The holidays, and whats been happening.

Right before i get started id like to type im very sorry for not posting anything for decades, ive been in the proscess of moving and everything is all over the place. However the good news is its been the holidays! this means ive had lots of times to get on with some new projects. So im gona jump straight into it.

Edertorial illustration

Right so for the people who dont know edertorial illustration is the illustrations you see in the "tabloids" thats newspapers to you and me, and i was set a project to come up with two fianl pieces for any article i found, however these had to be done in two differnt mediums.

The first piece was all about the "mass graves of srebrencia". And the title read "mass graves of srbrenica finally reveal their fragmented secrets". This is what i came up with. The piece itself was mainly created using photoshop but the skull itself had to be hand drawn. The key words that i grabbed from the title helped me alot as we commonly ossosiate words with images i decided it was a good idea to go along that route, such as, "graves" this word made me think of death this is where the skull came from, then "fragmented" this made me think of a jigsaw piece thus i started building up the image using the words and "hey presto!" i came up with this.

There where other atempts also, because the article went on to talk about how they were going to identify the bodies through "electrophoriesis" i started to think of ways to incorperate this into my work. This is what i came up with.

As you can see ive enfisised the coulors to make the piece alot more striking and also the "wells" are blood red to add to the terror. The one thing to watch out for when working on this article was to rember that this is a real event and real people were involved in this so i must keep profesional at all times and rember my audiance.







Article 2

Now the heading for this article was "Talking cars could reduce motorway pile-ups". Most people would slap a human mouth on a car and that would be the end of it. However i though why not do it the other way around, i mean it was all there in the article "human like facial features" "the abblilty to know the road ahead" these qoutes are all in the article and this is to just name a few. It was like they had already given me the answer. But and it was a big but i had to do this peice in a differnt medium so i went straight back to my roots, this piece has collarge, paint, ink, and even a bit of photoshop just to make sure. This peice is called "Motor mouth"

The only thing is due to me moving il have to transfer universitys so i wont be at birmingham anymore instead il be transfering to Northampton and all this work will now be irrelivent, however itl all be going into my protfolio.

Well i dont know exactly when il be posting anything else up but i know it will deffinatly be when ive moved to northampton, so until then if anyone does actualy read this thing. chow.

WELCOME BACK!

Wow its been a long time since ive posted anything, and ive done alot of work since then. Anyway lets get started, ive recently added a peice into the cheltnam illustration "Tree Time Tales" project. And the general gist was you had to design an A3 illustration of anything to do with trees or tree related. Mine was about a man called eric that kept eating apple seeds and one day an apple tree grew out of him.

Another peice that ive been working on is a personal project where i had an idea that i wanted to do something to do with diamonds, anyway theres no real reasonw hy i did this but it gave me a chance to get used to using my graphics tablet a bit more.

Anyway those were the highlighted peices, here are the rest from previous projects that i havnt mentioned while ive been away.


"Shikira" Tree time tales.

"goldie locks" Drawing on life



















At the moment im currently doing a summer project where i have to illustrate two articals from any newspaper. I think i may have found my place doing edertorial illustration...

Amplifying and illuminating text final outcome!

This is another project where i was asked to take a quote and mine was "Eating is a silly thing, in order to get food into your stomach you've got to push it through your face" by Dagwood. The final is mainly hand rendered but then edited in photoshop. The aim for me was to work in my usual rough style but to still be professional in my outcome, this is why i have also created a vectorised piece, if your new to vectorising its basicly when you live trace the image and essentially take away most of the detail so the image can then be printed to any size you want and no pix elation will take place.

Appropriation!

If you are not familiar with what this word means it is basicaly when we use a technique from someone or something and then using it in your own practise, this is not copying or plaguerism but a simple way of bettering your work by learning from others. The artist that i chose was "BLU" am artist that i have always been aware of but only last year did i start to look at his work and that is when i started using appropriation to better my work by using his techniques in my own. Anyway my uni asked me too do this as a small project, and here is what ive come up with, you will notice some pencil lines where ive annotated them but just ignore them.

Another update on my skills sketchbook, and a drawing for a special someone

I know i know it was only yesterday when i last updated my skills sketchbook but hey i know you love my designs so i decided to do another ahahaha, but seriously a mans gota draw so heres another drawing that i got inspiration from when walking back home today.
I get asked this question a lot believe it or not and every time i get asked the question i think the same thing i always do, "do i really care?" its a terrible expression its like asking how you massage a cow. Anyway i hope you like it.

