deal-with-the-randomness-of-self-generated-content fiasco again where I was just had to ask myself what the hell am I going to illustrate?

I considered developing my 'handbag collection' a little bit further (because, surprisingly, people liked the drawings I'd done so far in the crit today) and maybe submitting a sequence, but then I reminded myself that I hated it 24 hours ago so it's inevitable that I'd end up hating it again..

I had a quick peruse on the web for live briefs, not expecting to find anything useful, but the latest Don't Panic poster competition is coming up and the deadline for that is December 7th - so if I get something done on time for that then I can submit it to the Paul, Jodie and Holly's exhibition as well! That way I kill two birds with one stone - some sort of live brief as part of my visual language and a contribution to the exhibition. Sounds good in theory.

The Don't Panic brief this time around has a theme of "Value" - so create a poster through any means that captures this theme. So I've been brain storming and throwing out ideas in my sketchbook (which I'll scan in later and post because my though processes are too lengthy to explain in full) and although I came up with some illustration ideas I seem to have settled on the idea of values in terms of a designers moral viewpoint - things like design for social change as stated in First Things First Manifesto, eco-friendly design to do with inks and papers and also acknowledgement of waste and by-products. From this I've chosen to develop the idea of 'designer waste' - I was told yesturday that the design industry is has the largest paper consumption of all the business sectors.

And... I've done that thing again...

Where I say I'm going to do illustration but end up being pulled in another direction... The ideas that I have for my poster are now revolving around creating typography from the documents discarded by designers - i.e. LCA students. I don't really know how to explain myself properly but at the minute I see it being created through photography and ending up being more like graphic design than illustration so I don't think I'll be able to submit it for the exhibition.

Nevertheless, I'm still going to complete this brief in time to submit in on Monday because I really want to get stuck in as part of Visual Language and there's no time like the present really. I'll run it by the guys that are organising the exhibition and if it comes down to it then I will create a piece based on my initial collections idea, it won't be the end of the world!