Sketches!!

These are some of my sketches for this brief !

Reference

These are some images iv been looking at for this brief..

I got these pictures on pinterest

Ballerina's !!

After choosing to go with a dance topic for mood & memory iv gone into looking at ballet in particular, the classical music of Gustav Holst related to the brief links to ballet in the sense that its classical music that is danced to in ballet, since looking into ballet iv loved doing this brief and have loads of ideas. Iv just been doing loose sketches for the moment, i just want as many ideas and reference as possible before i refine them and produce something final ! Sketches to follow !!!

Mood & Memory

The final brief of the year is titled 'Mood & Memory', it's a really open brief, it asks for a creative response to a piece of classical music 'The Planets' by Gustav Holst (obviously avoiding the obvious). I have really struggled with this brief as to how to approach it when i can go pretty much anywhere with it!
I listened to the piece of music and did a few rough mind maps for what came to mind and what i was reminded of whilst listening to it.
Iv been illustrating (or trying to) some of these things from the mind maps but iv found that they are not working and are just all over the place, and i think thats because im just really not inspired by the things im drawing and i think i need to give my self something specific to go with and narrow the brief down to something i do find inspiring !

Iv been back through my ideas and dance was one of them, and im able to tie this in with alot of words i included in my mnd maps so thats the topic im going to go with!

I Wish Id Done That!

This is the work of my favorite illustrator at the moment, Jill Calder, i think her work is amazing and it constantly inspires me in my work, Jill Calder is an illustrator from Scotland, ahe is also a calligrapher, digital artist and lecture! Her work is a combination of traditional and digital image making methods. I love the playful style of her work and the vast amount of colour and different textures in her work, i particularly like her ink drawings, the life and character she captures in them is something i really admire about her work.

She's said in interviews she likes to people watch and draw everywhere, i think this is something i want to get out and do more of, i sometimes struggle with ideas and i think just getting out and drawing anything i see would help not only to get me out of my ideas block but also improve my drawing!

I love the use of colour in her illustrations and it inspires me to get over my fear of using colour in my own work and move away from my limited colour palettes!

Click here to see more of her work!!

Pick Me Up 2013

On friday 19th April i went to the PICK ME UP graphic arts festival at the Somerset House in London. I had a great time, there was loads of amazing work on show and it has really inspired me to really push myself more in my work.
These are some of the people that stood out most to me whilst i was there.

You Byun

Damien Florebert Cuypers

Malika Favre

Hattie Stewart

Ping Zhu

Stuart Patience

I Wish I'd Done This

 
I recently went to the Pick Me Up exhibition in London, held at Somerset House, and came across the work of Ping Zhu, she is an LA born Illustrator based in London. Her work focuses on people and animals which feature an amazing use of colour and texture. Her style of working features playful proportions and perspectives, sweeping and expressive brush strokes and lots of texture created using a dry brush technique, bringing so much life to every one of her images.

In a way her work reminds me of the work of Charley Harper, well her animal illustrations anyway, particularly in her ability to capture the spirit of the animal she is drawing without the use of un-necessary visual elements. The image above of the Chimpanzee used for an article in the New York Times is a perfect example of this.

I think using more texture in my work is something I really want to experiment with and definatly do more of i think this is one of the things my work is missing and something that would improve it. 

See more amazing illustrations from Ping Zhu here !!!!



1.2.3 Advice

Don't be a perfectionist..
This advice was given to me awhile ago and in a way it has helped me in the development of my work, I was always trying to draw everything exactly the way it should be and spent alot of time trying to make them perfect but i think doing this actually inhibited my abilities and restricted my work.
I changed my ways of working and let go and have now found a method of working that i love and have produced some of my best work because of it.

Always ask yourself why?..
On a presentation i have been doing recently, I have been constantly told to explore why? instead of how when looking at the work of other artists as well as my own work.
I think this has been a good piece of advice as it is helping me to think a bit more in depth about my own work and help me to be more critical about my method and style of working.

Don't give up, believe in yourself...
It has been a really tough year for me this past year (and a bit) I became a mum just before the start of it and was mad enough to carry on with my degree !!
I think juggling being a single mum a degree course and severe sleep deprivation has been the hardest thing I have ever done and there has been many times I have just wanted to quit and told myself I couldnt do it. When I feel like this though my dad comes along and is my voice of reason telling me not to give up and to believe in myself, I think this is what got me through the year :)

Final Work for Age UK Brief

 

These are my final images for my Age Uk brief, i decided to change the backgrounds to all three images after speaking with my tutor we decided the backgrounds werent working in the last images and i should try making up some backgrounds using different materials. I made the background from tissue paper and coffee stain and white paint, i made up a few but this is the one that worked best. I like the colour and think it works better with the colours iv used alredy in the foregrund of my images and the tissue paper gives it texture. I also made changes to the Historic Building cover, I added more of the stainglass flower into it and made them different sizes.



Historic Buildings Cover

For this cover the first idea i had was brick work in the same style as the poppies i thought of this because when i was looking at the church the brickwork looked different colours so i did a lino print as i thought this would be the best way to get the brick texture.

 

 I played around with them in Photoshop to get the pattern and size i wanted them to be.

 

 

And this was the outcome i really like it, but decided not to use this just purely because i thought its a bit predictable to use for an historic building cover.

So instead i started on a new pattern i thought of using the shape of the stainglass window on the church as a base for this pattern, so i drew a black outline of the window, and i pressed some vibrant ink colours to represent the glass, but when i tried to make it work on the cover in the same layout as the poppies it looked wrong.

 

 

 

 

So i took the same pattern and made it smaller and repeated it to make a sort of flower pattern, and used that in the layout and that worked, the only problem i have now is to make a background that will compliment both this cover and the wartime cover..

Historic Wartime Cover

The Last part of the brief is to produce a cover for two booklets one for Historic Wartime and one for Historic Buildings, it asks them to be kept fairly abstract and pattern based.
For the historic wartime cover i decided to use a pattern with poppies, in my wind in the willows work, i created flowers by pressing ink between to sheets of paper and i really liked the technique and the result it gave so i used this technique for the poppies.

I did a few tests and this was the one i decided to use to create the cover.

The covers are going to be folded to A5 so i had to take this into account when deciding how i wanted to the layout to be. I repeated the pattern and had them go from large to small and made the poppies fade out as they got smaller, At first i had it on a white background but felt it was a bit flat, so i tried it with a brush stoke background and i think that works better, but i am going to try it with a few different backgrounds.