Now moving on to my next peice and yes i did these both in the same day : D im proud of myself too for not getting distracted, i was asked by my other half to draw her a picture and really this is just for her but i might as well get your views on it too, if your familiar with my old work at all youl think i ripped this out of an old sketchbook of mine but i really didn't i funnily enough still work in that style.
Anyway that's all for today i think, oh yh im back at uni tomorrow so i guess you wont see a lot of action on this blog but il keep you posted on things and im still working on that big piece im thinking A1, PEACE!

Skills sketchbook update!

Yes its time for another update and a chance to look at what my mind has come up with this time, now i got this idea today and got it straight down onto paper once again its nothing special but i am working on a large scale piece and by working on i mean thinking of inspiration on what it should be about. Anyway have a look at what ive come up with and if anybody reads this blog feedback would be great. PEACE!

Mustaches

Taking a page for "David shrigleys" book ive started to work in his style alot lately as i may have mentioned in other posts, but i must say with some impressive results i feel alot more confident in what i draw and ive also thrown some of my own techniques hybriding the two styles together if you like. Anyway using pen and watercolour i created this piece, and yes i did get the inspiration for this design shaving.

CALM DOWN!

Yes its another update on my skills sketchbook, lately ive been swamped with uni work so i havnt had much chance to do some designs in my own time but just before i thought id be able to have time to do one another project from uni arives, so once again im swamped and more than usual this time because ive got to create an artist book, which is kinda what my skills sketchbook is but it dosnt really relate to birmingham so i doubt il be able to use it. Anyway recently ive been looking at "David Shrigleys" work if your not familiar with it il put a link in at the bottom, but if you are youl know that his work is alot of badly drawn line drawings, but the thing that i love about it is the fact that his work is so funny, this i thought would be an amazing chance to learn something from his work so, here we have my latest piece called "Calm down".

http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=David+shrigley&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1280&bih=639   <---- David Shrigley link!

I.T.A.P Production for visual communication (THE ACTUAL LAST I.T.A.P)

Principles

• From novice to expert
• The experts

From novice to expert
You can have all of the text book knowlage in the world but you are still a novice, because to become an expert you need to have actualy done these things that you read about. Its all about the experience and getting your hands dirty as it were. Take "the diamond of sutra" this is the oldest book in the world first printed in 868AD and was printed by using silk screens and wooden blocks, as a human race we have learnt over thousands of years how to make and print books, from the 1400's where the koreans were printing with metal movable type all the way up to 1976 where IBM created the first inkjet printer. With all this experiance and getting our hands dirty we have managed to create so much.

The experts
These are people who are in no way novices because they have been doing what they do for manny years and have been through almost every process, however this does not make you finished you can never stop learning and this is whats amazing about the human race because as i have shown, from the first book being printed to the PDF version 1.7 becoming released in 2008 we are always evolving and learning. But some "experts" are "zuzana licko" who works mainly with type and has created manny of her own typefaces one of the things she has said is, "Integrating design and production, the computer has reintroduced craft as inspiration" which basically means everyone uses the computer to find their insperation and not as a tool as much as it used to be, photoshop wasn't launched till 1990, but people designed using the computer before hand, so we mustn't rely compleatly on computers. To tie in with that quote "Hubert Drafuse" once qestioned if machines would one day be better than man, and if we always use the internet as a source of inspiration he will be right.

Task
Here are a few dates that i feel were very relevant to the production in visual communication, 3500bc: summerians use cuneiform alphabet on clay tablets, 105AD: paper invented in china by Ts' ai Lun, 1400: Koreans priniting with metal movable type, 1798: papermaking machine invented by nicolas-Louise Robert, 1948: coulor scanner invented by Kodak, 1971: email invented by ray tomilinson of BBN, 1976: inkjet printing announced by IBM, 1990: adobe photoshop launched, 1992: Tim Berners-lee of CERN develops software for the world wid web (WWW), 1995: Windows 95 released.

Looking at the overlooked final.

I was asked to choose 5 words that i feel describe Birmingham and then just to pick one and create a piece about it, using type but not just any type my own typeface. After using acrylic copolymer on a sheet of perspex and stenciling out my typeface i then wanted to somehow bring light and shadow into this project, so i chose the words "only at night" because i feel that Birmingham's dark side really comes out at night and also this gave me a chance to bring my "grungy" way of working into it. So i began to set up lights and suspended my perspex from some invisible thread to make my photos look even more interesting when i took them. After a bit of editing in photoshop to make it look like id taken the photos in a subway at night my final piece was ready.

The top photo i like especialy because i made sure that the camera caught every detail of the acrylic copolymer to give the photo a lot of texture, aand the bottom photo i blurred just slightly so the image looks rough and it gives the illusion it was taken at night even more.