Throughout this project my consistency has been quite poor. My attendance hasn’t been great due to personal reasons and therefore I have missed a lot of workshops along the way. However, my sketchbook work aside from some of the missing workshops has been quite consistent. My evidence of research and development is recorded and presented on powerpoint as in recent times I have realised that writing in a physical sketchbook often takes way longer for me due to my learning difficulties. I have been using powerpoint for this current sketchbook which has made my presentation a lot easier as well as the layout of my work being more clear as my hand writing is often illegible and doesn’t look as well presented. I have learnt quite a lot of skills during this project despite missing a lot of workshops. Going to watch the workshops back afterwards as they are pre-recorded I have learnt how to use and experiment with illustrator which isn’t something I knew how to do before. Experimenting with typography and layout has really opened me up to using more of these skills in the future as usually my work is mainly photography based and now having some basic graphics skills I will be able to develop these and combine my skills to hopefully create some interesting editorials in the future.

My project initial ideas started off from thinking about how body image is portrayed in the media and this took me to a personal issue that I know myself and many other people I know with have struggled with and this is eating disorders. Whether they are triggered by mental health issues to start off with,  people making judgmental comments about your body or just the amount of edited bodies that are seen and thrown in our faces across all forms of media. From thinking about these ideas I realised that unedited and much more natural images of people doing normal, healthy things such as eating food are not put into the media enough. Many people across all age groups are struggling with their confidence because of the constant fake and edited images and body standards that are projected onto us from all angles. The younger generations growing up using social media from a young age are going to be especially affected by this as I know from experience and starting using social media at a key age of around 10 or 11. I then decided from this to take images using my film camera of not only people eating their food but of pictures of the food I have eaten myself. I decided upon the name of nourishment zine as this was a highly appropriate name and the tag line to go on the back cover – in order to flourish you need to nourish.

I came across a few hurdles in creating the content for my zine with my films not reaching the photo lab in the post, so I had to make use of the 1 film I did have developed which was only a few photos on the end of a film I had started using for something separate. I created a good balance of images to text and used a simple font as I wanted to have a good and interesting balance of negative space. Even with the I have still really enjoyed the project and feel I have learnt a lot of useful skills that I will be able to take into future projects even if this project hasn’t’ been my most strong so far.