16 year old Sunita Hodgson is currently taking the Graphic Design Diploma course with Vanessa Weaver and Vanessa asked if Sunita could write a little about one of her cartoons for the college news blog. I’m sure you will find it inspiring and I hope you enjoy reading it!
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My name is Sunita Hodgson. I’ve always loved art since I was a small child and always dreamed of becoming an artist or a designer one day, however in reality I could never imagine it being a big part of my life until about a year ago. A close friend, who is a former art instructor basically agreed to teach me art, and after that I was hooked, so it was then that I realised and decided that I wanted to make it a big part of my life. I enrolled for the London Art Colleges Graphic Design Diploma course in March, and it hasn’t disappointed me at all. Being a 16 year old, I was searching around for a course that tried to incorporate every aspect of art, and the graphic design course at the London Art College was the one that caught my eye, as it has a bit of everything in, drawing, painting, designing etc. My dream is to become a designer, or to have my own business that has facilities for graphic design as well as art, art supplies and lots of hand made crafty goods, as I just adore anything like that!
The cartoon I did has been the most rewarding, I find pen and ink very enjoyable to work with and often find that you see good results quicker and easier. My tool for making this piece and all the others I have done is to do lots of research, particularly if you are doing something that has been assigned to you on a particular subject. I don’t think you can ever do enough research. Cartoons were very new to me, but I’m definitely in love with them now, as they are easy, fun and very funny, you can definitely let your imagination go wild and have a good laugh whilst you are drawing them. That’s what I was doing whilst I was drawing this cartoon, I tried to exaggerate the features, e.g. the nose and her body. But then also tried to keep it as a lady who is sort of working in an office! This idea of the enthusiastic office lady singing and throwing her papers about came to me by surprise, through research and inspiration, but I was not expecting it to be the final work that I would send in. As you can see I just wrote equal opportunities all over the papers, to sort of incorporate that in! I had lots of different types of ideas for the equal opportunities but this one of the lady just seemed to be the funniest and the best. I was very honoured and surprised that the college wanted to put it on the website as I was not planning on this piece being the final, it was quite a coincidence but that’s what I love so much about art…no two creations are the same and you seriously don’t know the end result…it’s always different and you always get surprises!!
This is a super recount of your experiences creating the cartoon character. I really enjoyed reading this blog post – your enthusiasm for art and design is so apparent! I agree with you that the spontaneity one can gain from making marks on a page can often be surprising – you never quite know where your ideas might take you or how a piece of work will look once it’s finished, creating challenges along the way that can be so rewarding in the end. Thank you for this wonderful blog Sunita and congratulations on such a lively and fun cartoon.
Vanessa