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.

I.T.A.P Photography (last I.T.A.P lecture)

Key principles

• How can you add text to change an image
• How text can influence our emotions

In photography and image is just and image, without some text to explain what the image is portraying then we have no idea weather an apple is just an apple or if its ment to show us how the recession is harming our economy. For example such photographers such as "John Heartfield" and "Peter Kennard" it is obvious to see what there photography is ment to be showing us.































Avendons work in the american west

This was a book by"Laura wilson" one of "Richard avendons" assistants, now his work was not self explanatory and he only took black and white photos in this book. The book was about "drifters" and how he just took pictures of them, now this is all well and good but the people have no story to them, its really just a blank canvas now text could change this and give you a lot more information but he chose not to do this, and its a crying shame because in my opinion it really ruins these beautiful crisp black and white photos.




































How can text influence our emotions

Now a photo of a murder scene is just a photo if we didn't know that the picture we were looking at was a murder scene, but put a bit of text underneath the picture explaining that manny innocent people died in that very spot would make you think a lot more about that photo. Well this is exactly what one photographer did, unfortunately i canot find any photos at this moment of his work. However i can tell you about photos take from the victims of the "Cambodian killing fields" this was when there was a lot of Communism in that area and anybody who failed to comply with the raceme were taken for "correction" by this they were horribly assaulted and then killed. These photos did have text in the book where it explained all this but without the text you would have thought that they were just drifters like the photos above.