Reflections on the first few weeks of the rest of my life.....

So on 23rd September 2019 I finally became an official university student at University of Cumbria. I feel like I've been waiting for this day for 20 years. Its the first time in my life that I know I'm doing the right thing for me and nothing will stop me from completing this degree.
Having said that, the reality of being a mother and a full time student is a lot harder than I imagined it to be. Remembering to do all my work as well as the washing and emptying the dishwasher etc is harder than I imagined. Me time is almost non-existent, but that's true for most parents I think.

Its a little easier now the workshops have eased off. The first 5 weeks of this semester we had induction workshops for different areas of art. This began with screen printing. As I have previously ran an etsy shop specialising in customising clothing and used heat transfer vinyl (HTV), I had heard a lot about screen printing and was really excited about it. We had a really fun time just learning something completely new to most of us. This is something I hope to start being able to do in my spare time and reopen up my etsy shop and start selling my illustrations as prints, clothing etc. Need to improve my technical drawing skills first though! 
After screen printing, we did linoprinting and etching. Linoprinting is quite enjoyable but I'm always worried I'm going to lose a finger and my attention to detail definitely needs working on. Another challenge I have is that my hands and fingers struggle with small details due to my health issues, so my Lino print wasn't quite as finished and attractive as I wanted it to be. I try not to let this bother me but it is quite frustrating when you have an image in your head and your hands just can't do what you want them to do. 
We also had a tour of the wood workshop and were given the choice of working in there or ceramics. The majority of our group chose ceramics and I really enjoyed being able to create something from scratch with only my hands. Hopefully it'll look okay after its been fired in the kiln.

The first project, the comic book I really struggled with, I'm not a comic book reader myself so it was definitely out of my comfort zone. Once the project was done, we went to Kendal for the Comic Book festival. We also had a talk at the studio from an amazing artist/illustrator Junko Mizuno, who considering her work is quite confident and has an erotic side to it, was very quiet and shy. 
The group of us together decided to randomly get a tattoo to remember our first year at uni and we decided to do that at lunchtime in Kendal, the lovely Natalya drew a lovely little good luck cat (like the gold ones that are popular in the Far East) and we all got one together.
The second project was paper play and manipulation. This was a bit more enjoyable, but I had trouble with keeping up with the tasks because of the kids school half term. I managed to get 90% of it all handed in after the half term though, so I don't think I did too bad. 

The project after that was about perspective, and basically, the beginning of how to draw from scratch, back to basics. This is really what I needed! It gave me a lot more confidence to try and although I got a few things wrong I have definitely seen an improvement in my work. 

Project 4, which I'm just at the end of the first week of, is really creative and fun. We made our own colour wheel and mixed paints as well as learning about the basics of InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop by experimenting with typography.

Overall, I'm absolutely loving the course and really like that no two days are the same and I never really know what to expect. I just wish real life would stop getting in the way of it though!

I'll leave you to look through a few pictures of the first couple of months of uni....
​Jilly x