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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

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Nonsensical Spam Project: Universal Truth

I've been getting more and more nonsensical spam now, which has given me much amusement. The latest comment I got was on This post, scroll down to read it. It literally had me LOL-ing, it's so ridiculous and yet faintly logical. This is the comment:

"The author of rachellewisillustration.blogspot.com has written an excellent article. You have made your point and there is not much to argue about. It is like the following universal truth that you can not argue with: eternal love lasts about three months Thanks for the info."
An oxymoron if I ever heard one, but quite possibly... true.

Click for larger.

So this is the illustration to accompany it. I felt the need to go slightly surreal on this one, with a sense of narrative behind it. The rabbit is actually taken from one of my photographs of New York from 2008, you can see it on this post.

It makes me feel a bit sad, and I like that.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

AOI Open Portfolios Evening

On thursday 21st Jan I went to an AOI Portfolio Evening. This was my first one I'd been to, they do them every 6 months or so, and thought it would be really great to get advice on my portfolio, now that I've graduated.

I'm an AOI member so it only cost me £11, which was a fair price really. It was held in the depths of Bethnal Green (well not that deep, a few minutes from the tube station lol..) but still a bit of a dodgy walk! Thank god for my heavy portfolio, I'd give an assailant a whack with that. Anyway, it lasted a good 3 hours, and I found it so invaluable. I met with Abby Glassfield, who works at Eastwing Illustration Agency; I decided to book with her as I know that I really want to get picked up by an agency so was good to have advice on what kind of thing they look for. I actually thought it would be individual one on one sessions, but it was actually a group thing, which I much preferred.

There were about 8 or 9 of us meeting with her, and it was really nice to see other people's work; there were people from all stages of their career, a girl like me who graduated last year, a couple of graphic design-type people who wanted to branch more into illustration, a few who already had an illustration career behind them but wante dto either change direction or get newer clients as work was drying up. So that was good, to see lots of varying styles and approaches. I always miss group crits from uni where we analyse each other's work and this felt a bit like this, it was nice to get input not only from Abby but also from the others too.

So I got some really good advice on what I should do and what to focus on, the main points I have to consider are:

  • Keep doing new work, constantly. A lot of the work in my portfolio is from Uni and I need to make sure that in a year's time, it's all fresh and new.
  • Do a lot of practice editorial work, get friends to give you articles which have had the original cut out so you're not influenced.
  • When it comes to my work, I should try not to not include so much text in all of my images; even though I love working with text, I need to make sure the images speak for themselves.
  • Do more book covers, I only have 2 in there.
  • Concentrate on including figures whenever I can.
It was great, I felt really energised to do lots of new work, so am working on things as we speak. I should have a good 2 or 3 new pieces by the end of the week!

I'm still in the process of making and sending out my self promo books, it takes me about 3 hours to make 4, I'm trying to make 4 a day to get them all done and sent out.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

YCN Student Awards 2010: Ted Baker Brief

I'm really excited about this year's YCN Student Awards Briefs. There are so many good ones! It took me a while to to decide which one to do... I almost thought of doing 2 but didn't want to make life stupidly hard for myself. Here are the ones which I found most interesting:

Action Aid

Inspire people to say Bollocks to Poverty by giving a little bit of their cash to support ActionAid’s work.

Fedrigoni

Encourage more designers to visit and use the Fedrigoni London Showroom.

Feel Good Drinks

Make us Famous / Fruit not Sugar.

Ted Baker

Devise a campaign for the launch of the Ted Baker Autumn/Winter collections, that makes use of our store windows as its primary vehicle.

The O2

Create illustrations around the iconic O2 landmark that relate to three key themes.

There are 20 briefs in total, have a look here, they're all good. I found it hard getting down to these few:
  • ActionAid I thought would be a good one, because I've done work for their Bollocks to Poverty campaign before and so have a good grasp of it.
  • Fedrigoni would be a really interesting one because you could do all sorts with paper; I would have gone down the origami/paper art route, creating a viral/ad something made entireley out of folded paper. Something.
  • Feel Good Drinks are a great little brand, not unlike in feel to Innocent, although much smaller. A good brief that I feel I could execute well, print ads, that sort of thing, and I almost chose it. Almost.
  • Ted Baker leapt out at me because the brief is to design a new store window design for this year's A/W collection, utilising digital media, not traditional advertising. So this was a bit of a winner for me - I can use my design/illustration/fashion knowledge to create a beautiful/crazy window display, and then use my brilliant marketing skills (lols) to dream up crazy digital media uses to get the word out there. Augmeted reality anyone? Oh yes. Rachel will have fun with this.
  • The 02 sounded like a good, solid, easy brief. Create a few illustrations. Could have done that. But it felt too easy... not challenging, not pushing me in new directions.
So, Ted Baker it is. Read the full brief here if you like. I think it sounds kick ass.

