The Process Of: Creating My Graduation Photo
THE PROCESS OF: CREATING MY GRADUATION PHOTO
Yesterday I finally got my results and I’m proud to say I’ll be graduating with a 2.1 honours degree in Graphic Design! My time at UWE, Bristol has been amazing and I’m very, very, happy. The last 3 years have been a lot of hard work but more rewarding than I can say. I’m also so thankful to everyone on my course and my tutors for making my time there so amazing!
Now, before I tell you how this fabulous photo came to be, I want to share some personal feelings about the end of university. Not having a degree show or graduation ceremony has hit us hard as a year group. We never got the chance to say goodbye or celebrate together with our friends, family and tutors. After 3 long years of hard work we never got to see our designs displayed or have that proud feeling of exhibiting our finished projects to the public. I’m genuinely finding it frustrating not having closure for my uni experience. You see graduations portrayed in films and on tv shows, and when you finally get on a course, you spend 3 years wondering in the back of your mind about your finale. You wait excitedly to find out how it will be for you, and to have it all come to nothing, is fairly depressing. We didn’t even get the chance to celebrate the end of an era with our flatmates and I shouldn’t really complain about all this, but that’s how I feel.
Right, enough of being sad, time for the happy story that was yesterday, Wednesday 22nd July 2020. At 9:30 our class group chat was going mad as everyone was waking up, congratulating each other and trying to find the link to where our results were posted, which did genuinely take several minutes to discover. Within the hour, members of our class began posting their results online. Being in lockdown meant the time to celebrate was now. I saw a few classmates on facebook, grinning proudly in borrowed gowns and mortar boards from older siblings and thought I’d like to do something similar but having no older siblings, I had to quickly devise an alternative.
My idea was to use a Harry Potter cloak my Mum sewed for me about 10 years ago as a gown. I then asked my hand-crafty sister to make me a mortar board. Alfie used some of my grey board and book cloth (cheap pillow cases) that I’d previously bought for making book jackets and in just under an hour I had a hat. My Dad made a tassel to finish it off using some dark coloured wool and my makeshift graduation outfit was complete. I went in to the garden and after a few dozen leaps in the air, I had a fun photo to remember the day I got my degree. A huge thanks to my family for making this happen as it was a mad and spontaneous idea but came together beautifully.
Photography of me by Mum: twitter.com/sophypaints
Mortar board construction by Alfie: instagram.com/theurbanchangeling