As the application season approaches, many students say that the pressure is increasing day by day. Most of the students have started to prepare for the last project step by step according to the schedule required by the teacher, or have entered the closing stage. Looking at my own collection of works, it seems that I don't even have a complete project. Where has the time gone? Every time I think about it, I feel nervous. The more nervous I am, the less I have ideas, and the more anxious I am. Have you ever thought that the preparation period of the work collection is really too short? In consideration of a series of problems that students often encounter, the teachers of the Natural Light Teaching and Research Center sorted out the following knowledge points according to the sequence of the production process of art design professional works. Help the students to finish the collection of works with more scientific and efficient methods and ideas in the last few months.

Production of art design professional works

01. Improve the concept of time

I believe that many students are full of confidence when they decide to start preparing the collection of works, because they think that more than one year is enough. However, the reality is that when they really start to work, they find that things are not so simple.

On the one hand, the vast majority of students are sophomores, seniors or sophomores, and entering the work collection is not completely out of work. In addition, when the project starts, other subjective or objective factors will cut off the time progress of the work and affect the continuity of the creation, except that the schoolwork in the school needs to occupy a part of time.

At this time, it is very important to work out a rigorous and scientific time plan with the help of teachers to achieve a relatively complete time period. The content of the table can be a few single project cycles with a short connection time, or a 6-8 month production cycle of the complete portfolio.

Taking the application in the direction of Yingshuo as an example, we will find that we need to spend more than one year preparing for the whole cycle and take the language test three months before the collection of works according to the reference suggestions for the application process given by the Natural Light Teaching and Research Center (as shown in the figure below). For students who are relatively weak in language, it is necessary to add some time to study after March.

Application Schedule - Natural Light Teaching and Research Center

Then, from March, we officially entered the stage of work collection. At this stage, you can refine your schedule, which is best accurate to days or hours. The teacher will arrange corresponding professional courses, reasonably arrange after-school time, and regularly check the degree of completion.

02. Balance time allocation

Many students put a lot of enthusiasm into the preparation of their portfolios at the beginning, and the projects ahead, especially the first one, will be carefully prepared. Spend a lot of time researching, analyzing data, and studying related theories.

However, when the collection of works reaches the middle and later stages, the time spent in the collection of works has also accumulated to a certain extent because of frequent contact with their own research fields. At this time, most students will feel physically and mentally exhausted and aesthetic fatigue. Efficiency has declined and enthusiasm has gradually faded.

These are normal phenomena, but if we do not adjust this state in time, it is easy to have differences in the level and completion of the previous and subsequent projects, or even lead to the completion of the final project.

Exhibition of natural light architectural design works (part)

In this regard, we can adjust the rhythm of our daily work, communicate more with students to stimulate inspiration, at the same time, draw experience from the projects we are satisfied with, refer to the internal logic of excellent cases to screen whether the projects we are working on are not complete enough, not big enough, etc. In short, we should check and fill gaps to avoid a tail in the head.

03. The topic is too grand

Each project in the collection will face a crucial choice, that is, to choose a theme. However, the problem that students often face is that they don't know what theme to do.

Choose the simple things in life. You will certainly feel that you are not creative enough. Therefore, most students will turn to choose some grand topics that are high, big and high, but far away from their own experience, and require a high amount of reading.

Women's rights, race, human rights, politics, environmental protection and other grand topics that are too general and difficult to go deep into often appear in the collection. It is unknown that forcing the students to be profound will lead to a collision with other students' propositions, and the content tends to be homogenized. They cannot find a foothold and get insightful conclusions, which often leads to "inconsistent pictures and texts" in their works.

In fact, we can choose what is happening to you or what is happening around you. A book, a movie, or the distinctive culture, architecture, and concept of the hometown can also be an emotion, and the relationship with family, etc.

Natural light interdisciplinary practice course, thinking structure chart of pure art direction

The advantage of this choice is that you can clearly understand the context, details, feelings, thought changes, contradictions, pain, memory and so on of the whole thing. These common routines may be of interest to examiners from different cultural backgrounds, and reflect the individualization and independence of the works.

Exhibition of plane&illustration works (part)

Qiaoxi and Lijia, two students of Natural Light, are majoring in plane and illustration. The Camp for the Sing, a project jointly completed by them, is based on the concept of marriage that occurs in traditional Chinese families around us.