The general idea is to 'devise a campaign for the launch of the Ted Baker Autumn/Winter collections, that makes use of our store windows as its primary vehicle, and utilise other media – digital, ambient, etc – to bring the idea to life, but not traditional press or TV advertising.'

Immediately my mind ran away with me; live fashion shows in store, live mannequins, parties/events, interactive twitter feeds, give aways in store that gave you links to download stuff, possibilities are endless really. I love the idea of augmented reality in windows, this is something that's just starting to appear but Hugo Boss have done it brilliantly:



If you can't be arsed to watch the video all the way through (you should though), the idea is that you are given a card in the store, when you hold the card up to the screen, it does all kinds of magical things and opens up and gives you your own catwalk fahsion show. Spesh. You then take smae card into store, put it against a different camera window, it then plays blackjack and you might win a £50 real voucher to spend in store. It's the perfect way of getting people curious, excited, then get them into store, give them a gift/giveaway (£50!) and they then spend spend spend. Done.

Other examples of this kind of video technology and augmented reality without the use of iphones as a platform are:

Some hockey mask brand using it so you can see what the hockey mask looks like when it's on:

This kind of thing has infinite possibilities in the fashion world. I'm thinking, virtual changing rooms, oh I like that top but can't be bothered to wait in the queue, step in front of the camera, yeah that's a good look. Hmmmm :)

Lego using this to brilliant effect in store:

This is great from Lego's perspective because the buyer can see what the model looks like once it's been made; not always easy to tell from the picture on the box. Kids love this, I bet. I'm jealous of the kids of today. In my day, we had Playdays. On VHS.

The reason why I'm interested in this sort of technology without the use of iphones etc is because it's easier to implement in a shop window, rather than relying on people actually owning iphones, they just step up to it with the trigger which is a card given away/product box/clothing etc. There's lots of 'Real life' AR apps out there - Foursquare, TwittARound, that rely on location and what other people are posting. Not sure if that kind of thing would work here.

Themes:
So I'm set for various ideas of how to market/implement the shop window and it's interactiveness, but before this becomes more concrete, I really need to nail the theme of the window. The brief says 'Just think about how many store windows have leaves in them come September/October. We need something distinctly more interesting than this. We could even ignore the fact it’s Autumn completely. Everyone has a calendar and knows when the season’s change. So perhaps a celebration of new Ted Baker collections is more apt. Or something completely different.' And I agree. Leaves/orange/trees/weather in autumn windows and L&F are everywhere. Themes that I'm playing with at the mo are:

Future
Retro
Death (as in, the death of summer, which is the reason I hate autumn, and also links with Halloween)
Medieval/Victoriana
Circus
Casino
Tea Party (this is my fave so far... obviously... I want cupcakes in there somewhere.)

These are all very initial, just visual themes that I love and fit in well with Ted Baker's humour/sense of british/fun/irreverent feel it's got going on. I'm doing lots of visual research on crazy window displays and images of these themes in general, here is a tiny selection of my random brain:








I have an obsession with Union Jack cushions. No really. Maybe that'll feature.

So these are all my initial thoughts, and I'm feeling really positive about it. I've even bought myself a new sketchbook/notebook for this, so I make sure I keep my thoughts organised. Feels just like being back at uni, this is how I used to approach my uni projects. Good times.

I will update when I find anything interesting and relevant to the project; not sure how much of my idea I'm going to post when I've decided on it - I'm aware this is a competition and don't want my ideas to be used by other people before I've entered myself! Such is the woes of t'internet.

Wish me luck! Deadline is March 26th!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Spreadin' myself around....

....Like the common illustration lady of the night that I am.

Just thought I'd better update with what I've been doing with myself in the past week or so since becoming unceremoniously unemployed. Aside from crying.

Jokes.

I've been on a massive self promotional push, basically.




  • I have just sent out 60+ self promotional postcards to Art Directors who I think would like my work. I wanted to send more but oh em gee stamps are expensive these days! 60 2nd class = £18. Now that's not a lot but I have many grand schemes in my head for cool self promotional mail outs (including badges woo) and I so don't have the budget yet. So I'm starting small and targeted, hoping I get a few nice clients who will give this talented graduate a break (heh) and then I can build my empire from there.

