Mon Anniversaire!

It’s my Birthday… I am no longer a teenager boo hoo

Winter Gothic Fashion Shoot

I haven’t blogged for nearly 2 weeks now! Crazy!

I’ve finished college for christmas now so have been doing some shopping, wrapping and snapping(photographs).

The snow has caused a lot of hassle the past couple of days but I wanted to look at it more positively; people forget it’s rare for England to get a good lot of snow so stop moaning and start enjoying! Parts of America seem to deal with it being snowy ALL year – we only get a couple of inches!

The snow looks beautiful with the blue sky we have been getting here in East Anglia so I planned a photoshoot with my sister and popped across the road to our local church and cemetery to shoot a Gothic style fashion shoot. It was bloody cold, but worth it (or so I think)!

Let me know what you think, did we capture the gothic atmosphere?

And after a hard day of posing we watched a pretty sunset

Typographic CD Design Cont…

My CD Design has really developed since the last post; I’m almost finished now!

I have mainly been working on the front and back of the fold out poster and aligning the inlay image with the CD image. This is because I have chosen to use a compass as the main image on the CD face and then match it up on the inlay tray. Hopefully the printer won’t affect the alignment, but I have a feeling it will, even after my constant measuring to get everything to match up!

The inside of the poster looked like this last time:

and then I decided I didn’t like the childish bright colours so changed it to match the rest of the minimal greyscale colours:

and THEN I decided the layout was too confusing and not organised enough so I re-arranged it all:

I realise some parts look really faint, but they look different when printed out

I based it around this picture of contours:

I looked at using a compass image for on my CDs and liked this one inparticular because it is different to normal compass images:

I put it in Illustrator and live traced it, but it didn’t come out as clean as I wanted it to so then I constructed it myself using shapes and lines:

I have tested out different colour combinations e.g. light design on dark background, dark design on light background etc and have decided that I will use a white background and then match the design colour to the 3 shades of grey that I am using for the spines of the CDs (Adante - light grey, Moderato - medium grey, Allegro – dark grey)

    

I have also used Illustrator to create some map key symbols to add to the map feeling. I have used them on the back cover to highlight the production and design credits etc and have also used them like they would be displayed on a map (randomly) on the inside of the poster. I selected them from this map key:

I looked at other map symbols but did not want to use any which suggested too much human interference as my map is more a snowy environment so won’t have a lot of  human settlement features. I chose to use the cave, hills, swamp, tower/fortress and windmill symbols.

I used these edited map symbols to add character to my poster and make it seem more map like.

Here are the final layouts for the front side of the poster, which include the front cover(bottom right), middle pages( top left and right) and back cover (bottom left) of the booklet:

CD1:

CD2:

CD3:

Close up of front cover CD1 (below):

Middle pages of booklet CD1 (below):

I’m having a bit of trouble with the alignment when printing the back cover and inlay back to back and stuff… as I discovered when I printed it out on card yesterday thinking it would be my final… it was ok there are a couple of tweaks I want to do to make them perfect though!

Here are my final designs for the back covers… which I am going to tweak and then re-print, again!

CD1:

CD3:

J’adore… Christmas By Colour

I’m trying to get into the ‘Christmas spirit’ – It seems to get harder every year now

http://www.christmasbycolour.co.uk/buy.php

These are great! Every Graphic Designer loves a bit of Pantone humour, right? 

‘A set of twelve Christmas cards based on colours submitted to our Christmas by Colour project. The cards are split into two packs with six in each pack.
Printed 4-colour litho on Trucard, the cards measure 165mm x 117mm and are blank inside. White envelopes included.
The set includes the following designs:

Pack one:
Quality Street
Sprouts
Yellow snow
Mulled wine
End of the Sellotape
Park Lane & Mayfair

Pack two:
Bank balance
Granny’s whiskers
After Eights
Bucks Fizz
Pigs in blankets
Walking in the Air’

I think my favourite is Bank Balance Red – not because I like being poor but because it makes me smile

Take A Looky At My Booky(s)

So yesterday afternoon I continued on adding to my series of books (which I still haven’t named yet! – I must get around to this soon!)

Last week I did not take pictures of anything but I can tell you that I decided to have a go at making a hardcase japanese stab bound book so I was making my hard covers!

Yesterday they were nice and dry and ready to be bound, so I pierced my holes and got on with the sewing. It’s quite an easy process but it’s hard to pull through the holes, I snapped my thread a couple of times! And Voila:

My first Japanese stab bound book! (name to be decided)

This isn’t actually my stictching though, Mr Skinner re-stitched it for me after I did it all on my own but forgot to do something which meant it wouldn’t be tied off properly… but I did stitch this one, top right hand:

A soft cover japanese stab bound book which I had started in the last post!

Here is my series so far:

And now Mr Skinner has managed to fit Bookmaking into our assessment criteria so we have been set a proper project! This is to create a book with content and using some non-bookmaking materials. So basically something unusual and interesting. I am still undecided on what to do for this, but I need to get a move on really seeing as the deadline is our last day before christmas, so the 18th!

Printmaking: Embossing with Collagraph

In our Printmaking sessions we are drawing to a close with introductiosn to the processes a.k.a we have nearly learnt the ones we will need to produce our final print (an A1 poster for the London Original Print Fair)

Today we did collagraph printing, which is basically like creating a stamp. I did my name (which Luis said was unoriginal but ohwell) in different letters from different fonts, and I like it.

