Seven Deadly Sins: Envy

So after what feels like YEARS of this project, I have my first final piece. Well, it better be. I have a feeling my tutors will say to do more stuff to it. I contemplated this but I quite like the simplicity of it. If I add any extra things to it the sewing will get lost I think. I mean it's deliberately a bit vague but I still want to have the image come across quite well. Sewing is fun but this took so long. I quite like it though, and it feels good to come one step closer to getting this project done. 6 to go....

Getting somewhere now...

Ian Dodd's lecture was really good, by the way. I am both inspired and even more scared of graduating now :P But yeah, loads of good tips for freelancing. Glad I went.

Right, so my projects are frustrating as hell these days. The magazine is going great, except I'm totally going to run out of time. I've worked out I have to do 6 double page spreads a week if I'm going to get it done. Well done Rach, totally made it easy for yourself. Here's one of the spreads I've done anyway:


As for my deadly sins project, this one's been killing me. It's been evolving so much that it's juts really stop and start, and everything I do just wasn't working. All the elements on their own were fine, but then getting them to work as a composition... everything was all wrong.

BUT.

I've been experimenting with sewing a lot more and I may have made a breakthrough. I hope. I did this, this morning and I've surprised myself. It's rather nifty I think. Touch wood.


So we're getting somewhere, finally. With 4 weeks to go. This is the part of the semester where I do this:

lhakwejhfoq4yrlkewbfljfif094fw30!!!!!!11098208!!!!!j;oiuf!!!

Hurrah.

How exciting!

So I found out the other day that we're having a couple of guest Illustrators visit us in the next few weeks, to give talks and all that jazz. There's an Alumni exhibition going on at Uni until the 21st Nov, graduates of Illustration from Wolverhampton from the past twenty years. I went to the private view on friday, was quite impressed. It's encouraging to see so much good work come out of this place :P haha. Anyway, so two past graduates, are giving talks, Ian Dodds and Tristan Manco.

Ian Dodds is pretty impressive... I hadn't heard of him before but I'm sure I've seen his stuff. It's ace, so layered and full of texture, totally my thing, really interesting to look at and figure out how its done. It looks quite screenprinty almost, but then quite digital too.. it's just a nice balance.

















So he's giving a talk this wednesday (12th) at 2, and I'm totally going. It's actually a bit crazy that this is my 3rd year and its the first time they've had a guest lecturer in for Illustration. I love the way the department is run. But that's another story...





This one on the left here, I love this. The type and colours and detail... I could quite easily stare at it. Good stuff.

Here is Ian Dodds on theispot.com.





















Tristan Manco, now I had heard of him, because I've been coveting his book, Street Sketchbook, all summer. My favourite thing about it is that it has rounded corners. Why don't more books do that? It's so pleasing. Mmmm. I should have bought it when I saw it cheap in London. Now I am poor and can't buy an Asda sausage roll. But that's another story.

So I was pleasantly shocked when I learned he was a University of Wolverhampton graduate! I feel quite special now. Here is his blog type thing. He is giving his talk the week after next, same day, same time. He's predominantly graffiti based, which I used to be SO into during A-level. I did a whole graffiti module thing and even went out and did some illegal spraypainting myself. How risque of me. So that was when I was about 16, and I've moved on aesthetically since then, but I still love it and get really inspired by it, even if it's not my thing anymore.





























Examples from the book, nice nice.


So there we go. Hopefully it'll be a bit of inspiration to us struggling students anyway. Looking forward to it.




























In other news, I finished the first draft of my dissertation today :) Which feels really good. I think I might post it when it's written you know. Or maybe not. Could be cool though.

As for the rest of my projects, I may have made a breakthrough, process-wise, which means I can crack on and get things moving instead of all this frustration. I'll post up some more experiments and what not in the next few days.

Lastly, I've started reading the book for this year's Penguin Design Award, The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It's amazing actually, a brilliant book. I'm getting lots of ideas but man the competition is going to be tough this year. There's no choice of book either, just this one, and although its an excellent book, creating an original jacket is going to be harder than I think. I bet. I mean the current jacket isn't great, but how to not be cliche with this one... I'm going to have to be really clever. The deadline isn't til next April so I've got a while anyway :P

(plus, I've just realised, that while my new header is cool, it's also massively too big. Sigh. This is why I need photoshop on my laptop and not just at uni on 24" screens.)

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.

Happy monday.

Actually, it is a fairly happy monday, I'm being tres productive. The projects are moving along nicely now... I'm having a good response about my magazine for the art school, hopefully that continues, and my portrait project is taking shape.

I've decided to focus the project around the idea of the 7 Deadly Sins; hence, 1 portrait for each sin :) And I'm going down the avenue at the moment of 'The sins of youth' i.e. I'm taking all my photographs on nights out. Which is fun, and actually harder than you think (whilst intoxicated) because it can't just be the standard Facebook photo can it. It has to be clever. To really delve into these friends of mine and our social idiosyncrasies and desires. The whole facebook thing is fairly interesting though; its kind of a commentary on current society, at least from the vanity perspective. Pride. Sin No. 7 I believe.

Anyway, so I've started drawing from the photos I've been taking. I've decided not to use any tracing at all; I really want to focus on my drawing skills. Here's a couple I've done which I think are the best so far:

So this is one of my friends... I hope he doesn't mind me drawing him whilst downing a pint of something. I'm sure he doesn't. He's a classy guy normally. And does usually own a lower body half. This only took about 15 mins actually, just a quick thing. I need to work more on tone and contrast though, brighter whites, deeper blacks, etc etc. And colour. That's this afternoon.


And this is another classy friend of mine... I'm sure we all know her dearly from her blog :) The tone is better on this one so that's cool.

There will be more after tuesday night, as this is Intended Night of Drinking a Lot.

happy monday!

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.

New things: Uni, Work, People, Places, et al.

So I'm finally back at Uni :) It was a long summer, but it's great to be back where I belong. My fresher's week lasted all of 15 nights (hardcore) and now it's time for some work. This term I have 2 projects to focus on, as well as my dissertation (eep), so it should be fairly manic and stressful. Just the way I like it. One of my projects is a 30 credit one, which means double the work, double the grade, but should be nice to have something so huge and involved to focus on.

So for that one I'm going to be doing a Portrait project... haven't ironed out the creases yet, but it's going to be all about the relationship between image and text, using lyrics to distort the perception of the people you are viewing, or to reveal something about them that they are trying to hide. That kind of thing. Quite fine-art-esque isn't it. How horrifying. But it should be ace, and very moving, and really push me forward in my development.

As a little experiment I decided to start the whole thing of with a Self Portrait. Now, no self portraits will actually exist in my project, this is just a "I think this is how it might look" type thing. And here I am, existing, drunk, and hiding from you:


How vain. It does look like me, honestly.


The other, smaller project I am undertaking is an Editorial one... but not in the standard way. I think I'm going to redesign the Art School's magazine. Right now it's horrible and dull... you can see it here. It's not exactly the kind of publication that should come out of an art school. So I'm going to make it all about the students and get loads of people involved and make it fun and creative and something that you want to have in your hands. I'm kind of taking on an art director role but that could be fun. And also a lot of work. Semi scared.

I'm going to be prolific this year. Just watch me.