The fork in the folio
At week 16 a student abandoned a portrait investigation and began a landscape investigation. The folio now holds 12 pages of portraits - observational studies, two resolved paintings, notes on a grandparent's illness - followed by 10 pages of landscapes with no page bridging them. The student wants to remove all 12 portrait pages because 'they're not what I'm doing any more'. Final submission is in seven weeks and the folio must demonstrate a sustained investigation. The student has 90 minutes of class time per week and no home studio space, and the portrait pages contain the only sustained observational drawing in the folio.
1. Should the portrait pages go? Argue both directions and reach a decision.
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For removal: coherence. An assessor reading 12 portrait pages followed by 10 landscapes with no stated link sees two unfinished investigations rather than one. Twenty-two half-explored pages can score below sixteen resolved ones, and the landscape work would gain the space and the time.
Against removal: the portraits hold the folio's only sustained observational drawing and its only content with a genuine personal stake - the grandparent's illness. That stake is not replaceable in seven weeks. A redirection is also itself evidence of critical reflection, which is directly assessable, provided the reason for the redirection is visible rather than concealed.
Decision: keep them, and re-frame. Not as 'early work I have moved on from', but as the first phase of one question. The bridge must be argued from what is actually on the pages, not invented: both bodies of work are about watching something change slowly over time - a face across months, a field across a season. That is a claim the existing pages can support.
2. Design the bridge. What goes on the pages between the two halves, and what is the risk of constructing continuity after the fact?
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Three bridge pages.
- A double-page comparison of details: a portrait's handling of light on skin beside a landscape's handling of light on water, annotated to name the shared problem - the same question asked of two subjects.
- A deliberate transitional test: one new work that contains both, such as the view from the grandparent's window with the figure still in it. This earns the bridge rather than merely asserting it.
- A dated reflective page stating plainly what prompted the change: too much time indoors, the practical difficulty of a sitter, the desire for a subject that could be observed alone. Honest reasons read as critical reflection; a retrospective narrative that makes the change look inevitable reads as fabrication.
The risk is real and assessors are alert to it. Retro-fitted continuity is a form of dishonesty, and the safeguard is a strict rule: every claim on a bridge page must be evidenced by something already on another page. The student may re-describe existing work; the student may not invent a motive that left no trace. If a link cannot be shown, the honest move is to label the phases and make new work that genuinely connects them.
3. With seven weeks and 90 minutes of class time per week, give a sequencing and identify the task most likely to be left too late.
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Weeks 1–2: build the three bridge pages and re-sequence the existing 22. Re-sequencing is free and changes how the folio reads more than any single new page will.
Weeks 3–5: make the transitional test and two to three landscape pages that deliberately reuse a portrait technique - the way skin was modelled, applied now to terrain. This is the evidence that the investigation is one investigation.
Week 6: generate comparative test pages and the closing page, which states where the inquiry arrived and what remains unresolved. A folio with an unresolved end is stronger than one that pretends to conclude.
Week 7: edit, annotate, check dating and sequence.
What gets left too late is almost always the annotation. It is resented as administrative, it is deferred until the work is 'finished', and then it is written in one rushed pass that produces generic commentary on every page. Annotation is the cheapest page in the folio and the most commonly sacrificed. It should be written in the week each page is made, at 30–50 words, tied to a specific mark, and dated.