Portfolio Visit- Aurea Carpenter

So, in London, I have a group portfolio visit with Aurea Carpenter, Short Books publishing. Quite a small publishing group.
This was my first portfolio visit in London so I was very very nervous, and after walking up a few flights of stairs in the heat, I became even more nervous. Even though I was with both Chloe and Philippa my hands were still shaking. The area was nice and quiet compared to where we were staying (Kings Cross travelodge) but it was not too far, about a 20 minute walk.
We buzzed in and a nice lady showed us where to go etc, it was quite an old building, with old floorboards and things everywhere! (mostly books of course) but it was very calming and cosy.
So Aurea took us to a small meeting room and spoke to us a little about what they do, then she took a look through our portfolios, I was sat next to her so she automatically went for me first! eek, I was so nervous, even Chloe said she could see my hands shaking! But once I got into go through my portfolio I felt a little more calm, and it helped that Aurea seemed to like my work alot which was great.
She liked my use of colour, shape and texture and could tell that I am interested in Children's illustration.
My twinkle project is at the beginning of my portfolio, which most people I have been to see haven't really had much to say about it, which has made my confidence about it drop a little, but Aurea seemed to really like my characters and she liked the outlines aswell which alot of people have not been keen on, but I think it works well for those particular images. But like most people she also mentioned that I need to work on bringing my text in with my images, making them work together and not separatly.
She loved the colours and patterns of my Dia de los Muertos work, very bright and eye catching with a fun topic to work with.

I also put what I am currently working with in my portfolio, my Grimm's fairy tales book cover, which I thought I had finished, but Gary suggested a few changes, but I had already put what I thought was finished into my portfolio before the changes, but Aurea loved it. She told me not to change anything as she thought the idea was great and she pointed out certain things that I hadn't even thought about before and hadn't noticed untill she said. I had used very sharp pointed shapes for trees which my characters were made around, gary felt that these shapes were making my characters strange looking and not as good as they could be, but Aurea pointed out that these shapes give the cover a sense of jeopardy and they also looked like teeth, making the image dark and scary, which was my main aim of the cover. So i stuck with my image as Aurea suggested and I am very pleased with it. She said she could see it working very well as a jacket on a book.
She liked my rapunzel book cover, mostly the castle which I had created, which lead me to think of things to do with the castle, so I have started to screen print the castle and make some pillows and other bits out of them :)
She seemed to like all of my work and didn't really have any negative things to say which was great and made me feel alot more confident about my work.
After she looked through all of our portfolio, she showed us a project she was working on atm.
She was trying to find an illustrator to illustrate a book cover mostly with typography and she was showing us some good roughs and bad ones. The stage she was at, she had 3 similar roughs from one illustrator, and she asked for our opinions on each ones, the good parts and the bad, after explaining the story we got a better sense of what the cover should feel like, but we gave her our opinions and she agreed with all of us and said she was going to go with what we thought, which made us feel great, having someone professional take our opinions into perspective.

We left her some business cards which she thought was very professional of us and left her some chocolates to say thank you. Overall It was a great portfolio visit, we all left with huge smiles on our faces and felt really good about ourselves and our work. We were very proud and thankful for Philippa for arranging the visit.