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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

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Illustration Friday: Cars

So here's my first attempt at an IF topic ^.^ I've been unusually busy this week so didn't really dedicate enough time to it as I probs should have done, but I was determined to do at least something.

It's 10:30 on thursday night, so pretty close to the deadline, but better late than never :)

My first idea was to do cute little vegetable/food cars, hence this little guy: (it's a tomato... suppose that would be obvious with colour...)Buuuut, I went to see Pirates of the Carribean today (good film *thumbs up*) and on my ticket was printed:




'Pirates of the Car'! This made me giggle at the image in my head until I thought it would actually fit this topic pretty well. Since I always draw this pirate guy anyway :) So I went home and came up with my final IF piece:

Now, they're both the same, except the background. I did the background initially, then thought it looked a bit weird... then I liked it.... now I don't. Ugh. I'm bad at decision making when it comes to my own work :P

So I've just put both up. Off to post my link. Enjoy!

Vote for my design at allmightys.com!

Yep, if you're interested at all, I have a t-shirt design up for public voting at the wonderful world of www.allmightys.com. If I win my design gets made, so this is where you come in :)

1) Go to http://allmightys.com/features/vote_designs/not_cached/index.htm

2) Look through all/some of the designs (there are 86 so i'll let you off looking at them all) And vote them 0-5 of how good you think they are.

3) The most important step - If you only look at one design, make sure it's mine!! It's about 2/3rds of the way down the voting page and looks like this:

(Yes I know it's posted down in another post, but this is the final one, waa waa)

4) If you like it, give it a nice fat 5 for me :) I'll love you lots.

5) Look around the rest of the site. There are pretty t-shirts there!

That's it. Let me know if you do vote though, even if you give it a 0 ;)




* don't you dare give it a 0.



...Right, off to finish Illustration Friday...

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Life Is Scary

Hurrah! Just submitted my design to Allmightys. Hope it gets accepted =/ Took me so long to sort out the files, geez. My laptop is supposed to be new and awesome but it's damn slow... It took 2 hours to run a defrag on it this morning, then I attempted to edit the files in Photoshop... my laptop hates Photoshop. It's so laggy, takes about 3 hours to do each step I swear.

I knew I should have bought a mac. Using Windows is like swimming in honey... you think it's all yummy and nice and then you're moving all slow and suddenly you can't breathe and oh dear you're dead. Sigh.

And it's a Vaio. One of those expensive ones. Should be awesome. But noooo.

/rant.

On a different note, I had my interview yesterday with the design company that I hoped to work for a bit in summer, I think I mentioned it earlier. That sentence had the worst structure ever. Anyway, so it was pretty scary, but I think it went OK. I'll be covering for one of the designers for a week, plus a few days either side. But, it's basically full on DTP design work. So I need to learn InDesign and Quark in about 3 weeks.

Argh.

Well basically they said if I can learn them I'll be far more useful to them, so I need to really. Problem is, even if I get a crack copy from somewhere just to play about with, as I mentioned above, my laptop will hate it. And my home computer is reeeaaally old and slow these days anyway. So I'm going back up to Wolves on friday to visit Russell, and University is still open so i'll just spend monday and tuesday going through tutorials from the internet. It shouldn't be that bad actually, I'm pretty good at picking up new software, and it's in the same family as Photoshop and Illustrator so it'll look semi familiar. Eep.

But yeah, even though the job is only for 8 days, i'll get quite a lot of money for it (which I need badly, boohoo) but even more important is the experience; it'll look great on my CV :) Yay.

Wow it's nearly 4:30. I was going to have an art day today but my stupid computer took up most of it =/ However I'm still going to have a crack at the new IF topic... it's Cars though =/ And that's the one thing that I can't draw. Hmmm. Should be fun :P

I'll post it today or tomorrow when it's done.

OH OH and the nice guys at Allmightys added me as a friend type person to their website... I even have my own little button, on the right side of their page. Which is jolly nice! Although this blog is kind of a working title... I need to make it pretty really. I got some nice comments from them too, so ta for that guys.

If my design gets accepted, EVERYONE has to vote for me. I shall make it law.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

The Robinson's adverts

Has anyone seen these? They're so cute! I just love the style :D

You can watch one here

^.^

Here's some press ads too:


Got them all from here.
Yay :)

I really want to know who did them. I think the advertising company was called BBH, but some designer or illustrator has got to have created the whole thing.

Answers on a postcard please :)

EDIT - OK I just found him ^.^ He's called Adrian Johnson and his stuff is AWESOME. I love it way too much. Look:

Hehe. His website is Www.AdrianJohnson.org.uk. Everybody go there!
Think I may even add him to my inspiration list. Get me eh.

