Sketchbooks, a learning log and a beautiful painting …
Posted: 23/01/12 03:52 | 32 Comments
OCA student Lucie Bromfield recently completed a level 2 OCA painting course and submitted a suite of work that demonstrated such thoughtfulness and integrity that we just had to review it for the blog. Lucie’s mark reflected what the assessors felt about the work, and here, OCA tutor and assessor, Emma Drye, reviews the work.
Posted by author: Jane Parry
32 thoughts on “Sketchbooks, a learning log and a beautiful painting …”
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Wonderful work, Lucie. Well done. Your work is inspiring.
Congratulations Lucie, wonderful to see.
Well Done Lucie ! I enjoyed working with you. and I hope the 5c’s courses helped.
Wonderful work – I enjoyed it all but watching the last piece of work take shape was especially interesting.
Thanks everyone. And yes Richard the visits to musueums and galleries, and trying to understand what you see in a structured way, was a big help.
Creative, painterly and inspiring. Well done Lucie.
Wonderful work Congratulations Lucie.
Brilliant work Lucie, really inspiring. Well done
Very inspiring – wonderful job Lucie! And thank you to all concerned for these insightful videos.
How inspiring. I love it. Well done Lucie.
Very glad to have the opportunity to see this work but it leaves me daunted while I try to compile my own Learning Log. Far too late now to draw on the pages!
Hello Pam, please don’t feel daunted. Enjoy your log. Why not sit down one evening with a cocoa and read it back to yourself, scribbling notes about anything you feel is important or has changed in the margin. If you want to add images of any kind, you can always sellotape them to one edge of a page so they fold out. The best logs are those that look as if they belong to the student, whatever that means for the individual.
Wonderful work Lucie, plenty of variations based upon really skilful techniques.
I particularly love the sketches of the children and your compositions. It helps to know what to aspire to even if it seems some way off. You make me believe and make me want to do more and more.
Paul
I am really impressed with this log and sketches. Those are the masterpieces! Very constructive. I myself feel encouraged to do my best, and improve my logs. Well done Lucie! Thank you Emma!
Well done Lucy. I’d be seriously chuffed if anybody talked about my work like that. Congratulations. Be proud!!
For the first time I understand a sketchbook.Fabulous.It needs to be published.Thank you so much.
Truly inspiring Lucy,How I would just love to sit around with you personally and others and consume the energy that must have gone into your sketchbook. Can I assume that other than the pencil drawings that most of the paintings were done independant of the sketchbook and then transfered on to the respective pages?
well done Lucie! very inspiring for myself and i am sure for many other students. i just started painting one and i am feeling honoured and privileged to be able to see your work. it s like traveling into the future and, like Paul said, it makes me to work more and be more ambitious,organised to get at a better level.
MARIA
Excellent work, truly professional, an inspiration to us all.Well done.
Truly inspiring, and a wonderful thing for us all to benefit from being able to view this work.
I can feel the energy jumping off the pages.
Well done, Lucie.
Outstanding work Lucie. I am sure you have inspired many. Love the way the last few paintings have emerged. Keep up the good work. Best of luck.
Thanks very much!
I have to say what really motivated me was seeing so many vibrant and intense paintings being produced by people alive today. It’s very easy to see painting as a vision from the past – Impressionism and Van Gogh are all very well and good but don’t forget that painting is still alive, and really go out to search for the people who are still doing it. That’s what inspired me.
Hi Lucie and Emma,
Thanks so much for bringing Lucie’s work to our attention – it is inspirational as so many folk have already said and so practical! Lucie I just googled you and found your blog, which I’ve subscribed to. I love how you’ve shown there works in progress – this is a fabulous learning tool and so kind of you to share!
I wish you all the best in your future studies and commissions and work!
Alli
I must echo the comments above. Thank you Emma for showcasing Lucie’s work ,it is certainly something to aspire to. Congratulations Lucie, I am in awe not only of your ability & method, but also of your time management skills!
How beautiful, exacting and concentrated work you have produced, well done to have your work talked about in such an eloquent way; you must feel very proud to have achieved so much.
Am I the only person to find this sort of item depressing? Yes Lucie’s work is fab but I don’t really learn anything from such a display. Better was the work displayed 2 years ago on the “Communities” button-there we saw a range of work submitted by students. Please bring it back. Or a progression item where we could say “Yes that happened to me!”
Hi Maggie – you can still see a wide range of work done by students by looking at the folders that everyone uploads onto the student site.There are also plenty of ‘that happened to me’ moments on the various fora you could subscribe to. We have talked about filming a tutorial or an assessment but there are a few issues that need to be thought through as you can imagine.
Fantastic work Lucie and very inspiring. Well done. What puzzles me about all the impressive log books the OCA tutors choose to display is that they frequently are handwritten. I think that this is great – so much more personal. However in the OCA booklet, Assessment how to get qualified, in the section on presenting work for assessment the very first instruction is that work has to be typed. “Hand written assignments can not be accepted.” Have I been wasting my time, typing and referencing my written work carefully? Was this booklet for use only by students doing creative writing courses and not the painting courses I’m doing? I would appreciate some positive advice from the OCA tutors please.
Hello Maggie and Jinty. I want to comment on both of your responses to Lucie’s post. I am, sorry Maggie, that you found the piece depressing. We believe at OCA that its important to show excellent work, so that students know what to aspire to. However we are conscious that sometimes this can be depressing because you may feel like giving up if this goal seems far off. Because of this we do strive to put a range of work up on the blog, and at each assessment ask assessors to talk about a range of work, not just very good work. I hope we’ll have some more of this following the March assessment so look out for it.
Jinty: re handwritten work. Putting handwritten notes into a hand produced log that is part sketchbook part log is fine. Its a fine judgement here. Many students also keep blogs where everything is of course typed. Having hand written notes in a largely visual log is fine, as long as the notes are clearly written. If students produce anything more than a few brief paragraphs, assessors want it typed.
Hi Paul, Thanks so much for your clarification about hand-written versus typed log books. I love the idea of part log, part sketchbook. I’ve probably stuck to the guidelines too closely and missed the spirit of the thinking behind the creative process, (although I do make notes in my sketchbooks). There is no suggestion that this cross-over between sketch and log-books is a possibility in the student support booklet “Keeping sketchbooks and learning logs”. Perhaps it would be an idea to state this as a method of working in the next edition with a note in the Assessment booklet as well. I’m very grateful for your help, I feel freer for it and inspired to stretch the boundaries now!
Hi Jinty
I read it to mean that the 2000 word written assignments should be typed.
Haven’t looked at the handbook recently but it did originally say that you could make a combined log/ sketch book, which seems to me the most natural way to work.
Amazing and inspiring work Lucy, well done.
Jereme
I have just panicked as I have been hand writing my log. I looked in the student support book under keeping a learning log and it says ” A learning log is a record of your own learning. It is not a formal academic piece of work but a document that is unique to you and cannot be right or wrong. ” no where can I find any reference to type written learning logs. Have I missed something?