Worked example · Art · Year 11
DCF: Producing → Sourcing, searching and planning digital content
A secure Year 11 response with the five rationales actually written out and counted. Show it after Part B, not before — the whole difficulty of this task is being made to choose, and a model answer removes it. When marking, the test for each rationale is simple: cross out everything a viewer could see for themselves, and check something is left.
| No. | In or out | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Out | Does the same job as piece 7 — proving observational drawing — and the smudged fixative means it photographs badly. |
| 2 | In | The only piece that shows a decision being made rather than an outcome. |
| 3 | Out | Painful one. It is technically excellent, but it says the same thing as piece 12 in the same language, and two big paintings would split the viewer's attention instead of building an argument. |
| 4 | Out | The registration is off on four of the five prints. One good print is a lucky print, not a controlled process. |
| 5 | In | The experiment that did not make it into the final piece. It shows where the work goes next. |
| 6 | Out | Unfinished. Unfinished work belongs in a portfolio only when you are discussing it as process, and I am not. |
| 7 | In | Proof I can draw from observation, and the only non-colour, non-digital work in the five. |
| 8 | Out | The object might be fine; the photograph of it is flat grey and unusable, and I have no time to reshoot. The portfolio is also not about sculpture. |
| 9 | Out | The other painful one. It is the best-looking single image I own and it has nothing to do with journeys. A portfolio with a theme has to hold the theme. |
| 10 | Out | Overlaps piece 5 and is less resolved. Where two pieces compete, keep the stronger one and say why. |
| 11 | In | My own source photography — the research the final piece is built from, and evidence I did not lift reference images from a search engine. |
| 12 | In | The final piece. Twenty hours and the resolution of the whole project. |
The two I was proud of and cut: the Severn Bridge acrylic (3) and the cyanotype (9). The acrylic would have earned a slot if it had been made before the final piece and showed a different problem being solved — as it is, it is a second answer to a question already answered. The cyanotype would have earned one if the theme had been journeys on foot; I could have shot it against a trail map and made it belong, but I would be arguing for it after the fact.
Evidences criterion 1: exactly five kept, every rejection reasoned, and the two hardest cuts named with what would have changed the decision rather than with regret.
Slot 1 — piece 12, mixed-media final piece (52 words)
This is where the project landed, so it leads. Twenty hours of acrylic and collage on board, 60 by 80 centimetres, built from my own platform photographs rather than found images. I chose it first because the layered timetable fragments answer the question the whole project asked: what does waiting look like?
Criteria 2 and 3: names the job the piece does (it resolves the project's question), gives medium and scale in eleven words, and is counted at 52.
Slot 2 — piece 11, photographic series (53 words)
Nine photographs of the same platform between six in the morning and nine at night. They are in because they are the evidence: every colour in the final piece is sampled from them, and they show I sourced my own reference instead of searching for someone else's and hoping the licence was clear.
Criterion 2, and it is the rationale that addresses the DCF element head-on: sourcing and planning digital content, including the licensing point.
Slot 3 — piece 2, biro thumbnails (48 words)
Six biro thumbnails on one A5 page, drawn in twenty minutes. They are the ugliest thing in the portfolio and the most useful: you can see me reject three compositions and find the diagonal that the final piece is built on. Outcomes alone would hide that decision entirely.
Criterion 2: argues for a deliberately unpolished piece on the grounds of what it evidences, which is a curatorial judgement rather than a preference.
Slot 4 — piece 7, observational pencil drawings (54 words)
Four sketchbook pages of hands holding tickets, in pencil. Included for range and for proof of observation: the portfolio is otherwise weighted towards colour and digital work, and these show I can draw from life. Two pages are weaker than the others, so I photographed the two strongest at an angle that avoids glare.
Criterion 2 with an honest limit admitted, plus a practical decision about how the work is captured for screen.
Slot 5 — piece 5, digital photomontage (51 words)
A digital photomontage combining a scanned bus timetable with a family photograph, made in four hours. It closes the portfolio because it points forwards rather than back: it is the experiment that did not make it into the final piece, and it is the direction I would take the work next.
Criterion 4: the last slot is chosen for what it does to the shape of the whole sequence, not because it was made last.
Why slot 1 is first. Most people looking at an online portfolio see the first image and nothing else. If the strongest, most resolved piece is at the bottom in chronological order, it may as well not be there. A viewer who sees only slot 1 should come away with the theme, the scale of commitment and the fact that the source material is mine — all three are visible in the final piece. Everything after it is the working that proves slot 1 was not an accident.
Criterion 4: a decision about order with a stated reason, and a clear claim about what the first image alone communicates.
Journeys is about waiting rather than travelling: platforms, timetables, tickets and the light that changes while nothing happens. Everything here is built from photographs I took myself on the Valley Lines between Pontypridd and Cardiff. The five pieces are ordered so the final work comes first, then the research and drawing behind it, then the experiment I would follow next.
Criterion 3 and 4: exactly 60 words, and it covers all three required things — subject, where the source material came from, and the logic of the order.
| File naming pattern | surname-firstname_journeys_SLOT_short-title_medium_YYYY-MM Real example: jones-catrin_journeys_01_waiting-room_acrylic-collage_2026-05.jpg Slot number first inside the theme, so the files sort into portfolio order in any folder view. |
|---|---|
| Format, and why | JPEG at quality 85 for the exported portfolio images, because they are photographs of artwork and the file needs to load on a phone. The masters stay as TIFF or PNG: lossless, so re-editing next term does not degrade them. Exporting a JPEG from a JPEG from a JPEG is how a portfolio ends up looking blotchy. |
| Pixel size | 2000 pixels on the long edge, sRGB. The camera gives 6000, which is roughly nine times the file size for no visible gain on screen — and a 12 MB image that never finishes loading is a portfolio nobody sees. 2000 px is still enough to zoom into the collage edges. |
| Where the masters live | Two separate folders in my area on the school system: journeys/masters/ and journeys/web-export/. Nothing is ever edited in the export folder, so the export can always be rebuilt from the master. |
| Alt text for slot 1 | "Mixed-media painting, 60 by 80 centimetres: a station platform in acrylic, with torn strips of printed bus and train timetables collaged across the lower half, and a single figure waiting at the right-hand edge." |
| Source material that is not mine | Two things. The family photograph inside piece 5 belongs to my grandmother, and I have her written permission by email to use it in coursework and in my online portfolio — that email is saved in the masters folder. The scanned timetables are printed ephemera I picked up at the station; because I cannot establish who owns them I have used only small torn fragments, credited as "fragments of printed timetables, 2026", and I have not reproduced any of them whole. Everything else in all five pieces is my own work and my own photography, so I hold the copyright. |
Criterion 5: format, pixel size, folder structure, alt text and rights are all decided rather than left to whatever the export dialogue does by default, and the two items the pupil does not own are handled honestly.