Student spotlight on college-level UAL Illustration and Animation students Katie Breeze and her work with South Tees HeadStart.  HeadStart is mental health team and a part of Public Health South Tees that works to promote “children and young people’s emotional wellbeing in schools, at home, in the community, and online. Working with partners, the aim is to improve resilience and provide support at an early stage to enable children and young people to better cope in difficult circumstances.”

This live brief was a course wide project that allowed students to choose to work with a client including HeadStart, Cleveland Police and Genesis Thirteen. The aims of the project where to develop industry knowledge, soft skills, personal progression routes and specialism’s. Outcomes were to include promotional material for a live client that drive forward the key strategic messages of the client whilst remaining visually dynamic, playful, and accessible to an identified audience.

Speaking of the brief Katie said “we were given a great opportunity to work with different clients for our live brief project which included Cleveland Police, Hart Gables, Genesis Thirteen and HeadStart out of the four I chose HeadStart. This was due to the fact that I thought there was more creative freedom and there was many outcomes we could have chosen to do such as posters, business cards, a graphic, illustrations or an animation.”

For her project she chose to create posters. Speaking of her concept she said “I wanted to make them to hang up in the classrooms for a younger audience, each poster has a positive affirmation on it to not only inspire, but to motivate anyone that reads it.”

Inspiration for the design came from Katie’s family basing her characters on her little brother and cousin, “I share close personal relationships with both and so I can draw from past experiences watching them overcome challenges and show bravery. Throughout childhood, they have supported each other, my cousin has been supported by my brother, who is the same age as her, he would always be there to make her feel better, to protect and guide her through anything that she might face and grew up being her best friend.”

To create the work she said “I had used some primary source references of photos of them together as they grew up. One being a 5th birthday party with different exotic animals and insects, there was a giant snake there too, it seemed very scary, but my brother petted the snake showing my cousin that its alright. It’s not as scary as it seems ,and that she will be okay because he is there. I had a few others from Christmas time of them both sitting together for the camera and the last one I improvised based on the images I already had of them.”

Stylistically she “decided to use blue drawing ink as my medium and colour the backgrounds with different bright, pastel colours as I thought it would catch the eye of the younger target audience and make it seem more like a children’s illustrated book. My main inspiration for the art style was Lauren Child (Charlie and Lola) and Charlie Mackesy (The boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse) as they both illustrate children’s books as well as animated versions of them to make them come to life.”

Katie said she ran into some practical challenge but overall enjoyed creating the work; “sometimes when using the drawing ink, it went through the page because I had used too much ink or because it took a little while to dry it made it hard to do new drawings if I had to turn the page so it would not smudge. While it was a tedious process to complete, it was worth every second. I was constantly checking with my peers about my work so I could get some feedback and fortunately for me it was all great, not much to improve upon, letting me know that I was going in the right direction for what I was doing.”

HeadStart’s Andy Appleyard said “The work that Katie created is all part of our positive affirmation campaign. The work produced will be distributed to our partner schools for display. As a team we were delighted with the work that Katie created and completely matched the outcomes that we originally set. We look forward to potentially working with Katie and other students in the future.”

Speaking of working with the HeadStart Katie said “I really enjoyed working with the client and creating art for them! I hope a lot of younger people might relate to it and help them speak up. ” Katie is also looking forward to future projects including one on “Fables and Folklore which I am quite excited about as I could use my home town for my primary research, there is a lot of history here.” Reflecting on working on how working a live brief might impact her work, she said it will help her expand her network “by doing work with a live client as well as doing my own commissions for myself too, it will be so much easier for me to meet and work with new people.”

Speaking of her time on the course she said “I feel like throughout each project that we do it helps me grow greater as an artist and allow me to get more recognition for my work when I publish it” reflecting on the culture and community at the school she said  “I have made so many great friends throughout my almost two years at this college, as well as getting to know the teachers. Each and every single one of them has supported my journey as an artist and helped me improve my work and learn new skills which has been beneficial when doing new projects.”

If you are interested in studying illustration and animation at college-level look no further. We offer a dynamic diploma that allows students to develop the skills and opportunities needed to carve out a career in their industry. Find out more about the course here.