Self Promotion woes and stumbling upon nice things.

Every so often I have one of these days on the internet. It's quite strange. I'll be researching something or other, an article or artist or whatever, and it'll take me on this crazy ride of following links all over the place. A minute ago I had 20 tabs open purely just because everywhere was taking me everywhere else. It's exciting. The cyber version of opening a door which leads you to another door and another one until you fall off the moon. Or something. Anyway, right now, this is entirely useful because I am currently trying to devise my Visual Identity. I capitalised that because it's such a huge thing that I feel it needs it. It's a scary thing, right? How exactly to capsulise ME in a nice little branding package. Business card, CV, Letterhead, Postcard. These are requirements for this module (of course it's a uni project, I'm glad of it, it forces me to do this.) But me being me, I also want to apply the 'rebranding' (omgzzz total like corporatementalness there) to this blog, and I want a website too. A real one. That is all www.lookhereIamisn'tmyworkwonderful.co.uk. Haha.

I've been stuck for ages, so I just thought, I'll do something, and work from there. So this is my first little idea. It's not a huge leap; ink, graph paper, hand rendered text. I want to have white space definitely because my work gets so cluttered that I need to move towards involving white space. Because I like it, and it does look better rather than 'everythingeverywhere' which is the approach for me in the past :P The font here is called 'Sketch Rothwell', and I'm not going to use it; I want to actually draw my own type (I'll probably end up tracing Gill Sans or something lol, totally obsessed with ol' Gill at the mo). But you get the point.

And yes, this isn't the best dimensions to be applied to....well any of the things I have to produce. But it's a starting point.

What I really wanted to blog about was Keri Smith. She is the author of The Guerilla Art Kit and Wreck This Journal and other lovely things as well. She's basically a pretty cool illustrator and human person. I like her, she did a nice post the other day that has gone some way to pull me out of my unmotivated/overwhelmed/ohmygod the end is nigh mentality of the past few weeks.



This is the coolest thing. I want one. Go check her out :) The other thing she has done is this PDF, of 100 ideas to do. I've just printed it out and I'm definitely going to do some, or all of them. This is my problem you see. I'm a creative person. But I never bloody create. My journal is pitiful. Keri is like, Queen of Journals. And I always say, oh I'm going to draw every day or collage once a week or whatever but inevitably I get sucked into doing Uni work, and when I'm not doing Uni work I'm enjoying my last few days of studentland and crying on people. Haha. It's not that uni stuff isn't creative, it clearly is, but it's always for a deadline, always for a purpose...always now now now do something quick before your tutor calls you a failure. Lol. And ultimately, sometimes I'd rather curl up with a film after a hard day at the Macs instead of drawing my telly or something.
Does that make me a failure to the illustration profession? Hmm.

On the subject of drawing, here's one I did of a not so happy snarly wolf:
Copyright to me, Rachel Lewis please. That goes without saying but I don't trust the mintynet *squinty eyes*
that one is straight from the scanner, levels are a bit off. Actually looking at it now, the eye is a bit weird too. Noted. It's for my book cover for The Secret History; of which I don't have a jpeg to post of what it's looking like currently. Man I need Photoshop. At least Ps Elements or something :( sigh. But as I don't believe in any form of digital piracy, and I have no money, I have to go to uni to experience that delight.

I'm off to brainstorm myself. No, really. If I'm going to Visual Identity myself then I need to know what myself constitutes, in spider-diagram form.