On another note, I just heard today that I've got a 2 week paid work experience placement at a local design company. They are called impact! and I'm quite excited :) I was hoping for a whole summer placement but I suppose this is better than nothing! And I can stay on longer if I want, just won't get paid. Should be interesting though.
I have to go there next tuesday to show some of my work... but I need to choose pieces that have an editorial design slant... hmmm. Might be quite hard =/ Scary.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Scary Biscuits!

My housemate Claire had "scary biscuits" as her MSN name once, and I thought it was too cool of a statement to pass up. So I dreamt up this. It was just a silly sketch that I stuck on her door but then I got to colouring it in on photoshop... quite crudely really but it does it's job.

Anyway then I stumbled upon the 'Monsters and Mayhem' competition at Allmightys.com
and thought it would be fun to enter it. I haven't actually done so yet cos you have to make templates and thumbnails etc but I will do, cos I've only got until next thursday. If you win you get a percentage of the price of every t-shirt sold, so that's way cool. If I knew how to work illustrator properly I would've coloured it using that, you know with paths and vectors and stuff, so it was all smooth. This look s a bit like it was coloured in paint. But it wasn't, honest!

Yay. Next week I'm going to do my first Illustration Friday attempt. Go me!

More 1st Year Work...


This lot is stuff I mainly did in my second semester. I think I improved a lot this time round. Right...

This is a screenprint I did for my printmaking module... I love printmaking and I think this looks uber cool ^.^ It's meant to be punk-neon-awesomeness pop art styleee. Yeah. It's an edition of 4 and so if anyone wants to buy one, then you can... limited edition and all that. The original size is A2 ish, so quite large. As always you can click on the picture and you 'll get a larger version.


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This cute little fella on the right is a cow that's been shot in the head... badly. So he didnt die first time like they're supposed to. Basically this was a piece I did for an american story about memories people have and stuff. So I went the abstract weird route... the story was set around the cold war/nuclear threat era hence the planes and bombs, and the map of korea... I'm really pleased with this one and it didn't take me very long at all. It's basically a collage, but all the pieces were put together digitally instead of being physically stuck down. I think that's my favourite way of working - I love hand making collages but also like the freedom that you get with photoshop of resizing things and getting everything just right. Hurrah.

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The colours on this one have gone very weird... it's perfectly fine on my computer but as soon as I upload it to blogger it has this weird cyan/orange thing going on. Which is quite disheartening. So just try to imagine it with nice dark blues instead of those crazy colours ok? This was for the concept of 'Sleep', we had a small sentence to work from, just about this girl who is lying on her side in a cold room. The final piece is just watercolour and ink, layered using photoshop. It's not a great illustration but at least it fulfils the brief.
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Right then, these 6 images are my favourite of the whole year I think. If youknow the book 'Everything is Illuminated' (Author escapes me) then this is where they're from. (It also got made into a film with Elijah Wood in it. Possibly.) There is a passage in the book about a bird flying through a window at the wake of a woman's dead son. It's all very metaphorical and strange.
So I did this very surreal take on it, Tim Burton-esque style. The original images are all A3, hand inked, and they took me aaages. Like 5 hours each. Then I didn't do much digitally, just added the red curtains. The bird was a digital collage.
I am proud of me ^.^
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This last image is one of the 6 children's characters I had to create... most were poo (I am so bad at character illustration) but I quite like this one.

It's basically just shapes on photoshop. Would have done it on illustrator as I'm sure it would look even better, but... I need to learn how to use Illustrator. One of the things I need to do over summer yes.

He's rather cute though :D






Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Work done for 1st Year of Uni

So I thought I'd better post images of the work I did this year... only things that I'm really happy though. This lot is about a third of the total I produced this year.
This is an editorial illustration I produced in the first semester; actually this is the first piece of work I finished for Uni. It was for an article called 'How To Look' about how people look but don't really see things. For the first piece I did at HE level I'm quite happy with it. The hands could've been better I guess.

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These were produced for a book cover project, for the penguin book "The City". I did two versions, one for day and one for night. I'm quite pleased with it except for the fact that the buildings are supposed to spell out 'The City' but I guess it's not all that clear.









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This narrative sequence was produced for a passage from a Franz Kafka short story ( I think) called 'Passers-by'. I'm quite proud of these four as they've got a nice atmosphere about them.
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This was a CD cover I produced in the second semester, for a Friends of the Earth CD raising awareness about Climate Change. This one was really fun to do as I love making collages, and the style fit the design really well.


The pictures aren't great quality, sorry, but don't want people stealing good quality copies of my work do we :P

I have some character designs that I did, I'll post them at another time.

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