  • I've also been compiling a list of awesome design studios who might want to hear from me, looking for someone for a placement/tea maker. That could be me. The list is one thing, it's writing emails/sending cool stuff to them that will take time, I'm not the kind to do a generic 'dear sir' email, that's lame and never got anyone anywhere.

  • The piece-de-resistance is my super cool Mini Portfolio that I am going to churn out like a factory queen and send your way. That's more art directors (who I think need the extra effort to be impressed), and illustration agencies too. I would love to be represented by an agency and this is the way forward. Also any super cool studios might get one. Bear in mind they take an hour to make each. I'm spending all this evening doing some. They're cute though.
See.

  • Applying to any placements in London that I know I'd be good at and applying lots. Even the unpaid ones (Boo). I have a thing against unpaid placements; I think it devalues the work and it's a joke that graduates have to work for free to be taken seriously in this industry. You either do the free placement or get nowhere. Sigh. But as I'm close to London right now and can sort of semi afford kind of to work for free a bit, I should do it. Because someone else will. And they'll get the awesome job.
Depressing news:

I didn't get the amazing placement at AMV.BBDO. This was upsetting. It was a 3 month, 3 day a week, paid placement, working in the Art Production Dept, helping out on all manner of daily tasks and sampling the life of a busy advertising agency. Basically my ideal job; I would have loved to have got it, and I would have gotten so much out of it. Anyway, turns out they're not taking anyone on! So at least it wasn't a rejection because I was rubbish. So there. Tres upsetting :( On the look out for more things.

There's a job going in Peacock's in Leighton Buzzard. Where I live. I really should apply. It's upsetting to work in retail when I've got so much potential but needs must. I can't be all high and mighty about it, I have to suck it up and do it because no one else is paying me right now.

A little help?

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Nonsensical Spam Project: Let's take our chance together...

One of the very first nonsensical spam comments I got was this one. 'Let's take our chance together to get rid of nastiness of the life'. Strangely sad, I thought. Sort of lonely. So here's the illustration I came up with to accompany it. It made me think of one side of a conversation, like you hear when people are on the phone. The grammatical error just made it all the more sad, kind of childlike actually. I almost went on a more naive style for this, but I'm really happy how this came out. Haven't done anything collagey/scribbly like this since my Seven Sins project.

It feels great to have some new work done. Soo great. Photoshop, how I have missed thee.

Still thinking of a better project title =/ Read about the beginnings of the project here.

Green Eggs and Spam

I've been getting a ton of spam comments to my blog for a while now:

As you can see, it's mainly in Chinese. Which is annoying. Well, spam is just annoying in general. And, strangely, it never used to be like this. I never used to get any spam comments. (I never used to get any comments at all...) but all of a sudden, a few certain posts are getting attacked by this randomness. Sigh. Good job I approve all my comments first though =/

However, some comments are not so unintelligible. Sometimes I get an actual sentence, either string together by somebody in a foreign country using an internet translator so it comes across as near nonsense, or by some crazy spam bot, I don't know. But I love them! Really strange, prophetic almost, phrases that seem to mean nothing and yet kind of fascinate me. I'm not entirely sure why, they're just crap really, but it gets a chuckle out of me.

And then I had a little inspiration moment and thought, I could make some great illustrations from these. So this is my new project.

I've got about 5 comments sitting there that could be vaguely useful, so I'm starting there. After I've done an illustration for each one, I'll just wait until I get another good bit of spam, and so on. So there'll be no schedule to this project; if and when I get a good nonsensical sentence, I'll do a new image. Should be interesting, if nothing else :)

I'm working on the first one right now. Still need a good title for the project though, can't just call it 'Spam Project'. Hmmm. I'll get back to you on that.

I'm definitely not the first person to do something like this, other awesome spam related projects out there are:



I'll probably come across a few more on my travels. Nice stuff :)

Monday, January 11, 2010

How to: Make a Self Promotional Mini Portfolio

There have been various options going round my head of how best to make this sort of thing. I really enjoy bookbinding, even though I've never actually been taught properly how to do it; it wasn't a part of my Uni course at all. But, like most things, that never stopped me. I made all my own sketchbooks in the last 2 years of my course, nothing fancy, just binding them myself when I was all done. Then, for my Seven Sins project, I made a handmade book as the outcome, of which you can see here. I followed a tutorial in Computer Arts, which you can download the PDF of here. It was definitely a trial and error thing, and a labour of love. Came out well but much too time consuming to make 20, or 50 of. Which is about how many I need, to promote myself effectively.

