Exciting Happenings: Me and my work featured on Crushable.com!

I did this interview a couple of months back, and then my life went into overdrive with my new job that I completely forgot to actually talk about it! Which is crazy seeing as I was damn excited about it.





The really awesome Tom Rosinski, who is a writer and graphic designer at Crushable.com, contacted me saying he really liked my work and wanted to feature me! Click here for the full interview.


Crushable is a really great fashion/design/entertainment/culture online magazine, based in America, I suggest you save it as one of your bookmarks.

Woo!

Banner featured on the homepage of Red Lemon Club!

Red Lemon Club is a nice little website giving loads of good advice on Online Self Promotion for Creatives. If you're a freelancer then the site is a must to check out - some really useful hints and tips on there.

I entered a competition to get free advertising on the site for a month - it was one of those 'Retweet to win' competitions on twiiter, always good - and I actually won! So my humble little banner...

...With a link to my website is now up on the homepage for the next month!

I can be a bit jammy sometimes, me ^.^

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.

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 now have a profile over on Society6, that place where all the cool kids are at. Join me, follow me, mmm.

• I'm also on CR's Creative Handbook, although no work posted up there yet; technical hitch.

• I'm up on IdeasTap now, a new site that showcases emerging artistic talent.

• 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?

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

Awesome ways of saying hello

Well, I think it's awesome. My business cards turned up last friday, they are pretty damn cool. I used alocalprinter.com who turned them around in 5 days, and are environmentally friendly - only using FSC certified or 100% recycled stock. Naturally I went for the recycled of course, and they look ace. You can see the flecks in it as well which I love. They use Revive recycled paper, i'm super pleased with how they look. AlocalPrinter is a great printer actually, I recommend them, and it seems it's no more expensive to print on recycled paper than normal paper, and the quality is excellent.

There's way more than this, I had the massive urge to chuck them all in the air, just for the crack. Luckily, I didn't.

The design on the front of each card.


I printed them single sided, as I planned to use a stamp that I had ordered to stamp the back of each one - this was for 2 reasons, firstly it worked out cheaper and I can use the stamp again and again for future promotional materials, and secondly, it gives it that handmade quality, which is really important to me. It's going to take ages to do them all though... I'm working in short shifts lol. Stampy stamp stamp.
Each business card is then going to be put into one of these small envelopes, which I die cut with a speech bubble cutter (can you tell that 'hello' and speech bubbles are my branding thing? hehe)... except that using that cutter is so painful after a while, oh the things I do for my art....
And it means I get left with literally hundreds of these cut out speech bubbles. They look cool but not a clue what I'm going to do with them.... any ideas would be appreciated! (confetti at a wedding? maybe? who knows....)
And so the die cut hole lines up with the 'hello' on the card... isn't it lovely :) I like them a lot, and it was relatively inexpensive for the whole thing... all 500 done with envelopes and everything for about £60. Which is nice. Considering whether they need anything extra on the envelope... hmmm.

I plan to get badges and/or stickers made up, to put inside the envelopes as well for the D&AD New Blood exhibition... didn't have time to get them done for this friday though, unfortunately.

Also, I've got my promotional postcards back from the printer too, which will be there to take at my degree show. They too look cool. Hurrah! :D :D

Postcard design, More retro fun, exciting...

Firstly, good news: I found out today that my design for the Penguin award has been shortlisted! Which is so exciting. So fingers crossed for that... :D

Next, I finished my self promotional postcard design, which I'm pleased with in the end:

It went through about a hundred different versions but I finally cracked it. I think it sums up me and my style of work quite well :) Just got to finish my business card and website now.

Also, I'm getting on with my Sustainability/Don't upgrade your phone project, I finished the 6 escalator posters and am now working on the 'main' poster:
This is going to be the main element in the poster, with accompanying slogans/text. I'm really pleased with this so far though, it's the '&' logo for Together.com, with my twist on it. Retro-tastic!

So things are going well (work-wise, anyway, don't get me started on the rest of my so-called life), I had my interview at st. martins and am nervously awaiting the result. Still petrified.

New stuff, awesome happenings, etc

I've been working on my sustainability/mobile phone project a lot recently, it's really coming along. I'm doing a mini branding/advertising campaign, as if it were for the charity Together, which helps people fight climate change. A made up brief but I'm basing it around them because I like what they do. The posters I'm doing are being made as if they'll be displayed in the London Underground; 6 escalator posters that you see as you go down into the tube, giving you first exposure to the campaign and intriguing people with the imagery. A big 16 sheet poster across the tracks on the platform that ties all the visual links together and encompasses what the campaign is about, and then a tube car poster with more text on to explain exactly what the campaign is and what you can do about it. So a coherent campaign that you are exposed to as you travel on the underground.

The campaign is to encourage 16-25 year olds to consider whether they really need to upgrade their phone to the latest model, for the sake of the environment. Using the device of retro/vintage is cool, keep your old phone if it still works, etc etc.

So far I'm working on the escalator posters, these are 3 that are nearly done:




There's going to be 3 more, imagine them in a series as you go down the escalator. No thieving! :)

Other exciting stuff:

After the disappointment of not being accepted into the RCA for my masters ('twas a long shot I know), I found out yesterday that I have an interview at St Martins! Which I'm so pleased about because I really want to go there. The course looks so great. So that's exciting/tres scary.

Also, I now have a website! Well, I bought a name. www.rachelsayshello.com There's nothing on it yet. But there will be! It shall be immense. Or something. That's my May project; once I've handed in all my Uni work, I'm building that, in time for the Degree shows. I really like the address, it's going to fit well with the branding ideas I'm coming up with for myself.

I'm submitting my Penguin Design Award entry this week; I'll be posting the final image on here this weekend hopefully. It's driving me crazy though, all these minute little details that I still can't get quite right. But it's 99.9% done.

Um, I think that's it right now. Oh we had a lecture this morning by the guys at Nolan|Ross (ooo I figured out how to do the | thing!) who are a cool little multi-talented design company. They do loads of stuff, have a look. It was nice to see past students doing well for themselves, gives me hope! :)

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.

My Online Portfolio on Creativematch.co.uk

So I've now got a Student portfolio on creativematch.co.uk, which is rather nice. Exposure and all that jazz.

You can check it out here.

It's all on this blog anyway but slightly easier to manoevre around. Clap clap for me.

Apart from that, no new work to post yet. Might do IF this week though, we'll see.