Deconstructed Book

This project was about getting a book and changing it's appearance and function into something different. It was to start off our own book making project where the final piece will be a book based on the work 'place'. Here is what my deconstructed book looked like...

Even though I didn't spend that much time on it and it could have turned out a lot better, I still quite like it. I am pleased the way that when you open the book the 'tree' comes out. I was worried it didn't look like a tree so I added a little person on a swing. Yes, he's on a swing it's not someone hanging, I don't think I'm that morbid.

Rose Wong

(Spotlight, 2012- Ink and Photoshop & Holding Closely, 2012- Pencil and Photoshop)

I came across Rose Wong when looking at the tag Illustration on Tumblr. I really like her work! The way she draws the hair on her characters above is really interesting, and the reddening of the joints on the body I find adds a sweet, innocent and rosy feel to the piece. I also like the textural background because it doesn't look pristine like most digital pieces again adding to the humble innocence of the pieces. I then looked at her deviantART and Tumblr page to find more art from her and thought these hand studies she did in graphite were really nice. I like the fact you can see the hand is hollow, a really nice detail, making it unusual and different in comparison to your average hand study drawings making them an artistic piece in itself. 

Clay Rodery

Clay Rodery is an Illustrator which I stumbled upon when looking through Tumblr. It was this piece which caught my eye and I thought it was very interesting in terms of composition and imagery. The subject was, I think, the SOPA and PIPA law enforcements in America. This artist, based in New York, would have been affected by the protests against the enforcements being made. In the picture you can see that the hands are cuffed with an ethernet cable, used to connect to the internet. Saying perhaps that the internet will imprison us. I then looked into some of their other work on clayrodery.com and saw some other pieces that interested me...

(Recession Blues, 2011- Scratchboard)

(3 Sketches of Lightnin' Hopkins- Crayon and Ink)

I really like their black and white drawings. The areas of light and dark on the shirt image I find really impressive, I wish I could draw like this and make it look good. I really like the little triptych of Lightnin' Hopkins portraits are really simple and are quick neat little sketches. 

(Dorothy and the Cyclone, 2011- Ink, Charcoal, Pastel and Digital)

'Curtains of Oz', obviously related to 'The Wizard of Oz', are a series of colourful illustration on Dorothy's Journey through the land of Oz. The picture above is when she is at home and she sees the cyclone coming. I think these are really nice and simple but hold a sinister theme throughout the pictures. This eerie feeling is emphasised by the darkness of the images as a whole. 

David Foldvari

There was a lecture with the artist David Foldvari today who came to talk about his art work and his profession as an illustrator. He was a really interesting guy and did some really interesting drawings. It really fascinates me how some people can draw faces so well and put so much character into the faces with just lines. Foldvari's portrait of Prince Phillip really demonstrates what I like about his drawings. 

A project he has been recently working on is for an interactive graphic novel called 'Dickens Dark London'. He has created a series of illustrations on Charles Dickens' travels through London at night. During the lecture he mainly showed us pictures from 'Seven Dials' which is what Covent Garden used to be called, and was one of the darkest, dirtiest places in London around that era. In his illustrations he depicts dirty chimneys, children in poverty, crowded market places and the great fog which engulfed most of London. One of my favourite images he showed us from the series was a scene where something has happened and people are shouting, screaming and the chaos is then calmed down by the police.

I mainly like it due to the different facial expressions everyone has and the general feel of the image. From the darkness surrounding the bottom of the crowd in the centre, it looks as if the people have suddenly ripped through the page and are all trying to get through at once, adding to the sudden hurried commotion of this particular scene.
After talking about his previous and ongoing projects, he gave some good advice on how he works as an artist. Throughout the talk I was trying to imagine how he came up with all these faces and facial expressions in such detail. He then explained that he references images from primary sources or from books in the library. This gave me inspiration for the book I am going to create as part of the 'Place' project as i need pictures of shocked faces and other facial expressions. I also need lots of victorian imagery which so far I have been sourcing my imagery from the internet but I may turn to the books we have at college. Another piece of useful information was to draw all the time. He then showed us a small image he created which wasn't anything like his commissions. A small illustration depicting himself playing the bass and being really small because his friends took the mickey. Quite a comical image, showing that drawings don't have to be all perfect and as detailed as what you have drawn before.

