For my final major project, I chose to create a non-fiction picture book about the true story of a scientist, artist, and rule-breaker Marianne North. Throughout the development of this project, I have taken as much care as possible to ensure that every aspect of making has been documented thoroughly. This has not always been successful and at times, in truth working independently has been hard to stay motivated. Especially in the past few years of the pandemic, being at home most of the time meant we do not have to worry about going out and seeing people. Despite this, taking away these pressures temporarily, the fear of having to eventually return to normality was sometimes hard for me. I feel like there are massive gaps in my learning due to the pandemic and there are certain things I feel I should know but I don’t. It’s no one’s fault, the pandemic has put a huge amount of extra strain on staff, students, and everyone, but I hope in the future employers are understanding. However, through all the trials and worries over the past years, I feel I have created a product that will hopefully engage and inspire others about Marianne North, but just how well did I do in developing this product? This evaluation will attempt to unveil all the views and opinions I have on every aspect including what I thought went well, what could have been done better and what I feel I could have done differently if I had more time. To ensure my finished product would be of the best quality possible, I began development by searching for graphic novels, and illustrated books about the life of scientists and adventurers identical to Marianne North, such as Evelyn the Adventurous Entomologist by Christine Evans (author), Yasmin Lmamura (illustrator), Ocean Speaks: How Marie Tharp Revealed the Ocean’s Biggest Secret by Jess Keating (author), Katie Hickey (author) and Shackleton’s Journey by William Grill (author). Researching how illustrators publish books has helped me plan out the stages of making a picture book. I explored how visual and verbal language can playfully interact to enhance the narrative and experiment with different visual storytelling techniques such as the vignette, the spread, the panel, and more. While I am satisfied with the research I have undertaken to properly shape this project, one of the things that I feel I could have done better would be to continue to read Marianne’s autobiography Recollections of a Happy Life which could provide a sense of a variety of North’s life. I Feel I could have used the opportunity to read her second volume. Additionally, to acquire further inspiration and provide a sense of a variety of studying Marianne North is to visit the archives collection in Kew Gardens, which includes personal papers of Marianne North and other individuals including Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker who encourage her to travel. When the development of my product began initially, I had to express an interest in developing a journey about Marianne North’s life in detail. As research and writing continued, however, I began to realise that this would be too overwhelming and an enormous task to explore so this was ultimately changed to focus on the most important highlights that shaped North into the person we know today. I want to create something that would explore the importance of nature as well as
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F I NAL E VALUAT IO N
