The Joy of Deadlines!

This week I have handed in both my Illustration Applications Module and my Book Arts Module. I found both of these modules really challenging and very difficult at times but also really enjoyed them and I think I have learnt a lot from them both!

With Illustration Applications I thought that it would be a challenge and it really was! I've never done projects that have specific guides and aims - for example to go in Reader's Digest magazine illustrations and so on. From all of the projects I learnt a lot about doing more background research and creating work for a target audience that would work well in a magazine, on a shelf ect.

With the first project I reall struggled to find my feet with it. I found it very difficult to come up with any ideas that would fit in with each subject and I then struggled to develop them. The images below are a couple of ideas that I enitially had - and even though I do quite like the images me and my tutor agreed that they didn't suit Reader's Digest magazine and were much more suited to a younger audience.

With this in mind , I felt that it would be best for me to illustrate the second option rather than keep attempting and getting stressed out over the same thing. With this breath of fresh air I felt a lot more confidence with sketches that I had drawn up. I decided I wanted to use lines and colour to work in harmony and create images that worked together even though they were totally different in content. With that in mind I created final images on Adobe Illustrator and used similar colour to keep them together.

I really liked my final images and thought that hey worked really well together and would suit really well in the magazine. The final step of putting them on to the layout and I really liked how they looked and felt they did work well.

For the Second project I really had a lot of fun experimenting with colour and silhhouettes to create a very uneasy atmosphere that suited the book that needed the jacket design - The Rocking Horse Winner.  I used cursive yet slightly bold fonts that brought a haunting feel to the cover and took a lot of inspiration from Vintage wall papers and old leather books. I recreated textures and colour using watercolour and used solid black silhouettes in various sizes with a repeating wall paper effect and strong scratchy boarders to complete the piece.

Sadly, I wasn't clever enough to get a photo/scan of my work before I handed it in - so that will have to come on a later post!

For the third project I did most of the work on paper as I deceided to stay away from the digital side of illustration and focus on doing some hand drawn work. I really struggled with idea generation but once I had sketches to work from I stuck with them and developed some ideas that I really liked. I chose to illustrate the headers for music, theatre, dance and music for the New Yorker magazine. This task did have a little twist in the challenge as they're couldn't be any colour. I felt that if I hand drew my ideas I could use fine liner pen for both lines and shading to give texture and feeling that I would normally use a lot of colour and paint with.
Sadly, as with the Second project I didn't think about scanning my work before handing it in - so these images will also be on a later post!

Project 4 - tea packaging for Waitrose
I had an awful lot of fun with this project. I focused on using colours to represent the flavours of the different teas and as the theme of the group of teas were cities I used simple line illustrations to represent different aspects of each city - for Harrogate I focused on the flowers to create a little touch of uniquness using small white flowers in certain places with a mixed purple background for the flavours and senses in the tea. For brighton I used green as it was green tea and used swirls on the bottom of the packaging for the fresh sea. With all of the designs I kept them uniformed using each little quirk in the same place and keeping the fonts the same. I also kep the same tea cup design for all of them too. I made them different usuing the colours in the background and the things like the flowers or the sea to add a small touch of the city to the packaging.
I really enjoyed using Illustrator and InDesign as I haven't had the opportunity I'd like to use them and experiment with them as much as I'd like - and with this project I got to use lots of experimenting and tools on both of the programmes.