David Foldvari's Website: http://www.davidfoldvari.co.uk/Site/home.html
David Foldvari's Blog: http://davidfoldvari.blogspot.com/

Think Project

Since I went back to college (on the 9th of January) we have started a new project called the "Think Project". At the beginning we had to pick a word from a certain list which we could promote or protest against. I had no idea what to pick, so I randomly moved my finger across the word "coaster"... Possibly one of the most difficult words I could have picked but I thought that it would set me an interesting challenge. I then chose to protest against coasters because we were encouraged to do the most outrageous thing to be able to be more creative. I thought that promoting coasters would be boring because it would be the normal and easy path to go down. However, I wanted to challenge my creativity and thought of how to protest against my word/object. Without coasters, there would be stains of furniture and other surfaces around the house, so I chose to concentrate on the idea of coffee stains and rings from mugs. Thinking about how they can be artistic, add character to someone and add to the history of the object it stains. I then created a poster for my final piece...

This was my final piece. I quite like how it turned out, because I didn't use actual coffee/tea because I didn't have any at the time so I drew huge circles and painted over them in a coffee like colour, then I blew on the excess liquid to look like it had run across the surface. I then realised that I never mentioned 'coasters' anywhere within this piece, but hopefully people will get the message anyway...

Illustration: Day 4

I came in late today but apparently all we were doing was experimenting with our already created imagery. I decided that I go on photoshop (because I really like photoshop) and experiment with some digital media. I scanned my monoprints in and found pictures which I could add to them.

My first two pictures are my favourite especially the first one. I shall develop these by transforming the pictures I found off the internet into something more illustrative. For example, tracing over them with acetate and painting them or created a line drawing from the shape. Might try this next lesson.

Illustration: Day 3

(A monoprinting roller that has gotten dirty with so much paint!)

Today we learnt all about monoprinting. A subject I knew all too well from having done it previously. I enjoy monoprinting but it does become a repetitive task of putting ink on your work surface, rolling it, place paper, drawing, take off the paper and repeat. The reason I would say I enjoy it is the effects you get from the process. The images we were monoprinting had to be based on a story we had created using automatic writing for homework.

  

  

(First we experimented with just black ink, taking inverted prints and using different materials)

  

  

(Then we experimented more with coloured inks and collage with pieces cut out of our previous monoprints)

I really liked adding the colour to it. I picked red, white and yellow because I wanted to use colours associated with the rising sun. I also like the dramatic affect this has with the darker, more monotone elements such as the silhouette of the milkman (the last picture). I also really liked using collage within these pieces as it creates a clean edge contrasting with the rough texture of the monoprints. I'm beginning to really like the little character with the crown. So I decided to take some completely random pictures of him looking like a cheeky postman king (Ever heard of the rhyme "I'm the king of the castle, get down you dirty rascal"?).

    

Illustration: Day 2

Today we carried on the homework we had to do over the weekend. The homework was to create a piece of automatic writing and write a story. My story, to cut it short, was about how postmen and milkmen were secretly the kings and queens of the world. They perform their daily deliveries like a loyal dog, however, without them we would all be lost and so with this, they hold the ability to control normal civilians. It's was a strange story, but then again I thought I could get some interesting imagery off of it, so I used if for  the lesson. We were using techniques like collage, line drawings, ink splashes etc... in order to create imagery to illustrate our story.

I enjoyed created such imagery and my favourite image would be the second one from the top. I like the use of colour in which I was trying to represent a sunrise with the blowed ink. This was because I was linking it to the fact that milkmen and postmen have to get up early in the morning. I also like the variety of techniques used on that particular image such as painting and sewing onto acetate. I also used the inside of a letter to draw the postman on the left onto, this was so I could link the postman to his job of delivering letters. The general composition also looks like it's been mirrored when it hasn't and the two sides confront each other within the painting. Lots of different things are going on within the piece, however the line is simplistic and so is the image of the postman which creates a nice balance in the image.