I’m not sure which style it reminds me of though, any help?

Me and Sophie used the press to emboss our ’stamps’ onto card first, then experimented with a plastic coated card, newsprint, brown paper and glossy paper.

Then I varnished my ’stamp’ so that next week I can apply ink and print with it, which I am looking forward to! :)

Typographic CD Design

This is another project(like book design) which is coming to a close now, with only 2 weeks left until the deadline!

With it being our first project when we got back into the 2nd year of our course we all have struggled with this project really, as its coming to the point now where we are running around like headless chickens – we will learn, sometime in the future!

Basically, the brief is to design 3 whole CDs; front cover, back cover, booklet, CD, spines – EVEYTHING! Our tutor set us classical music because he knew that none of us were really into classical music so we could do a project that we didn’t know anything about. He gave us Chopin, Mendelssohn and Mozart to choose between and then we were off into the world of CD design… mainly focusing on the typography. I listened to works from all 3 and chose Mozart because I liked his work the best.

My mind spluttered like a car that has ran out of petrol. Eurgh. Where to start? Well, we had to avoid all the cliche images associated with classical music e.g. flowers, music notes, instruments, the composer, so that helped eliminate some ideas. I listened to some previews of the music to see what it reminded me of, if anything and I used watercolour paints to draw strokes in reflection to the music. I thought about using these with black ink line drawings over the top like work by Natalia Grosner and Baiba Ladiga.

Natalia Grosner (above)

Baiba Ladiga (above)

My watercolour efforts – not as elegant unfortuantly, I am NEW to watercolour (only the second time I have used them) I scanned these in at 500% to get good detail!

After a discussion with my tutor, who saw some of the painting work to be like contours of mountains on a map, I then changed my mind and focused on producing a more typography based design on the style of maps.

I discussed the new idea with my fellow Graphic Design student Luis, and he suggested a more subtle style using white and shades of grey instead of bright, childish colours.

This is the map that is kind of inspiration, found here.

THEN it developed further – I had a brainwave! Luis (now on the foundation course) had been a second year on the National Diploma last year and for one of his projects he had cut some letters (in helvetica of course!) from foam and covered them in white emulsion paint to get a dripping effect. I thought this would be a good way to create my mountain ranges on white paper, and then I could photograph them to get the grey shadows I wanted!

The first attempt didn’t really go how I planned, I left the paint to dry and hoped it would crack a bit – but it didn’t turn out the way I wanted. So I tried again, this time taking my pictures while the paint was wet. I got some good shots, but wasn’t totally happy with them because there was so much grey:

….so I tried again! And this time I used a bit of photoshop, I like the result:

I’ve also been working on the inside booklet, which I have decided to make a fold-out poster of a contour map. Here is the first version, but I need to sort out the font size, colour and create some kind of key so that reading the passage in order is easy to do:

Advertising: Think! Texting Campaign

Since finishing the brick advertising challenge I have been working on another advertising brief.
We have been challenged to create an advertising campaign for a charity or cause and I have chosen to try and stop texting while driving.

Did you know that texting whilst driving is 3 times more dangerous than drink driving!? A study by the RAC Foundation found that reaction times were slowed by 35% when 17-24year olds drove while reading and writing text messages.

However, it is not only young people that text and drive; many older drivers think that their experience will stop them from being distracted from the road – but it doesn’t!

I have chosen this as my campaign subject because I don’t think the problem is highlighted enough, with big campaigns about drink and drug driving only.

My ideas are based mainly around the language of texting, using shocking/harsh messages to enforce the reality of the problem.

Here is the first draft of my advert:

Click here to see it 100% (As always it is only a PNG so a bit blurry)

This is not the final image, I still want to sort out the:
- Type alignment
- Typeface (I want a more rounded font I think?)
- The exclamation mark needs to be white
- The top right image needs to be blurred to show movement

Any comments/opinions/ideas for improvements?

Creative Faces

I work at a chinese restaurant, and something has been bugging me for weeks.

One of my jobs before we open is to clean the salt, pepper and toothpick trays. I do this every Tuesday, and for a while now I have been seeing a face in the arrangement!
It was very co-incidental/odd/perfect when at the ucas fair last week, a student at Leeds College of Art and Design told me about a ‘creative faces’ competition that is running at the moment! The prize is a Digital SLR camera! How cool is that?  So, I managed to take a sneaky picture last night and have submitted it:

Who else can see the cheeky face sticking it’s tongue out at you?
(Click the picture to go to the site and check out my competition)

I had a look at the competition and the majority of entries are photos of people or animal faces, which I don’t think is very creative really… so hopefully I will be in with a chance!
You can enter upto 3 times, so I have 2 gos left… watch this post for updates on any more faces I see!

ALSO, let me know if you submit any faces!

Printmaking: The proof is in the print

Yesterday I printed my first linocut – when I say my first I mean I haven’t PRINTED before, I have linocut before and failed miserably!

I think it turned out quite nicely; I chose a bright blue ink which really stood out next to the black ink my friends used.

You will need:
- Lino thats been cut with your design
-  oil based relief printing ink
- a scraper thingy to get it out of the tin
- a glass sheet to mix your ink on
- a roller for applying the ink

Just to clarify, those aren’t my hands – they are too hairy! Neil showed us how to roll the ink on evenly before we had a go

All inked up

Ready on the press… (it stands out against black doesn’t it?)

…. printed! Woop!

And then, because I’m good, I cleaned my lino with turps!