Developing a personal project
Art & Design · Key Stage 3 · The School
From starting point to outcome
A project runs from a starting point — a theme, an object, a question — through research, experiments and development, to a resolved final piece. What examiners and viewers look for is the JOURNEY being visible: that decisions were made for reasons and that the final piece grew out of what came before rather than appearing from nowhere.
The sketchbook is the argument
A sketchbook is working evidence, not a neat presentation made afterwards. It should show artists you looked at and what you took from them, materials tried, versions rejected, and notes on why. A beautiful sketchbook with no thinking in it is worth less than a messy one that shows a decision being reached.
Keep the failures
Experiments that did not work are evidence of testing, and removing them makes a project look luckier and weaker than it was. Annotate what went wrong and what it changed. The habit is also practical: an approach abandoned in one project is often exactly what a later one needs, and a record of it is the only way to find it again.
A sketchbook page of a wash that went muddy, annotated: "Too much water and I worked back into it before it dried — the colours mixed on the paper. Next page: let each layer dry, and test on scrap first." Then the next page shows it working. Remove the failure and the improvement looks like luck. Keep it, and you have evidenced exactly the development the assessment objectives ask for.