Study Task 9 - Reflective Writing

In this lesson, we began by sketching a chain diagram filled with different symbols that were supposed to represent the different processes we took during this project.

I then refined these symbols and painted them so they fit with the general theme of my sketchbook.

From here, inspired by the symbols we drew, we were asked to create a piece that summarised our time working on this project. I sketched a self portrait, of what I looked like for the majority of this module.

From here, we then had to write up an evaluation.


At the beginning of this project, I went to the library and found as many books as I could that covered topics I wanted to talk about. I started here as when it comes to essay writing, I am more of a reading/writing learner than a visual or auditory learner. At this point in time, I was struggling to come up with a practical response that linked to my essay question, and it was only during our first peers feedback session that I considered a visual route I could potentially go down.

This was to look at the silhouettes of certain characters. Seeing as I wanted to study the evolution of character design, I decided to break the characters up by their decades to see if I could spot any similarities or differences. I felt this exercise was really helpful as it provided me with figures to use in my essay. It also made the evolution more apparent as I could notice certain reoccurring features better, such as head to waist ratios, or how small the hands/feet were. I broke the characters up by their decades as one of the books I found ('Women, Feminism and Media' by Sue Thornham) believed the feminism movement in media first appeared during the nineties, so I wanted to see if I noticed any differences in design around the same time.

From here, I decided to paint some characters inspired from shows that came out during the 1980s-2010s as while I could still compare the decades and find similarities between designs, this also gave me the opportunity to explore character design for myself, as while the shows styles were already established, the designs were still original concepts.

I continued to listen to what my classmates had to say during feedback sessions as I wanted to explore as many paths as I could in the time I had before I focused solely on my final outcome. I also did these extra experiments as I thought looking at the question from a fresh perspective would help me consider alternative opinions when answering the essay question.

The first idea I had for my final outcome was to take the best aspects from all decades and make a character turn around sheet of a completely original character. However, I didn't think this was very symbiotic as there wasn't a way I could seamlessly add this outcome to my essay response. So, I ended up making four character concepts instead, each based on a different decade. From here, I made a survey where I asked the audience to rank the characters from most appealing to least as this would provide more primary research for my essay. I also attended the Manchester Animation Festival to gather up as much primary research as I could. I feel because of this, my essay response was well informed. I also looked at articles and interviews to get secondary research too as this was cheaper and faster than gathering the data for myself and again, provided contrasting insights into the essay.