So I applied to Vogue for some work experience over the summer. I wrote to them by letter so am not able to show you my attempt, however I did get a reply which I was stunned by. Obviously, with the company being so large and presumably extremely busy I didn't even expect that. So here it is:

• VOGUE‏

17/02/2011

Reply ▼

Nina Godfrey

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To 'chloejones2@live.co.uk'

Dear Chloe,

Thank you for your letter regarding work experience at Vogue. I am afraid your application has not been successful.

I am sorry to give you a disappointing reply and good luck with your search elsewhere.

Yours sincerely,

Nina Godfrey

Editorial Coordinator

VOGUE

The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.

Vogue House

1 Hanover Square

London

W1S 1JU

Tel: 020 7152 3471

Fax: 020 7408 0559

As promised, a few snappy shots of my creative baking...

Caravaggio, you sly fox!

Here is some more news for you hungry souls, courtesy of the BBC News website:

Four hundred years after his death, Caravaggio is a 21st Century superstar among old master painters. His stark, dramatically lit, super-realistic paintings strike a modern chord - but his police record is more shocking than any modern bad boy rock star's.
An exhibition of documents at Rome's State Archives throws vivid light on his tumultuous life here at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries.
Caravaggio: A killer whose patrons and friends included powerful cardinals
Caravaggio's friendships, daily life and frequent brawls - including the one which brought him a death sentence from Pope Paul V - are described in handwritten police logs, legal and court parchments all bound together in heavy tomes - and carefully preserved in this unique repository of Rome's history during the Renaissance and after.
The picture the documents paint is that of an irascible man who went about town carrying personal weapons - a sword and dagger, and even a pistol - without a written permit, boasting that he enjoyed the protection of the ecclesiastical authorities who commissioned some of his most famous works.
He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady sued, so he and a friend pelted her window with stones.Tennis court battle
All these events are documented with eyewitness accounts in this collection of yellowing parchments - difficult to decipher for the non-specialist, but rich in contemporary detail for a skilled archivist.
Police Dossier - Artist Behaving Badly
4 May 1598: Arrested at 2- 3am near Piazza Navona, for carrying a sword without a permit
19 November 1600: Sued for beating a man with a stick and tearing his cape with a sword at 3am on Via della Scrofa
2 October 1601: A man accuses Caravaggio and friends of insulting him and attacking him with a sword near the Piazza Campo Marzio
24 April 1604: Waiter complains of assault after serving artichokes at an inn on the Via Maddalena
19 October 1604: Arrested for throwing stones at policemen near Via dei Greci and Via del Babuino
28 May 1605: Arrested for carrying a sword and dagger without a permit on Via del Corso
29 July 1605: Vatican notary accuses Caravaggio of striking him from behind with a weapon
28 May 1606: Caravaggio kills a man during a pitched battle in the Campo Marzio area
The documents provide a completely new account of his most serious brawl in May 1606 in which he killed a certain Ranuccio Tommassoni. This brawl - just like a modern-day clash between warring gangs - was arranged in advance by eight participants who have all now been named.
Caravaggio and his three companions, one a Captain in the Papal army, met their rivals at a pallacorda court in the Campo Marzio area, where the artist lived. (Pallacorda was a game played with a ball with a string attached - an early form of tennis, which some older Romans still remember seeing played in the streets of the capital in the mid-20th Century.)
Some biographers have suggested that there may have been an argument over a woman, but the text of the court report suggests the quarrel broke out over a gambling debt. Caravaggio killed Ranuccio and fled the city.
One of Caravaggio's own supporters was seriously injured. Taken to prison, he was subsequently put on trial, and the new evidence emerges from the report of this trial.Early death
Caravaggio himself fled south to Malta and to Sicily where he received important new art commissions. The death sentence from Pope Paul V - whose portrait he had just painted - was imposed in absentia for this offence.
Statement to police by Pietro Antonio de Fosaccia, waiter, 26 April 1604:
About 17 o'clock [lunchtime] the accused, together with two other people, was eating in the Moor's restaurant at La Maddalena, where I work as a waiter. I brought them eight cooked artichokes, four cooked in butter and four fried in oil. The accused asked me which were cooked in butter and which fried in oil, and I told him to smell them, which would easily enable him to tell the difference.
He got angry and without saying anything more, grabbed an earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the level of my moustache, injuring me slightly... and then he got up and grabbed his friend's sword which was lying on the table, intending perhaps to strike me with it, but I got up and came here to the police station to make a formal complaint...
The documents also shed light upon Caravaggio's death at Porto Erole, north of Rome in July 1610. He did not die alone on a beach after escaping from his creditors and the police, as some of his biographers say, but in a hospital bed.
Only 38 years old, he was on his way back to the city from the south in the belief that his powerful friends had secured a pardon for his offences.
The documents that record Caravaggio's life in Rome are written in a mixture of Latin legal jargon and racy Italian vernacular that any modern Roman could easily understand.
They needed careful restoration, as parts of the parchment were breaking up - the acid in the ink literally devouring the pages.
A handful of sponsors including a local bus company and the Italian Land Rover distributors helped to fund the work. The Italian Culture Ministry has slashed budgets this year as part of Italy's austerity programme and libraries and archives have been particularly badly hit.
The restored files provide the historical context for the sellout show in Rome last year, when more than three-quarters of a million visitors queued for hours in stifling summer heat to see some 50 of the mad, bad and dangerous painter's works.
"A window has been opened into the past," said Federica Galloni, head of culture for the Lazio region at the opening of the new exhibition.
All the events described in the documents occurred within walking distance of one another in a small area of the city.
Caravaggio's haunts such as the Osteria del Moro (inn of the Moor) and Osteria della Lupa (inn of the she-wolf) are long gone, and the church of St Ambrose has been subsumed in a larger, more recent church on the Via del Corso.
But the narrow streets are still there, often clogged with parked motorbikes, but still dotted with medieval buildings that Caravaggio would have known. Walking along them, after visiting the exhibition, the vivid tales of the painter's rumbustious life linger in the imagination.
Document images courtesy of Italy's State Archive, and the Ministry of Culture. The exhibition continues until 15 May.

