Grief and Loss series continuation (extended study part 2)

To wrap up my final year I wanted to revisit a project I really enjoyed making.

I decided to do this as I wasn't really enjoying the previous VR project and wanted to switch up and end on something I could have fun making. For me, that was continuing an old project.

To summarise, this project is about stories of people's loved ones that passed away and transforming them into an illustrative series. I gained people's stories by creating a google docs form with a series of 14 optional questions and allowed people to fill this out anonymously as I understand that it's a hard topic to talk about.

I also used my own experiences as a starting point but mostly focused on the anonymous stories instead.

Here is what I created originally:

From here I simply kept making! I made 30 illustrations and turned them all into a physical publication. Here's the pdf version with all the images and photos of the physical thing below!

Grief and Loss publication pdf

.pdf

Download PDF • 32.58MB

photos:

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I also turned the book covers I made for the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology into dummy books with book blocks, I mostly wrote about this in professional practise as I used it as my live brief but I'll include images of these too.

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Evaluation:

To round off my third-year project, I ultimately decided that it'd be for the best if I did something I enjoyed instead of forcing myself to do something too big and no longer sparked an interest in me. I do still love the idea of coming back to my VR project however I feel it's something I want to spend a lot more time on when I feel more recharged and no longer burnt out. Being burnt out was a big struggle for me during this year. I found that I'd go long periods of time without creating but felt guilty about it. I'm not the type of person that can ask for help easily, but am aware this is something I need to work on and don't blame anyone for this. I'm purely reflecting on how I felt during this year and what I decided to do to try and combat this feeling.

This is why I ended up deciding to go back to the Grief and Loss series. It's one I'll always be passionate about and I find the creation of it to be a good way to process such a topic too. When I was feeling vulnerable I felt I could express that while drawing so it really helped to do these illustrations. Another reason I was glad to rework this project was that I wasn't too pleased with how I handled the end results the last time I worked on it. I feel that I was able to rework the pieces to a standard I am proud of and happy with. That is of course not perfect but I do see the growth compared to last time. I liked how I kept this project ever so slightly more uniform by creating all the pieces to be landscape instead of a mix of landscape and portrait. I later decided to take all of the pieces into a physical publication which I have to say I really do like. I feel very proud to be able to hold it in my hands and it looks so professional. My only dislike with the publication was how I handled the text at the beginning and end of the books I feel that I could've looked at more references for how I could've put it together in a more aesthetically pleasing way but it still does its job so I'm not too displeased with it.

From here I think I want to focus on building similar-ish projects, but to maybe experiment a bit more and maybe bring back collage or even other mediums and look at what I can do with textiles and photography to keep things fresh. I'd also like to continue doing book covers too I had a lot of fun making them for the competition. My main focus after uni is to build my portfolio more with these types of works as I feel they mostly align with who I am. So here's to the future and thank you.