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.

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.

Summer Project

The brief for my summer project this year was called "Library and the Book" and was about the process of visiting a library and choosing a book, with the final outcome to be an A3 poster. I started by taking some photos and doing some sketchbook work about the journey to my local library.

It was nice to do some exploring of my local area. When I got the library I had a look around and was drawn to the Urdu section because I like look of the writing. I had a look through the books and was drawn to the ones with cheap looking covers and eventually chose a trashy looking thriller. 

As it was in Urdu I couldn't understand the content so just focused on its physical qualities and appearance. The book read from back to front which was interesting. I liked the fact that it was cheaply and poorly printed and the garish, trashy graphic design.

A couple of the pages were torn and scribbled on with crayon which gave some clues about the people that had read it before. I decided to use crayon to make my final poster. I found it interesting how the image of the woman was a central part of the cover design, but I felt that she wasn't a central or well developed character, more of a sex object or motive for the other characters. For my final poster I drew a background of mountains inspired by the mountains on the cover of the book. I drew a portrait of a woman in blue referencing the author photo on the back cover, incorporated text, and finally scribbled over her face to partially obscure her. I guess the poster is kind of meant to show my frustration at the lack of convincing/important female characters.

Arte Povera - Matches

One of the first things I did this year at art school was the Arte Povera project, the object being to produce a sculpture inspired by the Arte Povera movement. I didn't especially like the brief so I basically spent two weeks messing about with matches.

Like most of my projects I wasn't happy with this at the time but now I think it's actually a pretty successful project. I wanted the outcome to be fairly subtle and I spent a lot of time just doing different experiments, trying different methods of "drawing" such as smoke on tracing paper. I also liked the forms of the burnt out matches. I presented my final piece, a suspended sculpture, as a handmade book.