So after a bit of internetting, I decided upon a Concertina book. Seemed the easiest to make and the easiest to alter the contents of, from book to book; this means that I can slightly tailor the insides according to who I'm sending it to and what sort of illustration they commission. Aha.

You can buy books that teach you how to make handmade books, the simplest one I found was Handmade Books: Binding, Folding and Decorating by Heather Weston. Cheap, too. I probably will buy it at some point (I wonder if you can get it at the library..) but as I'm trying to spend as little money as possible here, I just found a tutorial off the internet and made it up as I went along.


Here's how I did it.

1. Learn how a concertina book works.
The websites that I found seemed to make it sound harder than it is. Basically, you need lots of sheets of paper, the same size, folded to make a small flap on each side to glue to the next piece, and so on, until you get one long massive piece of paper that folds together. You then need some hard board, slightly bigger than the area of the paper, to stick to each end, and end papers if you want. That's about it. You can get complicated with spines and all that, but I'm doing simples.

Taken from this website - follow it if you wish, it's not so simples.

I decided that I wanted my book to be A5, landscape - A5 is a good size for a mini portfolio, and I chose landscape because a lot of my work is landcsape; just fits the pages better.

I did a lot of experimenting with scrap paper to figure out how to fold the flaps and where they had to be:


Before I decided to go landscape.It's a lot easier to do this because you can figure out what side the flaps have to be in relation to which side of the paper is getting printed on.

So I decided that the easiest thing for this was to set up an A4 portrait sheet, with the flap folds on the right hand side, of 7mm. Then I could slice each sheet in half once printed to make my A5 landscape ones, and glue together.


2. Set up a document in Indesign/Illustrator to work from.

This is probably the most important step, so spend lots of time getting it right. I used InDesign for this as you can set up the Master pages then just add content from there, but I guess you can also use Illustrator just as easily, with separate layers for each page. Whatevs.

If you click on that image up there you'll be able to see what I did a bit more clearly. Use whatever system you find easiest; this is just one that I understand and know works. Again, experiment with it, print out some test sheets, find out if it all works ok.
Gridlines and margins obviously don't print, so I added tiny dotted lines so I knew where to fold, and where to cut, once it was printed. Image above is without margins etc. Nice.
Experiment with colours and fonts at this stage too. Before you print out 20. Just a heads up.

Once you have the format perfect, save it, and keep it forever - you can change images, add or take away pages etc, but your rules and spacing will always keep it pretty.

3. Start adding content.
This is the fun part.

Add your images and descriptive text, fiddle about with alignment, size, etc. I added a few more rules for myself at this stage, like where to align the text to, etc. It all ends up quite organic though, if you want to ignore your lovely grid, then do. It's what looks best, after all.
Choosing fonts is important - I went with 2, which could even be too many, one more decorative for my website title and one for the descriptive text. I decided a sans serif font was less conspicuous, as a lot of my work already has type in it and I wanted to be as discreet as possible. So Gill Sans saved the day.

4. Print out your pages and start folding.
Start off with printing enough for just one book first, ok. You just don't know if something's gone tits up and you have to reconfigure your creation. Once you've made one from start to finish perfectly, then you can get into assembly line mode and make as many as you need.
So here are all my lovely pages. I figured out while doing this that when assembling single pages like this, your first page's flap needs folding up, the second one needs folding down, and so on. The flap sticks to the underside of the next page, so you'll see why.
Eventually they were all stuck together in a several foot long book of joy. I just used pritt stick (other types of glue stick are available) but a more permanent choice would be double sided tape.

Next I added coloured end pages to each end - just so the hard board has something interesting to stick to. I chose blue because... I like blue.


What the book looks like as you turn each page over.

The front page, with the blue end papers. My hand looks strangely tanned. It's not. I'm as white as a sheet =/
The back, which I'm going to add something to; more later.

It's already pretty lovely, but won't withstand any kind of manual handling.

5. Make it sturdy.
You need some kind of hard board or mounting board for this. These days you can get mounting board in all kinds of colours, which would be a fine choice. I however, wanted to go for the more rustic, grey board look, for reasons you shall find out.

Cut your board so that it's about 1cm larger than your paper on every side. This means that it's all protected inside and has an attractive overhang.

Don't stick the hard board to it yet - we need to decorate it.

