I feel this was the best approach we could have taken because it would have been difficult for ; firstly the team to all be on at the same time, and secondly for the pitches to be finished in time. Working together, while it does have it's benefits, does slow the whole process of pitch writing and using the method of writing it individually and then critiquing any mistakes or rewording something was the best option.

He did part of the artist and artwork descriptions alongside Shadi for the still life artwork I think and did some research into pricing for the still life artwork. It was obviously difficult for him with personal circumstances but I believe he did put some effort and work into this task on that second day.

Arran unfortunately skipped one whole day so when he actually did show up we had all been almost done with our pitches. So I told him if he'd like to do the pricing or if he'd like to do a still art pitch and we disregard mine (that's how much I wanted to integrate him and not make him feel marginalized) or if he'd just like to review mine and add things to it. He said he liked mine a lot and was going to add to it, which was okay but honestly not enough because I had everything done anyways. And after that I actually asked about him in the main chat twice because I wanted him to help with the questions but he never answered. I just didn't feel that he was involved really though I really tried my best to integrate him.

Roxie, the prices of my art work was on the website of the artist so no research was carried out for my items.

I felt like Shadi tried to integrate Arran more for the sake of trying to integrate him than anything else. Anything that Shadi delegated to Arran he could have actually got done quicker himself (as could Roxie or myself, come to that). It's commendable how much Shadi made an effort with Arran, but I don't feel like he should have had to.

Apologies I got confused because you did delegate the task of pricing for those still life pieces to Arran on Skype so I thought he was responsible for that. My mistake.

That's disappointing to hear. Aside from this, were there any other issues in your team? One thing that struck me on the evaluations was an issue brought up about George being very last minute in terms of showing his pitch to Shadi and also having issues with the numbers of said pitch, both of which caused quite a bit of panic - can anyone elaborate on this?

We had all researched and come up with three artists that we liked for a specific category - I came up with three for still life - and thought we could choose from. We all then voted on the best one out of the three. The pieces of art were then chosen by everyone.

I will hold my hands up to the fact that I did prepare the pitch quite at the last minute - that tends to be my way. Writing well under pressure is something that I'm good at. On this occasion, it was a mistake because I found myself very confused about the pricing - I thought that the pricing would be more simple than it was, so we had to make rough estimates. I will concede the fact that that was my fault. Other than that though, I don't think preparing the pitch at short notice caused a particular problem - it may have put a bit of avoidable stress on our team leader, but I think I pitched very well. Shadi himself said that it was well thought-out, and my buyer said that it was an excellent pitch. I knew in advance what I would be pitching, so it was just the descriptions that I needed to work on, which I easily got done in just over half an hour.

For us I believe it was completely down to research done on the task rather than any familiarity with artists before hand. Mostly it came round to personal taste and then agreeing what we thought would be best to present in our pitches.

For my abstract artist Danny O'Connor, I had researched on about 5 different websites looking at lots of different abstract and surreal art work before I discovered him. I tried looking for something that was a bit different and unique but art that told a story as that was Aliyah's main point for what she wanted, so I wanted to make that 'story-telling' element the focal point of my pitch thus I had to choose art work with background stories. I had shortlisted about 4 artists before making a decision that I was going to do Danny O'Connor and confirmed with the team if they were happy with my choice and they were. I felt as an artist the stories told by his art were heartwarming and his art itself was so exquisite and beautiful that I felt incredibly passionate about choosing him and thought he would give us the best chance of winning the pitch.

Before I get to the results, I'd like to ask both teams a question. As I said before, this was a unique task in terms of involving you having to privately pitch to specific members instead of pitching to everyone publicly on the thread. How did you find this different way of pitching? Do you think that you handled the Q&A section well and were able to adequately answer each question?

I believe that for a first time on having to go through the Q&A, I thought that I did well and it all seemed to go better than I thought it would.

I felt that my buyer could have been around more. Part of the reason I prepared the pitch at short notice was because I was informed that he wasn't going to be around the following day, which I had been banking on. He said that he had told everyone this at the start, but I did not receive that - possibly my inbox was full at that time, I'm not sure, but no one passed that message on to me.

When I actually pitched to him, I felt that it went very well. He said that he really liked the way that I pitched to him and the artwork. Possibly the prices could have been more concrete, and I accept responsibility for that, but otherwise I think I did a very good job. I was surprised that he didn't ask more questions though.

I liked this one-on-one pitch because you could basically structure the whole pitch to what they wanted, as Aliyah said on the thread she wanted art that moved her and told a story I could base my pitch around that and present that as the theme across the art pieces. Whereas the structure for pitches for everyone else can a bit more difficult I feel because different people pay particularly close attention to different sections so structure is a little more vague and hard to pinpoint. I enjoyed my Q&A session as Aliyah really enjoyed the pitch and she seemed so intrigued by the processes behind the art in her questions. I thought my answers went well as I presented a series of points backed up by lots of sources and market research.

To answer your first question, I actually researched about so many Still Artists and chose the one I felt strongly about the most, this is how I came to decide on Elaine Schaffner. I had many others but I felt that Elaine's work spoke to me.

As for your second question, I felt it was a creative way of pitching. It definitely went smoothly, I don't think any pitch lasted more than 15 to 20 minutes. Everything was precise and to the paint, and the buyers were all great.

to the point*

I think i handled it well. I was able to answer the questions as best as i can and i was happy with the responses that i had given. I think the pitch was as good as it was going to be and I was overall happy with it.

I liked it - it provided an interesting dynamic to the task. I personally arranging times that suited wasn't particularly easy as we had to balance the buyers availability with enough time to get through the entire pitch in time with spending enough time on the pitches themselves despite us easily sorting our pitch times quickly. I personally ended up taking a rather risky move by getting a time much closer to the deadline than was wise and will be taking that forward in future tasks if I survive this week.

As for the Q&A section though it was a bit rushed due to not having much time to answer the questions I think I did pretty well on the whole on my answers though the lack of feedback due to the time constraints wasn't particularly helpful.

Good luck team. And good luck Team Aptitude!

Team Inspired.

Thank you, David! Pleasure doing business with you.

I'll reveal the results of Katie's pitches now - which was for the still life paintings, for which Shadi pitched for Team Inspired and Naruto for Team Aptitude.

Katie decided that the winning team for this pitch was...