The word "transformation" inevitably reminds people of the scene of urging marriage, which resonates deeply with the audience. Their collection of works made them receive multiple offers including LCC, Pratt, Otis and RIT.

04. Strengthen process awareness

Maybe there are different ways of art education in China and the West. We find that whether students from domestic universities or students who choose to study abroad, they generally do not pay enough attention to the creative process and the logic of the work in the creative process, but this is the ability that the examiners need us to show.

Some students are used to starting from the results. Usually because they like the work of an artist or because they think that the form of a work of art is novel, they are reluctant to find a farfetched theme to graft on this form. Another kind of students think a lot in their inner world, but they can't use visual language to express these in their works.

Interdisciplinary practical works of natural light interaction design

In fact, after determining the theme, we should obtain our own conclusions and views through research and analysis, and then extract the keywords and images in the work according to the conclusions. The form of the work is produced in such a process. The work does not have a complete reasoning process and ideas. It seems far fetched and deliberately empty.

If you are not good at expressing, you can first make a mind map of the words and phrases you think of, classify the similar words, find out their commonalities, and then add some pictures to these words. You can also mark some words, and talk about the relationship between these pictures, words and the theme you choose.

05. Overreliance on typesetting

Some students have a mistake - the process is not enough for typesetting. As long as the style, color and number of pages of the successful case collection are "copied", however, no attention is paid to the process and there is no highlight in the content. It is not enough to just pursue typesetting.

In fact, students who have participated in the interview, especially those who have applied to British universities, generally feedback that the interviewer will clearly say that typesetting is to express the theme of the collection more clearly. Indeed, if the collection itself is ordinary, the exquisite layout is not enough to impress the admissions officer to send an offer to the candidates.

Of course, that's not to say Composing Skills of Collections It's not important. Just don't rely too much on typesetting, but you can't simply list the sketch books. Within the specified range, try to average the number of pages to each project, with clear thinking and a clear understanding of trade-offs.

The typesetting pictures and texts should not be too small. You can choose the color that corresponds to the pictures in the collection. According to a certain clue, or chronological order, you can clearly display your collection from inspiration to research. Finally, the last 1-2 pages of each project should have an overall presentation of the work.

Natural light interaction design collection (part)

06. Try to be interdisciplinary

In fact, art does not exist in isolation, but is the product of the times. The emergence of art schools is inseparable from religious beliefs, economic models, political systems, science and technology at that time.

According to the statistics of the offers and collections of works obtained by students from the teachers of the Natural Light Teaching and Research Center, the projects showing interdisciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary cooperation are favored by examiners.

On the one hand, interdisciplinary knowledge shows students' creative thinking and rich knowledge reserves. On the other hand, the cooperation mode between disciplines uses the differences between disciplines to explore new perspectives for the theme.

Interdisciplinary creation is also a way of encouraging natural light. Admission Kamei CMU Interaction Discipline With the advantage of undergraduate study of electrical engineering and the foundation of equipment principle, design function, code and other related fields, the source student of has established the technical feasibility of the product for this project.

At the same time, in order to make up for the shortcomings, the source students did not take the product appearance and interface vision as the focus of the project, and the final project showed a different depth and breadth.

Interdisciplinary practical works of natural light interaction design (part)

Above all, the teachers of the Natural Light Teaching and Research Center, relying on years of work experience and interviews with students who have completed the application, summarized some errors that may occur in the process of preparing the work collection for students, analyzed the reasons, and also gave corresponding suggestions to avoid detours in the critical period of preparing the work collection for students.

As the application season approaches, students should also grasp the progress, evaluate their workload and work content according to the actual situation, adjust the course arrangement, and make up for the time wasted due to feeling abundant in the first half of the year and the impact of the epidemic.

Just as natural light has always emphasized and worked hard to do, we attach importance not only to students' offers and collections of works, but also to the cultivation of students' future learning ability, correct learning methods and artistic quality of docking with top institutions. As the core department of natural light leading teaching, the ultimate goal and appeal of the Teaching and Research Center will always focus on the students' gains. We will also try our best to bring more "security" to students and parents, so as to achieve substantial and long-term gains!

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