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.

A Favour For A Friend...

Over the weekend, I had promised my best friend (and pretty much older sister) to take pictures of this pre-christmas present she created/designed/made and gave me. It's a scarf/hat with little ears on top! I love it so much and wear it all the time. Anyway, she wanted me to take some fashion pictures with me wearing it, so my boyfriend kindly offered to take pictures while I modelled the garment. I then edited the pictures, which is why I'm putting them on here.

I really like editing pictures in general because you can change the whole effect of the picture by simply adjusting the hue, saturation, contrast etc... Simple and small changes create completely different effect on the whole. On these pictures my aim was to make them look cute and dreamy, so I added a red/pink hue to most of my pictures, lowered the saturation and adjusted the contrast as needed. I also cropped some of the pictures to get better detail of the garment, but I also think it makes the picture looks better as a whole. My favourite is probably the bottom one. The light coming from the top left corner really emphasises the dreamy feel I wanted to create. If you want one of these (they are handmade by the way!) you can contact her DeviantArt account called "Cupcake Curiosities".

Visual Communication: Day 3- London

Today we were sent to go to London to go and visit the Museum of Brands and the V&A Postmodernism Exhibition. I was very exited because I hadn't been to London in quite some time and love to look at exhibitions (because I'm that cool). Another task we had to complete was make 2 different alphabets. One using letters from actual typefaces, and another with purely letter forms. I found it really hard to find the letterforms so I didn't manage to finish that one, and I didn't finish the typeface letter one either but I cheated a bit so now it is complete.

First we visited the Museum of Brands, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it, but as soon as I was inside I was so happy! The whole museum was full of old collected bottles, packaging, chocolate wrappers... All the stuff that I collect! I only keep them if they hold a memory or some sentimental value, but I wish my house was like that whole museum! Unfortunately we weren't aloud to take picture, so all we could do was draw 5 fonts we liked out of the whole museum (we could draw more, but I also wanted to see the rest of the museum).

(Drawings of typefaces from the Museum, my favourite is "Keen's", I apologise the pictures! Some I did over 2 pages because I had no space left and some are just rough sketches. I also really like "Maypole Soap" the decorative "M" and "S" I find really pretty and the text is just generally playful with it's shading and composition.)

After the museum we went to the V&A where we visited the Postmodernist exhibition. I enjoyed the exhibition so much! From reading the blurbs and from my own observation, here is my own small definition of what I think is Postmodernism:

To explain Postmodernism one has to explain Modernism. Modernism based it's style on clarity and simplicity, looking especially at modernist furniture designs by Marcel Breuer, Eileen Grey, Gerrit Rietveld and the Bauhaus. Their designs well materialistic qualities as well as being functional so the those suffering financially from the war could still afford to have luxury in their home. Faster methods of transport was also becoming apparent with technological advances in trains, boats and cars. The general population could explore places like Egypt and Africa, the world was moving fast and so was coined the term Modernism. Postmodernism however, set to break all these rules and conventions set down by modernism. It was a mix of the theatrical and theoretical, complexity and contradiction. A new freedom to design anything became apparent. Starting in the 1960's in Italy, the key centre of critical practises which laid the grounds for postmodernism. Ettore Sottsass, an Italian designer from the postmodernist period, was fascinated with ritual and pop culture and designed props for pleasure filled lifestyles, seen in his tea-pot prototypes. From the 1960s-70s there were mainly experimentation with architectural styles, collage and 'Historicism'. Names such as Charles Moore, Aldo Rossi and Gaetano Pesce worked in this field. Furniture also became a mix with old and new, a good example would be Pieter De Bruyne's Chantilly Chest from 1975, and as the years were heading towards the 80s bricolage emerged again like it did during the Dada period with modern artists taking influence from Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann. The 1980s can be described as New Wave with their use of vivid colours, exaggeration and commercial appeal. "Blade Runner" the famous 80s future based film is an example of the style and commercial appeal of this period. As well as Jean-Paul Goude (partner to Grace Jones, a famous singer from the era) designed a constructivist influenced maternity dress for the singer. On the whole Postmodernism was extremely controversial in comparison to Modernism and broke every rule about clarity and simplicity with bold and exaggerated design and imagery.

Wow, I really didn't want to write that much (but from previously studying history of art, I couldn't help it!). I hope it's informative at least. Above is what I learnt from the exhibition, which shows I quite a bit. We then went our separate ways home and I drew some innocent people on the train (you can probably tell which ones I did first, the rubbish ones, and the ones I did once I got into it, the ever-so-slightly less rubbish ones).