End of Term Hand-in!

Semester is over and I'm trying to get used to the feeling of not having any work to do... The past few weeks have been a bit mad so I'm just dumping everything on my blog now and am enjoying looking back on the semester's work. Thought I'd just post some photos of my folio for the hand-in as it encapsulates most of what I've done this semester.

I worked a lot more on the layout of the folio this year and I think it looks much more professional than I've bothered with before!

Also next term I'm going to work on photographing my work better... It's difficult to do justice to stuff when it's badly lit and blurry...

Art and Science - Flat Earth Book

At the end of the Art and Science module I inexplicably decided I wanted to screenprint a 12-page, 2-colour book of evidence and bind and emboss the cover to be a part of the installation...

I trawled through a lot of old books published on the Flat Earth Society website as well as looking at Twitter for a modern perspective on the Flat Earth. I liked the idea that writing something down and printed it made it more official and with this in mind I made separations for the screenprinted book combining text and diagrams from the research I'd been doing and the handwritten quotes from Twitter. I like the idea of taking a quotation out of quotation marks making it into my own words.

I chose to use green ink for the writing as a reference to the journalistic joke about the green-ink brigade - possibly too obscure a joke but never mind.

Screenprinting the book was easier than I expected - I thought it would be a nightmare as it's double sided so had to be lined up accurately but it came out well. I wanted it to be properly bound so it looked official so I used binding cloth and used gold leaf for the title on the cover (I eventually decided against embossing as I was running out of time). It was my first time using binding cloth and gold leaf so I'm proud of the finished I achieved.

Art and Science - Flat Earth Installation

Art and Science exhibition was on Monday! Making the installation itself took a fair amount of work and took me out of my comfort zone venturing into the woodwork department. I didn't know how it would look all together until I assembled everything on the day of the exhibition and I was pleasantly surprised - while it's garish it isn't as horrendous as I'd feared which is the main thing.

The installation uses primary colours plus black and white. I decided to exclude other colours as a reference to exclusion of evidence and I actually really like the way it looks. All the elements focus on the idea of Zetetics - trusting your senses above all other evidence which ties in nicely with my visual way of thinking about things as an artist.

I also edited the conversation between David and Adam to manipulate their words and make it seem as they were in support of flat earth theory.

The installation got mixed reactions probably due to the "eye-catching" nature of it but I love the way it looks and I'm really proud of it! It was nice to work on a larger scale and I feel I definitely challenged myself producing some of the elements. All in all a good semesters work!

House of Illustration & Folio Society Competition - War Horse Final Outcomes

I just had an induction in waterless lithography which is a print process I immediately took to, and thought that the textured and tonal appearance of the prints would suit the subject matter of War Horse. I decided to experiment with the process for my final prints and am really happy with how they look.

I coloured the prints using watercolour and added in some subtle tissue collage. They're all heavily textured which I think is pretty effective.

I'm not sure how well the three illustrations complement each other but I like the way they look anyway although my tutors were concerned that they weren't that legible.

I think the binding design is more well resolved than the illustrations. In general the outcome for the project could probably have been better but in general I'm pretty happy with what I produced in the given time and think it's quite an original take on the book. I'm looking forward to trying more lithography in future!

House of Illustration & Folio Society Competition - War Horse

My final illustration brief this semester has been pretty hard work - it's for the House of Illustration and Folio Society book illustration competition which is a big deal in the illustration world. We were tasked to produce 3 illustrations and a binding for the book "War Horse" by Michael Morpurgo, which I can safely say is now my least favourite book... Although War Horse is relatively short and being a childrens' book, a pretty easy read, I still found it difficult trawling through all the text and choosing scenes to illustrate as well as deciding on a style. I started off by looking at horses and different ways to draw them.

I didn't want to go for anything too literal so I then looked at simple cut out shapes and abstraction of the figures.

I eventually chose three scenes which I thought kind of summed up the main themes of the book and also featured most of the main characters; the ploughing scene at the start; the scene where the horses are being transported to France by ship in the middle; then the no-mans' land scene towards the end.

I also decided to make the binding quite simple and graphic using the shape of an aerial view of a hay field which has been partially harvested - symbolic of Joey and Topthorn being taken away from the farm in France.

Magnolia/Manifesto Project

My second last project for Illustration was called Magnolia/Manifesto. We were each given a Dulux colour sample to explore - I got "pocketful of posies", a sort of dark pink, which isn't really a colour I'm that interested in.

Nonetheless I played about with the colour a bit looking at complementing and contrasting it as well as looking at the connotations of bright pink. I then decided to look at the name of the colour which relates to the bubonic plague.

For the next stage of the project we got paired up with second years - I was paired with a guy called James who had a nice blue colour. We were tasked to produce a manifesto relating to the two colours and the research we had been doing individually which was quite a bizarre task which we didn't know how to approach.

He had been drawing whales, so we decided to combine my drawings of rats with his whale drawings and make the manifesto a peace treaty between whales and rats...

We thought about how each animal would write and decided that rats would have very scratchy letters whereas whales would write in long flowing lines. I combined everything in a two-colour screenprint with the whale and rat forming a sort of ying yang type shape which I then stuck up in "rat" locations around the art school.