I have made some work this morning and my Mum has eaten it! Now there's a new take on the dog ate my homework - my Mum ate my homework!

I did however, manage to photograph it before disaster struck.

I have been inspired by some of the vegetable results on Google (pictures below) but I don't know if I have the patuence to produce something as intricate myself. I'll mull this one over for a while longer.

Onto other news, Ian Whadcock came in yesterday to offer his thoughts and opinions. Although credible, I don't think what he offered was altogether 'me'. The way he is wanting me to craft my design for The Wellsping project is not my idea of fun, and for me to get the best results from my work I need to have fun with it and the element of being able to play.

I will post my photographs (of said eaten homework) as soon as I have the time to upload them to my computer, over and out y'all!

These are some of the images that I have started to produce for the next brief. I am to produce an image to advertise food and clothing for a homeless shelter in Stockport. This is for a newspaper and so will eventually need to be greyscaled in order for it to be published. Please note that none of these are final ideas just me playing around with my starting points

Here is some work by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. He was an Italian painter working in the 1500's and died in 1593. His work has inspired me (amongst others) to look at faces in food, heavens knows what will be said when I'm seen with my fingers in my food!

Here is some freaky article that I found on the BBC news website whilst trawling through the daily feed. Wafaa Bilal has had a camera inserted into the back of his head for a year long project...

11 February 2011 Last updated at 12:30

Artist forced to remove head camera implant

The camera takes a picture every minute as part of a year-long project

An artist who had a camera implanted into the back of his head has been forced to remove it after his body rejected part of the device.

Iraqi-born Wafaa Bilal had surgery last week to remove one of three posts holding the camera in place as it posed a risk of infection.

The camera had been taking a photo every minute as part of a year-long project.

Bilal says he hopes he will be able to reattach the camera.

After doctors refused his initial request to have the camera inserted into his head last year, the artist had the procedure done at a body-piercing studio in Los Angeles.

The camera was mounted on three posts attached to a titanium base inserted between Bilal's skin and skull.

