The end of the project is so close now and I’m both relieved and extremely stressed. My laptop decided to give up on me at the start of the week so I am now unable to edit photos for my blog or create any art digitally in any way, shape or form. I’m just lucky I was able to get on it long enough to back up all of my files so I haven’t lost the work I’ve done over the past year. I was also able to upload my zine to flipsnack before it gave it up on me so I’ll post a link to my zine on this post. What it does mean though is that my 2^nd brief, which I have chosen to be the Creative Conscience Mental Health brief, will have to be created entirely traditionally, without the ability to edit it. I came so close to just calling it a day and handing in the project when my laptop died, I spent a few days trying to figure out what to do with myself, so it is safe to say that I haven’t achieved a great deal of work this week. I suppose the 2^nd brief was always going to be a smaller one, and I am allowed to hand in a traditional piece, it doesn’t have to be digital so I guess it’s not the end of the world. 

I did manage to get some artist research this week to kick off my 2^nd brief, I spent quite a lot of time looking for artists/illustrators that depict mental health in an accurate and fair way, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of using a negatively viewed, overused stereotype again like I did during the development of my zine with the head-clutcher image, a mistake I will never make again because the last thing I want to do is add to the already negative stigma surrounding mental health. I want to help remove the stigma and show people that mental health problems are a lot more common than they think. I will post my artist researches separately on my blog, providing I am able to access them on my phone which is what I am currently using to write and edit my blog posts now. 

Next week I need to really get a handle on the 2^nd brief, I’ll only have like maybe 10 days or less to finish it, but I really want to achieve what I set out to at the start of the project despite everything. I have some ideas of what I am going to do,  I know from the brief that I need to create something that is optimistic and empowering to people with mental health problems, which shouldn’t be too diffgicult as I am one of those people. Right from tomorrow I am going to sketch out a bunch of my ideas and quickly move onto development , a lot faster than I normally would because this is kind of like a micro brief at this point, so the project doesn’t need to be as expansive as previous ones.