Chloe Isteed Illustration

I chose the RSA competition, focusing on animating the audio 'Not Enough Time' by Tiffany Dufu. Tiffany talks a lot about the everyday struggle of balancing time and expectation. I think it's a topic that is incredibly relevant today, especially with social media and people presenting their 'best self' online using tools like Instagram. There is a lot of pressure on people to live up to expectation, and to be doing certain things.  The small section of Tiffany's talk chosen for the audio file for the RSA competition felt familiar to me. I like to be organised, and to plan. I myself make to do lists all the time, although a lot of the time they keep growing and growing and never get finished. I think this is the case for a lot of people. We all put pressure on ourselves, push ourselves to work hard.  You can watch a talk by Tiffany Dufu about her book 'Drop the Ball' and the subject of time.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti4QfSKmDLg

After our visit to the Sir John Soane Museum, I was looking forward to our letterpress workshop. I had never done letterpress before.  In my sketches from the museum, I mainly focused on objects and elements of the architecture, because I knew that the design would have to be fairly simple.  It was really interesting to learn about how to make prints in letterpress. It was quite difficult because all of the shapes and symbols are different sizes, and you have to find spacers to fill all the gaps to make sure that the print comes out successfully. It also takes a long time to make an image ready to print, and to put away all of the pieces in the correct place, but the actual printing is really quick.  For my first print, I wanted to try and create an image of a column or pillar. I tried to keep it quite simple, but I chose lots of small pieces, and so it was really difficult to find the right spacers to use. I think my first print is ok. If I could improve it, I think I would have use

We got the opportunity to sell our work at Hastings Illustration Festival! A group of around 17 of us worked together to plan, and we had meetings every week to decide things like name, logo, display methods, deadlines and payment. Not everyone came to every meeting, but that is always the way as some people just want to sell their work and not organise. I enjoyed the organising of the Spitalfields event we did, and so I wanted to get involved in as much as I could. I like to get involved in things like this, because its a great opportunity, and it might not happen again. Unfortunately, I couldn't go to Hifest because I was working on the day, and so I helped to organise as much as possible.  The day itself didn't go as well as we had hoped. The festival was quite quiet in the first few hours. There were mostly families with young children there, who were looking around, and saying they liked our work but not buying. We were expecting there to be more people around our age, m

Naomi, Yuzhen and I sold our work at the small Christmas pop up market at Camberwell. It was only a small stall, but it went quite well because it is so close to Christmas and our prices were low to suit the student budget.  It didn't take much planning because we already had work ready to go because of Hifest. We applied for the stall, sending the SU photos of our work we had already reproduced for Hifest, and we got accepted.  Naomi and I had to miss most of the event because the crit for our Ghost Post project was at the same time, but we managed to pop by and help out at lunchtime. It was sad to miss the event, but Yuzhen did well managing the stall, and it was good to see it was going well. It's really interesting to see what sells well in different environments.

Dom Sylvester Houedard - Concrete Poetry He turned his poetry into pieces of art by arranging the letters into an image, using a typewriter. He wrote this to describe his work:  “Words: hard and lovely as diamonds demand to be seen, freed in space; words are wild, sentences tame them.... Concrete poems just ARE: they have no outside reference; they are objects like toys and tools, jewel-like concrete things-in-them-selves” It's crazy to think that if one mistake was made, he would have had to start all over again! It was really helpful to see how typography and text can be used to create images that are visually striking, simple yet incredibly complicated.  Karel Martens He cleverly uses colour to create eye-catching prints using found objects. He says that “a design should have a lingering flavour, like a glass of good wine”. His work is simple, and yet really interesting to look at.