Week 4 Tutorial and timetabling

I had a really productive tutorial with Neil about my ideas and how to take them forward. We talked about the ideas that I thought I could expand and explore and which ones would suit me best. I explained about my previous blog post and the idea of joining the two projects together. We discussed how this could be a good possibility but I should treat the idea as two separate projects and just keep the idea that they could naturally merge and over lap - and if this did happen it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but it's not something that I should force either. As well as this I developed a schedule, one that could be adapted and changed, but would show what I wanted to achieve and a rough idea of how week by week so I had a program to stick to. Below is my two project titles and discriptions as well as my schedule (Hey you might be interested - you never know!)

Final Major Project(s)

After a tutorial with Neil in week four we came to a conclusion as to the two main concepts from my brain storms of what would be the most promising and practical ideas for me to explore for Final Major Project. The two ideas are as follows:

The Joy Of Words

-Exploring the concept of beauty and vanity through language and words such as quotes, poems and lyrics and using these pieces of literature to reflect on the practise of modern day tattooing and how tattooing and body modification relates to beauty and the way people perceive it.

Lady Ink

-          A portraiture concept looking at female characters I personally find interesting and the tattoos they have chosen to have – using this as a basis to reflect on how their tattoos relate to their character and personality as well as their normal everyday lives – What do these women have to say about themselves and their tattoos?

Rough schedule

Week 4 (now) – Research and planning – exploring how I will direct these projects in regards to subject matter. Finding inspiration, ideas and concepts to explore in relation to the project and developing a strong basis to develop from.

Week 5 (Formative Assessment) – Research and identify key aspects to develop for both projects. Identify forms and quotes (etc.) on beauty and vanity and relate them to tattoos. Explore how motives and emotions form opinions on both concepts of beauty and feelings towards tattoos. Brain storm ideas of what comes to mind from these ideas and what ideas develop for possible illustration ideas. Also identifying women with tattoos and approaching them and exploring/interviewing the women. Talking to the women about their tattoos and their personality and their opinions and how this relates to illustration and my project. Looking at what could develop from this portraiture inspired project and how it could develop.

Week 6 -Research and experimenting – Continuing research and development of ideas and concepts. Making mock ups, sketches, and observations and trying out ideas for viability and practicality.  Starting experimenting with certain medias to find methods that will work in harmony with the projects and create thoughtful and well-presented thumbnails and mock ups of different experiments, evaluating what was successful and how ideas and experiments could be improved and developed. Practical research of relevant artists, pieces of work and exhibitions as well as creating images, typography samples and miniature portraits to help identify  and define style and possible creative processes to develop.

Week 7 – Refining experiments and concepts. Using research and previous experiments to confidently identify what could look best and be the best to use. Re developing successful ideas and refining experiments that I would like to further develop into successful methods to display the subject matter for both projects successfully.

Week 8 Personally evaluating and reflecting on work so far. Record any weaknesses/areas to be improved and explore how to develop and strengthen them. Preparation for looking at possibilities for finished products and the form(s) they will take and analysis how successful they will be as pieces of work and answers to the project(s).

Week 9 Engage in developing ideas for final pieces. Exploring ideas relating to layout, focal points, typography and media. Evaluate how practical these ideas are and how well they can be developed as final pieces. Think about size, definition and detail within the images and how they will be presented.

Week 10 Define and prepare final ideas. Double check the viability and scope of the pieces – define how they will be successful and why. Start creating defined line drawings, colour concepts and typography concepts – mind boards for every image in both projects.

Week 11 Sucessfully finish confident and defined mock ups for one image in each project with mini mock ups done for any other images. Focus on consistency throughout the images for each project and strength of both projects individually.

Week 12  Create Final Images & how they will be presented

Week 13 Create Final Images & how they will be presented

Week 14 Evaluate final images and the project as a whole. Reflect on what was most successful, what could have been improved and any scope for the future. Final vlog overviewing the project as a whole and reflecting on the process.

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.