Emilie has just started her third year of ba fashion illustration and her final major project.

You can follow Emilie's progress on Snapshot and www.twitter.com/topofmytodo

My final major project includes two of my main loves, digital design and Brighton. I believe it's important to choose something that you love and expand on that for your final major project. Your final major project spans over two whole terms, so the last thing you want to do is get bogged down in a vague topic that you're not really interested in. I needed to be able to get a good body of research so I could keep developing my drawings and ideas.

I live by the sea in Brighton. I love everything about the coast, the people, the fashion and most importantly the music filled nightlife. That's what led me to the idea of making and designing a Brighton listings website focusing mainly on a niche clubbing market. I will be illustrating the main design of the website which will be based around the people and the fashion that make up Brighton's nightlife. It also has a promotional aspect putting up and coming illustrators in touch with club promoters to design flyers and posters. I'm going to use Dreamweaver and Flash to make the website interactive and fun for the viewer to use.

The first year of the Fashion Illustration BA we were able to explore and refine techniques and styles that perhaps we hadn't before. We were set a brief to illustrate and create a student guide to London, this was helpful for those students who perhaps hadn't lived or been in London before. We also completed a term in photography and were able to use the dark rooms, and studios to show our ideas. Animation was by far my favourite aspect of our first year on the course; we were given a lot of freedom with what we could do with skills we learnt in theory-based classes. The differences in our films, using different methods and styles just shows how you can go on your own path at LCF.

The beauty of studying at LCF is the links to industry and having real briefs set to you, it sets you up for the working world, and is particularly exciting when you have outside companies coming in to set you artwork briefs. We worked with Marvel comics, which was very exciting and I really enjoyed reading hundreds of comics as part of my research! Also a competition set by Jeans for Genes to create t-shirt designs and other apparel to raise money for the charity, which resulted in one of my fellow students, having her work modelled on Jaime Winstone, supermodel Jodie Kidd and radio presenter Zoe Ball. The photos of her design were featured in fashion magazines Glamour, Company, Harpers Bazaar, Tatler, vogue.com, and Heat.

In the summer term we worked closely with the Centre for Fashion Enterprise designers, and had meetings with fashion designers such as Meadham Kirchoff, Richard Nicholl and Mary Katrantzou and we were asked to illustrate and design look books for their collections. It was pretty scary as we were actually going to meetings and showing our work to these amazing designers at their studios! LCF has great links with the industry, which is a definite plus for studying here. Over all, the course has been very exciting, fast paced but also lot of hard work!

In our first year we were taught theory and hands-on classes wth programmes such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, these programmes are very important and you should be competent in their use as the whole of the industry uses them. The use of digital work is more down to the choice of the student. When we are set briefs we can use whichever tools we want. Luckily I was familiar with these programmes before the course so I choose to continue working with them throughout the course.

As for striking a good balance, we also had weekly life drawing classes in our first two years, with dancers and models. For fashion illustration you need to see how the body moves with clothing, and often we could style and dress the models and use whichever medium to draw with. It gives a good solid base for fashion drawings.

There are options in the second year to pick an elective, where if you want to do more of free hand drawing or digital work you can choose. I chose the Fashion Graphics course to expand my skills and knowledge.

I come from a Textile background, through A Level. I always creating graphics on the computer for websites I started making when I was 11. I have always been interested in fashion, and liked to combine the two. Staying up late drawing designs, and using the computer for graphics. For my Art Foundation pathway I chose Fashion, as recommended by my tutor, yet instead of the Fashion Design route, I was more interested in the Promotion from a creative perspective. I modified clothing, then took fashion photographs, created labelling and created a website to sell my clothes. Fashion Illustration seemed like a good mix of the two, as I was drawing models and clothing and was interested in illustration.