I’m five weeks into my final year and time seems to be passing very quickly. The main thing I have been focussing on so far has been the design for the website for my children’s magazine. I have been fortunate to be able to collaborate with a PhD student at Heriot Watt University on it. He is a user experience specialist and a particular expert on game and web design for children. I can’t say that my experiences of collaborative (read ‘group work’) projects at college has been all that positive. It’s more than a little annoying when fellow students can’t even remember to turn up. Collaborating with John has been an altogether different experience. I feel we have come up with something together that I would never have come up with on my own. I’ve loved the process of building on each other’s ideas and thoughts. It’s involved an enormous amount of drawing for me as the design is heavily reliant on the artwork. So, it was frustrating to be told by one of my tutors this week that he viewed it as a professional practice exercise and not illustration. I’m kind of stuck with the comment in my head too and unable to really decide what I think about it.
I’m sure I’ll work it through but in the mean time we headed back to the East Lothian coast today to go kite flying. It has been such a clear, bright day that a trip to the sea felt inevitable. We perched on driftwood logs with our flasks of tea, watching the waves lapping on the shoreline. What a difference to the sea of last weekend. Little Owl has an In The Night Garden kite, which she loves. The only problem being that she loves it so much that she balls her eyes out when it goes up in the air. She runs along the sand crying for it to come back. In true toddler fashion it’s not long before she remembers what it’s all about and is merrily dancing over rock pools yelling at the kite to keep up.
