Now I’m a girl who loves her hats, but yesterday we cycled through them so quickly it made my head spin. We were asked to critique each others self portrait collections from the viewpoint of:

The Yellow Hat: Something positive

The Red Hat: Initial reaction or gut feeling

The Black Hat: Something negative

The Green Hat: Something that could have been done different

Being forced to critique work in a certain way definitely worked to give us more rounded out feedback, rather than four repetitions of ‘I like it’.

The hat I found to give the best feedback was definitely the green hat though. It resonated with me because during the process of creating my self portrait, in times of doubt or blank minds I would turn to the people around me and say ‘What should I dooooooooo?’. Normally my melodramatics don’t pay off, the ideas people give me are too basic, too weird or not relevant to me, but sometimes what can happen is that they spark something. Something they say will resonate with me and an idea will pop into my head based on theirs.

It’s also a huge part of collaboration. I remember being in a Year 12 drama class with Liam Morkham creating ensemble pieces where we would spend entire classes bouncing back and forth saying ‘But what if we did this…’ or ‘I like that but what if we replaced this bit with….’.

Feedback and collaboration are a great way of extending your mind to include ideas you never considered and avoid getting stuck repeating the same patterns.