The set-up had been causing him pain despite treatment with antibiotics and steroids.

Click to play

Click to play

Artist Wafaa Bilal has had a camera attached to the back of his head in the name of art

"Such a reaction is common with piercings and implants," Bilal, a photography professor from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, said on his website.

"I'm hopeful the wound will heal quickly and I will be able to reattach the camera on the remaining two posts or on a reworked base."

In the meantime, the artist said he would continue to wear the camera on a strap around his neck to continue the flow of images.

The pictures are fed to the project's website and also streamed in real-time to monitors at an exhibition of contemporary art at the new Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar.

Bilal, who fled Iraq in 1991, says the project is intended as a comment on today's surveillance society, where people in cities spend much of their lives under the watchful eyes of security cameras.

Amazing stuff really and a lot more dedicated or is it extreme? than I. I'll let you make that decision ...

Charley Harper

It was pointed out to me recently, that I naturally have quite a symmetrical way of working. I like cutting magazines up and sticking them together to create characters. I like the quality of the magazines glossy paper and although I'm aware I should be creating a resource of pattern etc. it would be a waste to print them out onto normal A4 paper.

I was directed to Charley Harper, whose work I like, but don't 'adore'. He is much more switched on and has tuned into this symmetrical thing. When I look at his work I get the impression it has been produced on Illustrator, it turns out he is just a perfection freak! I think with a little more fine tuning and concentration my focus could shift to this way of working. The next item on my shopping list then is graph paper!

Here are some examples of Charley's work:

I think that the graph paper will be a useful tool as I can work along one line and flip it in Photoshop to create the full image. It will be less time consuming too as I will only have to create half an image! I like his use of line, how they vary in weight and density. Likewise, Harper appears to concentrate on animals and characters the way I do (dare I admit I'm scared of creating people?)

This fear is probably because we have an ideal of how people are supposed to look whereas animals and characters can take on a different persona. I'll tackle it... one day

Here is a look at my potential finished jacket. I think I like the way this works because of the minimal number of elements. When I try to put all 7 characters on plus James and his two aunts things look messy and un-edited, even though I can spend hours finalising the outcome.

I know and understand that this is not the solution to the brief but I have had a journey of development. I now know what works for me and what doesn't. I am taking more steps to becoming closer to who I am and what my visual language looks like. Maybe next year I will be able to enter and have a solid outcome for the brief too. For now though, I am happy that I am starting to produce work that I am happy with, that looks aesthetically pleasing and most of all enjoy producing.

Here is an idea for my Penguin competition entry. It needs a little more editing but I like the concept, it looks like child's play!

123…

Just be yourself

The most prominent piece of advice I have been given this year is to ‘just be yourself’. My tutor gave me a reality check when he asked me why I was producing work that I wasn’t comfortable with. Where is the sense in producing work that you are not comfortable with and essentially unhappy with? There isn’t any. Finally, I am starting to produce work that I enjoy doing, by concocting a recipe that works for me and my style. I have realised that by doing this I am much happier in my work and will eventually be more successful.

Devote more time to your studies

I am aware that I work an awful lot outside of university. In most cases this is my priority because it is my source of income and my university studies come second. It was highlighted to me that if I am to succeed in my chosen field I need to be dedicating ALL of my spare time to it. Without this I am not going to get enough practice before I graduate and my degree will not be as useful as it could potentially be. In response to this advice, I have stopped my overtime at work, which had become more like normal time I did it that often, and I have applied for an internship this summer taking a sabbatical at work in turn for some invaluable experience in my eventual field of interest. Any free time I have now is completely 100% devoted to my university work and the briefs I am set. I will succeed and I am putting measures in place now to ensure that I do.

Persevere

Keep going. If you find something that you like, keep on producing it. It can take several attempts to produce the exact final outcome. I have finally learned to develop this technique. If you enjoy it and practice makes perfect then this is the only solution. When I get my scanner hooked up I’ll post some of the elements I have been developing. I started off with one ladybird and one spider, I now have over 10 of each and I have so much more choice – it’s brilliant!