Illustration: Day 1

Inspiration from Tom Phillips led the whole class to doing a similar exercise to make pages from a book we found/ bought to look like Tom Phillips's piece "The Humument". From these pages we created random phrases/ sentences on each page. The book I chose was a small cute book from the charity shop called "The Little Book of Solitaire". I chose it due to its minute size and interesting vintage looking card related imagery. Even though we weren't going to use imagery in these, I can't help that this is what attracted me to the book.

I think I prefer the very first one, I like the 3d boxes which are linked together with a very thin line.

Visual Communication: Day 6

After creating the speech bubbles we were then asked to select one sentence to then create an image based on the sentence. I chose "Ordinary Honorary Badger" as it was a sentence me and my friend came up with through accident and misunderstanding. We then saw it as a fun tongue-twister and so we repeated over and over finding it very comical and intelligent that we had just invented this. At first I want to use a badger, or an illustration of, to use with my sentence. However, it occurred to me that this may be too obvious and I wanted for viewers to look at my piece and the more they saw the more answers they got. I was then driven down the route of "Roadkill" and "crime scenes". Not particularly the kind of subjects which I wanted to pursue but it then lead to the idea of honouring a badger which had died an ordinary/simple death. These are some results and my final piece:

To honour a badger in death is the message I concealed within my piece, consisting of the sentence being repeated around the shape/silhouette of a dead badger. This also echoes the effect of a crime scene but also emphasises the tongue-twister as the sentence is repeated. I used photoshop for the very first image and worked into it with fine liner to create the "fury" looking outcome. I like the added fur as I feel it links well to the fact that it's an animal being portrayed.

Visual Communication: Day 5

Today we had to take sentences from our everyday lives and write them into styled lettering.  My sentences were "Ordinary Honorary Badger", "Kaleidoscope Of Terror" and "Oh No! I Spilt The Cheese" (referring to a time when my friend burnt some cheese in a pan and when it came to washing it, the cheese came off in one piece and when placed on a table looked like a splash... of cheese). Here is me experimenting with different fonts.

(I didn't have enough space to write the whole of "Kaleidoscope" so I just wrote "Kaleido")

After these we then had to make speech bubbles out of one of our sentences. I chose to make a speech bubble out

of "On no! I splashed to cheese" as I thought that it was the most peculiar sentence and I also got really good feedback on how I wrote "splashed" so I wanted to use it. I wanted to take the picture in the very kitchen where the cheese splashed and so I went to my friend James's house and took a picture of him with the speech bubble.

I thought it turned out okay. If I had been more organised I would have used the nylon string I took from college so that it could have from the ceiling. However, I had to get James to hold it for me. Looking back on the picture I might have also made the speech bubble go over his face but I still think the picture looks quite good. I enhanced the saturation of the picture to add more colour and add a more comic book feel.

Afterthought:Here is a picture of the splashed cheese...

Visual Communication: Day 4

Today was set out so that in the morning we experimented with how to use 'worksheets' (basically a piece of paper to doodle/ write ideas on). We had to start with "A Small... A Big...", filling in the gaps with our own words we had to come up with sentences. I chose "A Small Bassline, A Big Drop" because I had a dubstep track in my head that day and I thought I could be creative with the theme of music. Here is a (pretty rubbish) picture of my worksheet.

I then decided to use one of the ideas on here and develop further on photoshop...

The first image was from a magazine clipping. I really liked the layout of the text and decided to use it as inspiration for the layout of my own sentence (even though we were told to keep it within six small boxes, a box for each word). I still don't know which one to use as my final piece, but I think one of the last ones as I added a boxed composition with the lines to separate the words. I like the way the lines drip down from the top of the box, emphasising the "drop" in my sentence. Overall I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, considering we had just the morning to work on them.

In the afternoon we had a "Photoshop Workshop" in which we took a sentence from our lives and created a poster which we then learnt how to warp across advertising surfaces such as tube stations or billboards. Here are my outcomes:

 (The image which I transposed onto real life advertising boards)

(On a billboard)
(On a tube station)

(On an advertising dog, isn't he cute?)

I could have probably figured how to do these by myself if I had messed around on photoshop enough but it was a fun day and I learnt that people advertise on dogs! Which was an interesting fact, and probably now against the law for animal cruelty. If I had more time I would have put more effort in the shading of everything (although, I kind of did on the billboard as I added the shadow of the lights at the top) to make everything look more realistic.