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Welcome to rachelsays... The blog of Rachel Lewis, containing my thoughts and musings on illustration, design, fashion, music, cakey-bakey goodness, culture and things that I generally find cool. There's also a good chance my own illustration work will pop up on here.

All work on this blog is copyright to me unless I state that it isn't. Obviously. Don't do stealing, kids.

So come on in, have a look around, and leave a comment if you like what you see.

www.rachelsayshello.com
contact [at] rachelsayshello.com

Monday, November 24, 2008

Seven Deadly Sins: Envy


So after what feels like YEARS of this project, I have my first final piece. Well, it better be. I have a feeling my tutors will say to do more stuff to it. I contemplated this but I quite like the simplicity of it. If I add any extra things to it the sewing will get lost I think. I mean it's deliberately a bit vague but I still want to have the image come across quite well. Sewing is fun but this took so long. I quite like it though, and it feels good to come one step closer to getting this project done. 6 to go....

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Getting somewhere now...

Ian Dodd's lecture was really good, by the way. I am both inspired and even more scared of graduating now :P But yeah, loads of good tips for freelancing. Glad I went.

Right, so my projects are frustrating as hell these days. The magazine is going great, except I'm totally going to run out of time. I've worked out I have to do 6 double page spreads a week if I'm going to get it done. Well done Rach, totally made it easy for yourself. Here's one of the spreads I've done anyway:


As for my deadly sins project, this one's been killing me. It's been evolving so much that it's juts really stop and start, and everything I do just wasn't working. All the elements on their own were fine, but then getting them to work as a composition... everything was all wrong.

BUT.

I've been experimenting with sewing a lot more and I may have made a breakthrough. I hope. I did this, this morning and I've surprised myself. It's rather nifty I think. Touch wood.


So we're getting somewhere, finally. With 4 weeks to go. This is the part of the semester where I do this:

lhakwejhfoq4yrlkewbfljfif094fw30!!!!!!11098208!!!!!j;oiuf!!!

Hurrah.

Sunday, November 09, 2008

How exciting!

So I found out the other day that we're having a couple of guest Illustrators visit us in the next few weeks, to give talks and all that jazz. There's an Alumni exhibition going on at Uni until the 21st Nov, graduates of Illustration from Wolverhampton from the past twenty years. I went to the private view on friday, was quite impressed. It's encouraging to see so much good work come out of this place :P haha. Anyway, so two past graduates, are giving talks, Ian Dodds and Tristan Manco.

Ian Dodds is pretty impressive... I hadn't heard of him before but I'm sure I've seen his stuff. It's ace, so layered and full of texture, totally my thing, really interesting to look at and figure out how its done. It looks quite screenprinty almost, but then quite digital too.. it's just a nice balance.

















So he's giving a talk this wednesday (12th) at 2, and I'm totally going. It's actually a bit crazy that this is my 3rd year and its the first time they've had a guest lecturer in for Illustration. I love the way the department is run. But that's another story...





This one on the left here, I love this. The type and colours and detail... I could quite easily stare at it. Good stuff.

Here is Ian Dodds on theispot.com.





















Tristan Manco, now I had heard of him, because I've been coveting his book, Street Sketchbook, all summer. My favourite thing about it is that it has rounded corners. Why don't more books do that? It's so pleasing. Mmmm. I should have bought it when I saw it cheap in London. Now I am poor and can't buy an Asda sausage roll. But that's another story.

So I was pleasantly shocked when I learned he was a University of Wolverhampton graduate! I feel quite special now. Here is his blog type thing. He is giving his talk the week after next, same day, same time. He's predominantly graffiti based, which I used to be SO into during A-level. I did a whole graffiti module thing and even went out and did some illegal spraypainting myself. How risque of me. So that was when I was about 16, and I've moved on aesthetically since then, but I still love it and get really inspired by it, even if it's not my thing anymore.





























Examples from the book, nice nice.


So there we go. Hopefully it'll be a bit of inspiration to us struggling students anyway. Looking forward to it.




























In other news, I finished the first draft of my dissertation today :) Which feels really good. I think I might post it when it's written you know. Or maybe not. Could be cool though.

As for the rest of my projects, I may have made a breakthrough, process-wise, which means I can crack on and get things moving instead of all this frustration. I'll post up some more experiments and what not in the next few days.

Lastly, I've started reading the book for this year's Penguin Design Award, The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It's amazing actually, a brilliant book. I'm getting lots of ideas but man the competition is going to be tough this year. There's no choice of book either, just this one, and although its an excellent book, creating an original jacket is going to be harder than I think. I bet. I mean the current jacket isn't great, but how to not be cliche with this one... I'm going to have to be really clever. The deadline isn't til next April so I've got a while anyway :P

(plus, I've just realised, that while my new header is cool, it's also massively too big. Sigh. This is why I need photoshop on my laptop and not just at uni on 24" screens.)