Growth and Form Prints

For my second self-initiated mini print project I decided to play about with screen printing bolder shapes than usual and using different materials to block the screen. Since last term I've been dipping in and out of D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, a textbook on mathematical biology which is a surprisingly good read, I promise... Anyway there are some really interesting points of inspiration about design in nature which I picked up on and decided to make some prints relating to structure in leaves so I poached a couple from a bush on campus, sourced a piece of netting from a satsuma box, and played about with some monoprints:

I love the simple almost photographic tonal quality of these prints and decided to incorporate the monoprint method into my final screen prints.

Lino Prints

During a particularly stressful week last semester I decided to take some time out and have a go at doing some lino prints using oil based inks, just to give myself a break from thinking about projects. I loved using lino but hadn't done it for a while and wanted to see how much better an effect oil-based rather than water-based ink would give me. I didn't plan the image just cut a pattern into the lino and played about with double-printing which gave such a good effect! Definitely going to have a go with more lino stuff this semester as I love the direct simplicity of the technique.

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!

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.

Memories Project

One of my projects this year was based around the idea of memories. I started by thinking about how memories can change over time, how you can alter memories by retelling them, and how memories of the same event can differ from person to person. I then spent a while sitting about reading the old newspapers which were lying about the studio to avoid having to do any work. After a couple of days of doing absolutely nothing I panicked a bit and started cutting out and playing about with some of the pictures from the newspapers, painting over images or using masking tape to peel them back.

The picture of the boys wearing purple is actually an old school photo which was printed in a newspaper article about institutional sex abuse (pretty topical right now sadly). I started thinking about how all the boys in the photos would have had different memories of their school days, and how the physical "visual memory" or photo, with rows of smiling faces showed a completely different picture than what actually happened. 

One of my tutors suggested I tried a acetone transfer print and showed me how to use the printing press and acetone to take a print from a photocopy. I made A3 copies of some of my sketchbook pages and layered them up in the prints which I think gave a very subtle ambiguous effect which showed exactly what I was thinking about. To complete the images I peeled back a couple of black and white newspaper photos using masking tape and simply stuck them on top which I think grounded the images well.