I recently did a webinar for SAQA on the subject of working in a series and how it can help you develop your own personal style as well as build a body of work and I wanted to share one of the slides from my lecture with you.  It’s the last and I think most important slide in my presentation….

There’s no way around it, if you want to develop a cohesive body of work, develop your visual voice and style then you have to make quilts – and you have to make a lot of them. And working in a series is a way to start that process.  Not all will be works of art and that’s good because you’ll learn more from the ones that you don’t like and the ones that just don’t work than you will from the ones that do.

But there’s a critical step that a lot of new or beginning artists skip when they start a series and that’s the evaluation step.  The evaluation step is so important because it gives you an opportunity to consider what you’ve done and what changes you’d like to make in your next piece before you start it.   Even if you’re not working in a series, you should always hang up your work, step back from it and spend some time asking some what if questions about it.  You might even consider keeping a notebook to record your evaluations about each piece you make so you can refer back to it.  Use the answers to inform your next piece and just keep repeating this create/evaluate/create process and before you know it, you’ll be well on you way to developing a body of work and your visual voice!