Context of Practice - End of Module Self Evaluation

Context of Practise was initially a difficult module for me; I found it hard to get my head around denotation and connotation among other semiotic theories. However once I did I began to really enjoy the module.

For the most part my daily commute from Leeds to York has been somewhat of a pain, however it greatly benefited me when it came time to prepare for my essay. My journey roughly takes about half an hour so each day I withdrew several books and spent the travel time formulating ideas and reading extracts that may have been important to my essay writing. This early research was integral as my laptop unfortunately died. I had failed to back up my work and my completed essay was lost. I had to hurriedly rewrite the entire thing and without my early planning and note taking I would not have completed my essay before the hand in date.

After my essay I did not look forward to continuing to study the area of female degradation as it made me feel horrible as a man. However as my research evolved I came to understand that men were being victimised just as much as women. I am glad that I pushed further with my visual research in my development sketchbook as this realisation would not have occurred if I hadn’t.

I feel that while my development work is strong it fails in the final steps somewhat. The characters within my book were not as refined as I’d have liked. This was down to a lack of investigation into body shape, which is quite an integral part of my final piece.  Given more time I would have gone back and reworked these characters, refining them and perhaps making there later body shapes more exaggerated. I was against doing this but feel that ultimately doing so would have added an extra element of humour towards what is actually a very sad subject. In the final stages however I feel that my experimentation with colour really benefitted my work. By developing a greater understanding of colour I was able to take my work to a high professional level. Unfortunately technology again failed me when I came to printing the work out; from InDesign I some how printed the pages in the wrong order. In the future I’ll have to take extra care to make sure I understand the printing process so my work is presented in the best possible way.

Going forward I’m going to have be more prepared for unforeseen events such as these. Technology hampered me in several instances throughout this module. By thoroughly researching and making backups of my work I’ll hopefully be able to prevent instances like this happening to me again in later modules. I also hope to take my research and development further going into Level 5 by thinking about the context my study has within society.