After hearing Fig talk, we got the opportunity to show her our portfolios. When looking through mine, she noticed that my work is quite feminine and lifestyle-esque, she said to carry on with the hand painted type as there is quite a big market for that at the moment and she said she's not really seen much like mine, so that was good to hear! Also, to look at creating some illustrated maps as they are also popular at the moment. I'm definitely going to take her advice on the type and create more as its something I really enjoy. Another point she said was to get better print outs as some of them were slightly pixilated, so I will be fixing that soon. 

Fig Taylor, the author of "How to Create a Portfolio and Get Hired" came in to talk to us about portfolios and how to create a good one. She talked a lot about making sure you research the commissioners, make sure you know who you're sending your work to, same goes if you're calling up anywhere, make sure you ask for the right person to speak to. As far as the look of it goes, Fig said no heavy mounting boards (which I completely agree with), put only your best work in, don't show them anything you hate, anything that makes you wince, have a running order, have no blank spaces in your portfolio, so back to back work. You have to be your own critique, more objective about your work and make sure you have a recognisable style, something that makes it distinctive. Also, commissioners want no mistakes, leave your rough work and development for your tutors, thats what they want to see, they want to see mistakes and ideas. Though an optional extra is to bring a sketchbook just in case and bringing a tablet or iPad over a laptop. Overall her talk was very informative and I feel more confident that I can create a better portfolio now.

Holly Wales came in to talk to us about her work and process, what she does and who she has worked for. I'm glad that I was introduced to her work as it is wonderfully playful and colourful. She uses hand-drawn felt tip markers and creates illustrated maps and hand-drawn type. When talking about portfolios, she said to show exactly what you can do, commissioners won't ask you to do stuff they can't see. So equally, if you don't like for example making things out of clay, don't put a photograph of something you've made out of clay just to show range, because if they ask you to do that you won't want to. She talked about making mistakes and how it is okay to make them, she actually likes some of the mistakes she makes sometimes, something that I need to get into my head! 

Heres some examples of how I tried to make my paintings stand out more and what worked and what didn't. So this first picture is an example of what didn't work! Painting and then drawing over in pen…it just doesn't look good and I really didn't like the look of this at all!

Here is an example of using stencils and doing the layers separately. It works so much better and there is no other outline needed. Waiting for the paint to dry before starting to paint over is really important too, that sounds really obvious and simple but I kept just doing it all in one go and the paints would all run but I just went with it, I didn't realise how much better it could look, just takes patience! 

Again, just another example…the first is using no stencils and not waiting for the paint to dry...

And here, I've used stencils and waited for the paint to dry before adding more to it, this still needs a little more colour I think but just the top looks a lot better than the previous I think!

Today we had a workshop on how to set up a website/buy a domain etc. I got mine on godaddy.com and chose the name corinafay to have as my website. I also chose cargocollective.com as the place I'd like to have my website on. Still got to get the hang of re-sizing my images and working out how to edit my website but I'm sure I'll get the hang of it soon!

www.cargocollective.com/corinafay