MAKING WAY WITH THE PORTFOLIO

With the build up to my portfolio review tomorrow I've been selecting my favourite knitted pieces to create on larger scale to put in my portfolio. I think it's good to have the real thing with knitting and it was mentioned I should incorporate original woks. I've also included the bournemouth pier knit unmounted so that it can be handled.

 These are the images I've chosen to knit so far. I'm toying with the idea of including images in my portfolio as I want to include the laptop.

SELF-PROMOTION

To get an idea of how to present myself I had some mock business cards and postcards made. I like the look of the postcards and feel the cropped images work here. However my business cards are dark and boring. I think it would have been better to have created them in the same way as the postcards and used cropped images. I do like my logo though and feel it ties all the work together, both in terms of promotional and online material.

BACK TO BLOCK

After trying to translate the bournemouth images to knit, I've decided to revert back to the original method of block drawing as I think this translates better to knit. I've gone back over my previous bournemouth drawings and pictures and used coloured pencil to recreate them for knit.

KNITTING IN DETAIL

I attempted to knit some of my bournemouth line drawings. I quite like the linear quality of the second image but feel the first hasn't translated as well. This could be to do with the use of 3 shades rather than 2.

I decided to knit a more complicated 2 colour image. I chose an image of the pier previously drawn for the mayor's wine competition. I don't feel this has worked as well as the block colour pieces as too much detail is lost during translation to knit. This image is of Bournemouth pier, however this isn't initially apparent. I think once the viewer is aware of the content it's more visible but I still think it's a lot weaker than previous work.

PHOTOGRAPHING MY WORK

I booked the camera equipment out over easter weekend to play around with composition and to see how my work photographed. However after getting the equipment home I found out one of the lights didn't work. The images therefore weren't as bright as I'd have liked, but nothing a bit of photoshop couldn't fix. I ended up whiting out the backgrounds but I'm glad I photographed it for the shadows.

I started off with more of a random arrangement of all 10

I thought it might be nice to group them by colour (browns, greens, blues, orange). I didn't like the triangle that formed.  Wanted more uniformity

really liked the 3x3 arrangement, although I had to leave 1 out thought it looked a lot better.

Tried the 3x3 with the landscape imagery, however didn't feel right.

Tried in  5x2, liked this a lot more, as it's wire than it is tall feel it better represents the landscapes as a lot of the colours within are blocked this way. Didn't like the position of the black, blue and green image (top right)

Prefer the image with black in at the bottom. It's the only patch with black in and also seems a lot harsher than the rest. I think the position it's in now is better as we look from left to right it almost acts as a full stop.

Final Images

I decided to change the centre image as I thought it was too bright in comparison to the others. Although it could've acted as a focal point I thought overall it would be too distracting from the rest of the images.

for both images I used photoshop to change the levels, making the whites, whiter.  I also re-took the the images after tidying up the stray wool strands as I thought this looked more finished and professional.

PICTOGRAM MARKET

My stall at pictogram's market event at 60 million postcards

I'd built this event up in my head as a chance to make a lot of money. However it wasn't well organised or marketed so we had very few visitors. People that came were those looking for a quiet bank holiday drink with friends. Although I made enough money to cover portfolio costs and business cards I would've liked to make more. I think another reason for this is the lack of a free cash machine, a lot of people now don't carry  a lot of cash and as none of us could take card I think this affected sales. Overall it was a good day, it was a good chance to practice displaying work and also to see how other people approached the same task.

DRAWING BOURNEMOUTH

While continuing to knit from my previous imagery I continued to draw from scenes around bournemouth. Knitting for too long is quite painful and I get finger cramp so having drawing breaks allows me to knit all day. The drawings aren't anything like my previous coloured pencil drawings as their purpose is different. Their quick line drawings more aimed at helping me experiment with composition than intended to be knitted.