year long project - 3rd year

 So, already said diary posts every other day have not happened, due to a number of reasons - I have content for a couple ready to go, just haven’t done them yet, from general life. I shall, come the new year get onto actually posting every day or every other day because I need to get it moving and make some solidified decisions. For now, I’ve got a small amount of research gained from Waterstones, which I went too for Christmas shopping: Obviously I can’t engage with all the items at a shop as much as I can in somewhere like the board game cafe but it’s a good source of inspiration, to see what is currently on the market and successful enough to be in mainstream retail. Story writing really seems to be popular at present, with a lot of the books and games having some connection to it which is interesting and something I was thinking of including. I want to include as many interactive elements as I can really, to reach maximum engagement.

  My thoughts before going the the board game cafe: Visuals and notes from the board game cafe: There weren't many children's games at the cafe, nor many actual board games as such, well not many that aren't extremely complicated and long winded to set up so didn't find all that much in the way of inspiration for a board game specially but it was a worth while venture. I briefly did a bit of work experience at a primary school, back in college, running workshops to write and illustrate short stories. When organising it and being given a year group to work with, I didn't think that the younger ages would be able to engage with the work all that well and wanted to work with the higher year groups. However, upon being paired with year 3, it became clear very quickly that children of that age group (7-8) were actually really engaged and it worked much better than I was expecting it too. I'm not too sure if it would have worked as well with 5-6 year olds, which is wh...

  Visuals & notes: Games:

 Notes from a group tutorial - first back after being ill. Certainly a lot to research and think about! The suggested books and the board game cafe are the first steps, as an easy way to get into the research and to start thinking about what the project could look like.

 After being ill for a bit, I had a bit of catch-up to do, starting with the lecture on using a blog to bring the year project together in one place. I used this specific blogging platform last throughout last year and it worked really well for me personally so I had already decided to carry on using it, just with a few additions and tweaks. My notes/doodles from the recorded lecture; I got a tad bored and started doodling thoughts and ideas for my project in and around the page but the lecture still gave me some ideas on how I could use the blog in a more expansive way. I need to some research into more board games and books, I just wanted to start thinking about some possibilities.

 I am going to try a different way of working, using both this blog, sketchbooks and digital composition, for the digital submission. Whilst I’m not overly sure my current intentions will be viable for the entire project, I am going to try and use this blog as both a place to upload my sketchbook pages, in pdf form, as well as doing ‘diary entries’ every other day about any thoughts I’ve had and anything that may have occurred in general life that could tie into the project - going through a shop to see how much of it recyclable, how many items of rubbish I’ve seen during a visit to the beach and so on. I’m doing this because at the moment I’m kind of struggling to really get into the project and properly engage with it for prolonged periods of time. The hope is that this will give me some real life context to work with and perhaps give me some interesting visuals to work with. I may not be able to do a post every other day but I shall try and keep it as regular as possible, even i...

 Back in September (my focus moved onto other projects once the year started), I did a quick visual & textual mind map to start the thinking process on what the project could be. I really like the idea of doing different sections, maybe four or five, each based on a different environment - ocean, forest, desert etc. I think that would be a good way of achieving a flow through the book, either that or the four seasons. I'm not sure how the seasons would work, whether I would base the book in one location and perhaps what we can do throughout the year, or change the location to match the season perhaps - the desert in the summer, North Pole in the winter etc. I'll need to do a fair bit of research really before I can get an idea about what will and won't work. I think I want to use the board game aspect as the space for the puzzles and games, rather than a completely separate game as such. I think that could work really well as a way of engaging the reader and making it a...