This is the back of my portfolio. Before sticking the end paper down, I made 4 slits to hold one of my postcards. This is just so that the recipient has something to stick on their desk/wall too - the dangers of a mini book like this is they get looked at, then put in a drawer. Postcards are more likely to be left in a place where they'll get looked at.

6. Design your cover.
You can do this anyway you like. Draw on it, screenprint it, stamp it. I'm banning glitter though. No no.
What I have decided is to use tracing paper as an overlay onto the card. That way, you can still see the natural colour of the board, but with a layer of plastic-ness. It's a nice juxtaposition, and you can print straight on to tracing paper, if you've got an inkjet printer.

I designed a simple pattern for the front, and decided to just go with my name. I could have done 'Rachel Lewis, Illustrator' or 'portfolio' or something, but I think you need something striking and uncomplicated. This fits in with the rest of my identity (speech bubble, colours).
Cut the corners of the tracing paper and fold round the back of the board - stick down. Don't stick the front, just the underside - that way there's a slight separation from the board and the tracing paper, which I think gives a nice feel.

7. Attach the hard board to the book.
Stick your end papers to the board with something better than glue stick - double sided tape is best, or industrial strength glue. Don't glue your hand to your face.

8. Admire your handiwork.



The one thing to remember about a concertina book is that it will all just fall out into one big line if you're not careful. You can fold it like a book but if you drop one end it'll just concertina out. Of course. So you might decide to seal the pages together, if you feel that's an issue. Make sure you include all your contact details somewhere in or on the book - in my case, I used my business card stamp to stamp the reverse. I'm also going to experiment with paper luggage tags too, as a 'to and from' thing.

9. Make as many as you need and send the bad boys out to prospective clients.
This particular one was made to leave behind at a recent interview I had, at AMV.BBDO. I'm buying more hard board tomorrow and spending this week making ones to send out. Having spare ones at hand to take to interviews/portfolio meetings is a good idea I think. And remember what I said, you can customise each book with different examples of your work in relation to who you are sending it to.

Good luck! And if you make this, please leave a comment telling me how you went with it! :D

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Oh, it seems to be 2010. How did that happen?

Hello there! It has been a while, almost exactly a month since my last post. This is of course because something called Christmas happened, which we all know is the best time of year, except if you work in retail, then it is the worst. So I literally stopped internetting for about 3 weeks - didn't even check my email or nuffin. The hours that I wasn't spending at work I was doing christmassy/relaxy things with family, and it actually felt great to completely unplug. It also meant that I did almost nothing creative, except wrap some presents rather beautifully, but honestly, I feel no guilt. Christmas was hard. I got 6 days off over the whole xmas/new year period, which is a lot less than most of you, I bet. This is the problem you see, if I was still a student I'd get 2 or 3 weeks off, and if I had a decent job I'd get about 2 off as well. But, as a recent graduate and bottom of the pile, I had to sell sell sell to you consumer people. Ah.

So as a result of this, here are some facts:

I have 500+ unread emails in my hotmail, all of which are newsletters of some sort. Ugh.
I have 1000+ unread items in my RSS reader. Yep. Clearly I was the only one who stopped blogging over christmas. You crazies.
I had about 35 comments waiting for approval on this blog, 34 of which were spam. Which I don't mind because a few of them were hilarious. Most are just in chinese which means nothing to me, but some seem to be written by spam bots who string several unrelated words together to form nonsensical sentences. Which, me being me, I find fascinating and am going to make a new illustration project from because they are great :D
I have 0 job offers. (unsurprisingly, lols.)
I have about 7 new twitter followers, how I don't know because I stopped tweeting for a while too.
I have a brand new shiny digital camera (its pink!!) which I got from father christmas so I can post even more amazing pictures. Ah. Did I tell you its pink?

So, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, let's get this show back on the road.

Oh, yes. My job wasn't extended past christmas temp. The most gutting thing ever. So last day was yesterday. So I'm FRIGGIN UNEMPLOYED AGAIN. However, I'm still waiting to hear back about an interview I had at none other than AMV.BBDO before christmas so mega fingers crossed for me. More on that later.

So I'm spending my new found free time so promote myself to commissioners and get some illustration jobs, hopefully. Again, more on how I'm going to do this in the next post, which is tomorrow. I'm literally going to do the 9-5 thing at my mac up here in my loft and work my ass off to become rich and famous.

2010 = Rachel gets awesome jobs, moves out, finds some sort of boy-type. Trust me.