Sw.ill

Just checked out the South West Illustrators blog, its awesome to have a good nosy at what illustrators are doing in the south west!

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The Nutcracker Sets

Here is the programme from the Nuts and Crackers Performance,..spot me out!?

The Nutcracker Sets

Yesterday my sets went through two performances and it was amazing! here are some pictures,... for some of it I was sat in the rafters taking some pictures, beautiful place to sit.

Todays 2 Screen Prints!

I really enjoyed today's print session and could definitely see myself using this technique again because once drawn and copied on to the screen it was a very quick process if you wanted to produce a lot of the same thing. I especially love the speckle bits on my prints, really adds the hand printed effect to it which it what I like, I always think; if you wanted straight clean lines then print it from a computer!!

Animations

Heres just the drawing animation without the background image,...

This is an animation that I had created for my final A level piece, loaded up for a possible idea for Vicky, its created using simple sketches.

The Super Group

Some post-it notes from our presentation today in contextual studies,..we wanted to be interactive and I think that it was quite an effective medium of presenting and we all enjoyed doing it and we hope that the audience felt the same!

Ghost of a bird

These are b-e-au-tiful, by Keith Newstead, spotted at the Ghosts of gone birds exhibition in London

The Nutcracker Sets

I found an advert for the show which I'm doing the sets for, in The Advertiser. Also when I was looking I saw an advert for advertising in the Advertiser and a number provided. This would be a great opportunity to advertise and promote myself!

inspiration always come when I'm sat on the bus!

I found this picture of a while ago when I had this idea for the first ghost piece on the bus, it was on a wet day and it was all steamed up on the inside which was quite ghostly because you could kind of see things outside but they were a bit mis-shaped! So I decided to draw into the steam and it had a beautiful delicate look to it which I really wanted to create and had struggled with before!

Haunted Houses

This is my end result for the 'Haunted Houses' session with Phil last week, it took a while to get into the session, as we had started with collage which I don't really enjoy. But after giving it a good go, i started to like the outcomes that I was producing. I was washing the photos in the sink with ink then scrubbing bit off when I saw how beautiful the ink looked when it was washed down the drain and how the photo looked on top of it. So i decided that I would do a series of 3 hand edited photographs then photograph them in the sink, a place of taking dirty objects and washing them clean. I love the final outcomes that I was producing, really exciting piece of work!

ITS CHRISTMAS!

My Christmas Card collection for when I'm at a christmasy fare and I have a conversation that goes a little bit like this,...
someome whoes interested; 'Do you have a sample of your work?'
,...and I say: 'Yes!'

And this is the point which I hand over my promotional Christmas card design:

The Nutcracker Sets

I fixed my sets together today and have started painting them,...its always such an exciting time!
I can see sereval health and safety issues here,..but seemed to have corrected them at the end with a ladder,...

Thursdays Print Session,....Lino

Here's some of my prints from Thursdays session with lino, considering that before Thursday I didn't really like lino and remember the painful hours in secondary school of spending forever cutting away and getting a poor result, i really enjoyed the process and loved the image that I had created and once cut out was a very efficient way of creating the same design!

I was inspired by a few pieces of work that I saw at a Christmas exhibition at a local shop called the Art Mill on Mutley Plain. The pieces were by Arthur Homeshaw, I seen to have problems getting on to his site, so i'll try add some of his work later!

Having a mooch and I found myself,..

This year I entered a competition with some of my work for the National Trust and Devon Decorative and Fine Arts Society,.. and I've just found myself on their website! me!

Time

I was sat at my computer desk thinking about our Contextual Studies presentation, my group decided to look at time and how we perceive it, and my clock starts to whizz round,..so i had to take some pictures,..it was so weird!

Producing and Selling my work for Charity

 Just recently my sister organised a coffee morning in Milbrook to raise money for a charity that she is working for when she goes on her gap year to Madagascar in January. I decided that I would have a stall and all the money I would make would go towards her charity, so for part of my stall I decided to make some cards ranging from blank message cards to Christmas and birthday cards. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process and learnt a lot along the way, for example even basic things like pricing my items and these pricing relating the time and effort spent on them. Also having to do research on the average price of cards so that people wouldn't be put off buying them if they were too expensive or a customer buying the lot in one go if they were too cheap. Here are some examples of the cards I produced.

