Thirty Sheets, Twelve Slots, Five Days
Elihas must submit twelve A2 sheets plus his sketchbook for the Personal Investigation. He has thirty sheets in hand: six resolved pieces, nine studies, and fifteen sheets of experiments - monoprints, ink tests, photographic trials. His sketchbook runs to forty pages. The theme set in January was 'Water and Drought'. Between February and March he made eight sheets of portrait studies of his cousin's face before returning to the theme; he now calls those weeks 'wasted'. One resolved sheet is still slightly damp. The deadline is in five days, he has mounting board for exactly twelve sheets, and the criteria name sustained investigation, development of ideas, contextual reference and a realised outcome. His teacher's only comment so far has been, 'Show your process.'
1. Select the twelve sheets and justify the distribution against the four named criteria.
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A twelve-sheet argument, not a twelve-sheet gallery:
| Sheets | Content | Criterion served |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Statement of intent (40 words) plus first observational studies of water containers | Sustained investigation - establishes the question |
| 5 | Development: two drought studies, two water studies, one sheet testing a material or process | Development - shows change between sheets, which is what the word means |
| 3 | Contextual: one artist study with a specific borrowed device circled, cross-referenced by arrow to a development sheet | Contextual reference - named influence that visibly changed the work |
| 1 | The portrait detour, annotated | Sustained investigation - closes the gap in the sequence |
| 2 | Resolved: one at the mid-point and the final outcome | Realised outcome - shows the answer was reached, not announced |
Why not all six resolved pieces: they evidence production, not thinking. With twelve slots, every resolved sheet beyond two removes a development sheet, and development is where the marks sit. Six finished works and no working drawings reads as a portfolio assembled after the fact.
Why not the fifteen experiments: they would swamp the sequence with dead ends and suggest an inability to select. The sketchbook is the correct home for those, and it is submitted anyway.
Practical: the damp sheet stays out. It will buckle and stick to the board; dry it flat under weighted board for 24 hours and swap it in only if it is genuinely one of the two strongest.
2. How should the sheets be ordered and annotated so that the sequence itself argues the investigation?
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Order is the argument. Read left to right, the wall should run: question → looking → testing → reference → pivot → resolution. A viewer should be able to follow the investigation without the candidate standing there explaining it.
Sequencing rules:
- Never place two visually similar sheets side by side - similarity reads as repetition, and the examiner starts looking for development rather than seeing it.
- Place each contextual sheet immediately before the development sheet it changed. An artist reference stranded at the end is decoration; an artist reference followed by the work it altered is evidence.
- Put the final outcome last but not largest. Oversized presentation of one piece signals that the candidate thinks the outcome is the whole submission.
- Number every sheet in one corner, in the same place, in the same hand.
Annotation form - 30 to 50 words per sheet, always three moves:
'What I tried → what happened → what I did next.'
Example: 'Layered ink washes to get the cracked-mud surface. Third wash lifted the paper and the tone went grey. Switched to dry-brush over a sized ground, which held the crack pattern; carried this into sheet 7.'
What to avoid: labels like 'Experiment 3', 'Final piece', or 'I like this one'. They restate what is visible and earn nothing. Cross-reference to sketchbook page numbers with arrows - it shows the sketchbook and the sheets are one investigation, and it directs the examiner to the evidence you want read.
3. Should the portrait detour and the failed experiments be included? Argue both sides, then decide.
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The case against including them: the criteria reward sustained investigation. Eight portrait sheets in the middle of a water theme can look like the investigation broke, and fifteen experiments can look like the candidate could not decide. A tight, coherent twelve is safer.
The case for: an unexplained three-week gap is worse than an explained detour. The examiner will see the dates jump and will assume the work was lost or abandoned. And a failure with a written decision attached is the single clearest evidence of judgement on the whole wall - it shows the candidate evaluating rather than producing.
Decision:
- Include the detour, on one sheet, with honest annotation. Only if the link is real and visible: 'These portraits were the first time I looked at skin tone as a warm-over-cool problem; the same layering went back into the drought series on sheet 8.' If no such link genuinely exists, cut it and accept the gap. A false narrative collapses the moment a moderator asks a question about it, and one inflated claim costs more than a missing three weeks.
- Include exactly two failed experiments, chosen because each one caused a specific change in direction and each can be annotated in one sentence. Two failures read as method; fifteen read as indecision.
- Keep the rest in the sketchbook and flag the relevant pages with a bookmark or a numbered arrow from the sheets. The sketchbook is submitted, so nothing is actually lost - it is only re-sorted.
The underlying judgement is the one the portfolio is testing: selection is the skill, and a candidate who cannot discard work has not finished the investigation.