The Daily Ampersand Project: Day 7 to 10

I've been massively busy (which isn't really an excuse) so haven't posted any of my ampersands! I'm about 2 weeks behind on posting and 4 days behind on actually doing them. Should finish more later.

The main trouble is scanning them in - I'm being lazy mostly because I haven't set up my scanner on my shiny super mac yet so have to use the parent's, then send the files to myself, bla di bla, lazy lazy.

So here's 4 days worth in one! Day 7 to 10.



Day 7's ampersand was 'Silom' (anybody ever used that? Bit weird innit) but it was perfect for another cut out, as you can see from the immensely bad quality of that picture there. My hand looks fat. I'm going on a hand diet. The pattern behind is day 8's ampersand, read on....

Day 8 is Monotype Corsiva, a lovely typeface that I use lovingly whenever I'm spreading love. It's ampersand is particularly nice. Looks like an R and a T, strangely. So I sort of broke my own rule here (no computers), but I just had to, I'd literally just acquired my amazing new iMac (so new I got it the first day it came out, booya!) and kind of HAD to use my spangly, wonderful, legal copy of the full CS4 suite. So out came illustrator and I made this pattern, then traced it in biro. Red biro - I know, I'm so pioneering. I want to make a huge pattern of this though. It's nice.


Aha, this elegant thing is 'Little Lord Fontleroy' (I know, right), found on trusty dafont.com, reproduced in good ol' blue ink for Day 9. With it's amazing ink smell. I don't rate all the letterforms in this font, but this ampersand is sweet as. Looks like a treble clef! (I just had to wikipedia that, couldn't for the life of me remember what the damn thing was called. This is why I never passed a single violin grade.) And so if you think about it, treble clefs look a lot like ampersands. Interesting. Wonder what their love child would look like.


See if you can guess what Day 10 was. It couldn't really not make an appearance, could it. It is, of course, Helvetica, hand stitched in pink thread. Helvetica's ampersand would destroy Arial's ampersand in a fight, if I made them fight. Arial is all unbalanced. Some would say criminally insane.

Ok I'm going to try and catch up properly in the next few days.

Now that's my TYPE of cake....

See what I did there?

I came across this amazing cake over at design*sponge (awesome blog, I recommend it strongly, lots of handmade project tips/interior design/general coolness) and have to post about it.

I have a bit of a love for typewriters - I haven't blogged about it yet but I bought an old typewriter from a charity shop and have started using it for collages etc. And most people know I have a massive love for cake, any kind of cake, yum yum.

Isn't that amazing? It was made for a 4 year anniversary party for The Regional Assembly of Text and it looks soo tasty. See the original post from design*sponge here.

Unfortunately, I've been on a diet for a few weeks because I want to look good for my graduation, so I've not been having any cakes. Or chocolate. Or much bread, either. Humph.

My graduation is tomorrow though (YAY) and I've lost 4lbs. Which is alright. I want to keep going though and lose some more. We'll see.

Anyway so my graduation is tomorrow and I'm really excited but also a bit nervous. I have a brilliant outfit though so I'll post that over the weekend :)

Pencil Power

I want to post today about a few illustrators that really inspire me, who all work with pencil predominantly. I'm a huge fan of good ol' fashioned pencil drawing in illustration, and I'm constantly trying to improve my drawing because I think it's important in this crazy digital world to still have these skills.

I've just discovered an amazing illustrator through a recent post by the guys at It's Nice That, who only goes by the name Henri.






Pretty damn awesome. It's all about Playstation.

Next is my favourite, I think I came across her a while ago in Grafik magazine, her work has inspired me so much. Esra Roise:




This one I love; there's something so personal about it. Reminds me that I need to draw the contents of my handbag soon. Actually I might just draw my handbag, it's very pretty.
Tapes! I love tapes, drawing them is somehow really exciting. These are just beautifully drawn.

Some of these are drawn from photographs, snapshot-style, which was a source of inspiration for my Seven Sins project.

Next up is Denise Van Leeuwen (what a great name!) She works with text occasionally and her images have a super-surreal feeling to them; purposefully out of proportion and quite stunning:





The colours are great as well, love that blue hair!


Sophie Henson is also great, lots of hand drawn type (which of course everyone knows I love), she draws with pen rather than pencil but her work is equally tasty:



This is great, love this image so much.

Another 'contents of your handbag' type illustration. The blue tone of this makes it extra special, I guess it reminds me of biro doodling. And is that a cassette tape I spot? ;)


I hope people get as much inspiration/tickly sensations from these illustrators as I do. Their work blows me away. Also, do you know of any awesome pencil/pen illustrators out there that I don't? I'd love to feed my visual habit.


In other news, the kind people at Creative Wolverhampton have posted about my Seven deadly sins handmade book! Which was so exciting and unexpected ^.^ That's a really good blog actually, I've been following it recently, especially if you live/study in Wolves and the surrounding areas, with news, interesting bits, things like that. Check it owwwwwt.

I'll be posting again really soon, seems I have lots of things buzzing around in my head that I want to talk about. I had a job interview yesterday and I have an interview for an Illustrator placement tomorrow... that's very exciting.

Lastly, I saw Wolverine last night. Go see it. Effects are immense, Gambit is a legend (he's always been my favourite), and well... girls, it's Wolverine. Just go watch.

Seven Deadly Sins: Finished Project

I never actually thought I would be able to finish this in time for deadline. This project has been so stressful; fun though. And even though I had to rush these a bit, I'm really pleased with them. Here we go:








I won't put the titles up; one of the ideas of the project was to create a sense of ambiguity with the sins; I know some are more obvious than others. I was looking at perception and the way text can influence an image, so I suppose it's interesting if people have their own perceptions of which Sin each image represents. My three favourites are Pride, Sloth and Envy; they definitely came out the best.

I also want to upload this image as well, it's my favourite drawing from the project. I've noticed I have actually improved over these past 12 weeks. It works quite well as a piece on it's own:


I handed in today; such an amazing feeling. Now I can have a bit of a relax over Christmas, while I start applying for my MA. Scary stuff.

I'll post my finished magazine next...

I think I have a typography fetish.

Because this took me about an hour and a half and I loved every minute of it. I just love letterforms. And all you can do with them. Mmmm. I know this is quite graphic-designy of me but sometimes I need a bit of that.


It's graph paper (recycled, don'tcha know) and letraset. That's all. Oh yes. OLD SCHOOL people.

I'm very aware I could have done this in half the time in Photoshop. But it's all about the process. Scratching those individual letters on, and all the mistakes that happily occur along the way. Ah.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, this is a quote. About lust. One of the deadly sins! Aha. I'm going to draw some sexy people in a bit, team it all up in Photoshop (can't resist forever) and see how it looks. The graph paper may be a problem. Or it could be awesome.

(This is totally going on my wall.)

Oh, and the quote is a lyric from The Sharpest Lives by My Chemical Romance. Of course.

Computers

I've had this quote going round my head for a while. Thought I'd better do something about it.


I'm not keen on the tetris style 'to'. Not that legible. The rest was fun though - It's just a type experiment before I delve into my projects. I'm not procrastinating, honest.

**I don't hate computers. I'm sitting in front of a shiny, pretty white box as I type this. I had to use it to scan it in didn't I? And overlay the microwave instructions. So to reiterate; computers are fine. Just not all the time. Do some painting, damn it.