These are the examples of  blank cards

 Examples of Christmas Cards

 

And an example of birthday cards

The Nutcracker Sets

A good friend, Mrs Smith, a while ago commissioned me to paint the set for her local performance 'The Nutcracker'. I decided that it was important if we met face to face so I could see her reactions to my ideas and for her to also get a feel of how I felt towards the project. Meeting with her also meant that we discuss about certain dilemmas which Mrs Smith wouldn't have necessary thought about and quickly try to prevent or over come them. Taking into account the amount of work she wanted, I then returned fire with what was realisitic for me because my deadline is December 10th and obviously I made it clear that my university work came first. I tried to be assertive and instead of me completely changing her vision maybe I couldn't see them being effective I worked with my client to reach a conclusion which considered both opinions. So we constructed a priority list which consisted of':
A main set, which is a huge open mouth
A sign post and,
A flat popcorn box.
These are all simple tasks to complete but because of there size a lot of other factors come into play, for example even moving the sets from place to place was very tricky because I needed a vehicle big enough to carry them and the man power to move them because they are very heavy and awkward to carry.

 

 I have just started the main set which is this huge mouth which you can see in Matthew Bourne's The Nutcracker. I needed to consider how big I wanted the set, big enough to be impacting but not too big that I couldn't realistically work on it. Because of the size of it I needed to think about the supports it needs to withstand the weight because young dancers will be jumping about on stage so it will need to be able to stand strong throughout. To help me organize this i decided to talk to the Lights and Stage Technician to give me advise on possible fixings that the set could have to hold it steady.
I feel that this is a perfect opportunity to get some experience of client work in for my work based learning module in the year to come, I have already learnt about how vital communication is to make something work and also techniques during that communication to make something last.

London!

My visit to London! I'm extremely glad that I went to London and feel I gained an awful lot from the trip, seeing lots of incredible sights as I've only been to London once before.
I'm going to try and debrief the trip but in a condensed fashion, which I feel is going to be very hard as if I could I would probably add all my pictures!

In one of my favourite exhibition, which took us an extremely long time to find, was the Ghosts of Gone Birds, a beautiful illustrative exhibition of all the birds that are extinct. The three pictures above are of a moving bird which was in a set of four, it moves so slowly and elegantly.

This craved wooden tree was in the entrance to Camden Market, and I was completely blow away by the detail and work that had been poured into it and the millions of people the walk by without even a glance!

Some interesting photography of Camden Market and The Underground at night, I love the movement that I captured with my camera, London looked so beautiful at night!

Screen Printing Research

I found this beautiful screen print by an illustrator called Michael Hacker,
It is a gig poster for today's Isis show at Arena, Vienna. Its a five colour screen print
50x70cm, edition of 109.

The colour's used are vibrant and this combined with the pattern creates an extremely eye-catching poster.
Find it at;

http://www.michaelhacker.at/?p=11

My Paper Boy

My Paper Boy, who needs a little help standing, created from the Matthew Robins talk. Robins was extremely easy to listen to which made his work very interesting and invigorating.

'looking extremely handmade appeals to me'

Said Robins and that's why I like his work because I like to use traditional techniques.

Top Trump

My Top Trump on Tomislav Tomic

I found it hard to choose one image that explained his entire works, and felt like the catergories that were provided needed a slight adjustment. For example 'humour' I felt could be adjusted to 'amusement' for the child reading the book and combining that reading and understanding with the illustrations. How much amusement are they getting out of it, or how much amusement am I getting out of it, which would have been a higher rating that what I gave it for 'humour', which was 3.
Popularity was another hard caterogy to work with because it is quite hard to measure the popularity of an illustrator, because you may think he is popular but others may not. But as this top trump card is based mostly on opinion I felt that due to the clients he has worked for, for example the royal mail, which is seen by nearly everybody, that his work was well known.
Also this being about opinion I had to give Tomic's work a 9! I think that his work is beautiful.

Blue Moon Mountain, Top Trump Research

When thinking about my top trump research i firstTomislav Tomic started looking at surf illustrations, but then remembered that it would be perfect if I looked at my favourite childhood book, and the illustrators that went with it.
The book, Blue Moon Mountain is a beautifully illustrated book about a girl who finds a blue path that only appears every blue moon and leads up to the blue mountain where she finds mythical creatures. She meets this unicorn who flies her home.
The illustrations are beautiful and I have treasured them ever since I can remember.
The two illustrators that crafted the illustrations are Nicki Palin and Tomislav Tomic. Looking into other work by Tomislav Tomic I fell in love with his work. He uses pen and ink drawings and engravings.

Some of his clients include ;

Macmillan Children's Books
Museum of London
Oxford University Press
Puffin
Royal mail
Templar Publishing

 

MYTHICAL BEAST STAMPS

Commissioned by Royal Mail.

http://www.arenaillustration.com/Artists/imageTomislavTomic-17.html