My name is Luke and I'm a Projects Assistant for Unit Twenty Three. I originally applied for the apprenticeship back in July 2015, knowing nothing about what the gig would give me a year later.

Prior to the Arts Award, I wasn't doing a lot artistically. Sure, I liked to draw a lot, and I was obsessed with music, but didn't really consider myself an artist as I didn't think of it as a valid career path. In fact, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life, so I thought applying for an apprenticeship will give me some focus. And believe me, it did.

Although I create visual art, my main art form is music. OK, I'm not a professional musician, and I'm still learning to play a couple of Blink-182 songs, but it's what drives me forward in life - I play it at work, I play it at home, I play it on the way to work, I play it on the way home. It inspires my look at the world in many different perspectives. It's so important to me!

It was both my boss Emrys Green and my former colleague Joshua Gould who introduced me to the Arts Award as an optional qualification whilst I do my apprenticeship, and naturally I saw it as an opportunity to gain a few UCAS points and add some experience to my belt.

As a result, music became the basis for my Gold. So for my Gold Event I ran a small music evening to celebrate the work of Unit Twenty Three over the past couple of years, and that was really beneficial for me because, as intended, I learnt a lot about organising an event for the first time.

For my Unit 1, I decided to learn more about playing the guitar by taking lessons (Yes, I know I took lessons and I'm a hypocrite) from director Dave Thomas, who is a talented blues musician from Norwich - I even did an interview with him. The lessons were really eye-opening as, although I'm nowhere near perfect, I learnt how to express myself through the songs I played, and I result I was able to express myself through the artwork I made…

Speaking of artwork, my art piece involved designing a cover for a demo EP, combining my art & photography skills and experiences with Dave to make an authentic cover. I used PowerPoint (I'm too poor for Photoshop) to create my cover, and got clever with it - I took a photo of a tree outside my house and used the features to make it black & white (kind of gothic) and duplicated it four times to create a surreal effect.

Now that I've done my Gold Arts Award, where do I go? Well, in the future, I'd like to keep working for a few more months, before maybe considering university. I really want to utilise what I learnt in both my apprenticeship & my Gold in other jobs as well, but what those jobs are I've yet to find out.

I like to keep things a mystery.