Finished Book Spreads

After a lot of time messing around on Photoshop I've finally brought together all my collage pieces for my inventions booklet into double page spreads. At first I just had my inventors/inventions with the text and I struggled with the placing of my element on the pages. They were just floating on their own in masses of white space and it looked boring. After advice on how I could anchor my images I quickly made backgrounds based of Bauhaus designs. This meant I now had markers for placing my images and text. I think the backgrounds really finish off my booklet and the varying shapes and angles adds more interest to every page. Here are three of my double pages which are now ready to be made into my A5 information booklet:

 

 

 

Booklet Front Cover

I've also done the front cover for my booklet which is of course made in collage. When making this cover I wanted it to look quite 'normal', as if it were a real info booklet that you would find in at an exhibition and not show that the stuff inside is nonsense. I also wanted it to look good so I really tried to find colours and textures in my growing paper collection which would best represent the building tools I wanted for the cover. I have also ended up with a title which I think adds to the look I was hoping for put makes you want to know what's inside. I've also added the MOSI logo on the back of the booklet to make it look more professional and this is the type of place my booklet would be shown.

1,2,3 Advice

Here are the three pieces of advice I've heard/found this year which have helped:

1 - "Create work that you love and try to keep a consistent style." Susan Farrington

My interview with the artist Susan Farrington helped me a lot, with both my current practise and advice on the industry I want to work in. This quote, taken from the interview, is just one of the pieces of advice which had an affect on me and will be useful not only now but in my future career. The point about developing a style in my work is something I think I'm starting to gain but obviously it will involve a lot of work. The idea of just enjoying the process of making the work and not worrying over every detail (which is something I tend to do) continues with my second piece of advice.

2 - Embrace the mistakes/imperfections created in your work. Holly Wales

During her lecture Holly Wales stated that due to her loose and fast style of working her drawings are never perfectly done. She feels that the mistakes she makes add to the piece and likes to leave them in. I have found while working in collage that by almost letting the material I'm using take the shape it does on its own helps me to create a character or a piece.
 
3 - "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." Sylvia Plath

Throughout the first year of the course I found that I was always second guessing myself and questioning the quality of all my work. While being able to self-assess your own work is important I just felt that everything I was doing wasn't good and needed reassuring. This constant worrying over my work meant that I wasn't doing enough and it was taking a long time to do as I wasn't confident in my ideas or my creative style. Now at the end of second year I think I have lost a lot of that self doubt that bothered me earlier on and although I'm still critical of my work I can see now what is good and what needs work.

Inventions



I've finally finished all six of my weird inventions for my six weird inventors and am very happy with how they've all turned out. Among then are the Bird Suit, the Hat Radio and the Electric Beauty Mask. I not very good at naming them but they look good.  They are all made in collage with details added later in ink on a few of them. I've also tried to keep the colours similar to the inventors so they will look like they belong together when I add them to the double page format of my information booklet.

 

Here is my favourite invention, the Walking Chair. 

 

 

 

I Wish I'd Done This

 

Image accessed here

 

I recently found the New York based Illustrator Hye Jin Chung in an article about her work on the It's Nice That website. I looked through her own site and loved her college/drawn pieces. This mix of materials is something which I have wanted to do for a while and seeing it done so well in her work makes me want to do it more. This piece is one of multiple made for a zine called Collectors, featuring four strange women who each collect unusual things: Plants, Planets, Water and as shown in the image above, a Mineral collector. Although I loved all the images in this zine I have chosen this single image of the mineral collector as the piece I wish I'd done. Although the style is much cleaner than the way I work at the moment I really like the blocky shapes and the simple set of colours used in the body of the woman. But then she adds texture and interest through the hair and the multi-coloured rocks balanced on the shoulders. The effects on these cut out pieces are added and made by the artist not found which is another technique I want to try out from this piece. The mix of collage and pencil drawn details adds so much to this piece and it is hard to tell where the drawing starts and the collage ends.

 

 http://hyejinchung.com/

More Inventors

In my strange inventions booklet for my personal project I need six inventors for my six inventions. I've already completed the first three and now I've just finished the last set of three. They all took a lot of time to make but I finally got them all looking how I imagined they would. I tried to vary the colours for each image and change the pose of them as well as where they will be coming from when i put them in the booklet. (This is why one is upside down.) 

Contacting Practitioners: Charlotte Farmer

After contacting the artist Charlotte Farmer she kindly agreed to answer a few questions about her work. Here are her answers:

Q- What is your process when making an image? Do you adapt your prints digitally?

 I'm an illustrator but also I show my screen prints in galleries. My illustration work starts off with drawings which I scan in and add colour using Photoshop (I usually make coloured-in shapes which are scanned rather than using the paint bucket)  - so I work in the same way as when I'm making stencils for printing. I always draw from reference once I've had the initial idea.

Q- I really love the handwritten type you make and it seems to be a very important element in many of your pieces that I've seen. Have you always used type in your work?

 I've always tried to  have nice handwriting (still gutted to not to have won the handwriting prize at junior school). It's something that's always been in my work, especially as I'm interested in the interaction between objects and/or animals.

Q- How did you go about getting your first jobs after graduation? Did you find you had to adapt your style in some way after graduation in order to attract more clients?

 

I actually got a bit lucky - I was working in a coffee shop and made some drawings for their window which were spotted by some people who I ended up making illustrations for quite a few years. I wouldn't say it's been easy though, I've had a lot of slightly dull part time jobs and it's only in the last few years that I've been doing illustration full time. I think it helps that I sell work in galleries as well as waiting for commissions.

Q- What general advice could you give to a newly graduated illustrator?

 

ERM, Get a dull part time job and make time for drawing too, so you can be safe in the knowledge that you're more than your rubbish job(!)…..if you've been printing try and find a place where you can carry on doing it/share a studio/do short courses/find people who are doing similar things to you/make a website and show it to people... The most impressive recent graduates I've met seem to be really putting themselves out there, working in galleries and pop up shops, running workshops (much more impressive than I ever was)

Images from Charlotte Farmer

Inventors

I have just about finished making the collage illustrations showing my kooky inventors and I'm really pleased with the way they've ended up looking. I've tried to make each one look different, using different coloured/textured paper, and made them in varied positions. As my original layout was a little boring with them all being in a similar pose, I am now going to have my inventors take up more of the page. Some will be interacting with the invention on the opposite page, doing something connected to it or just coming in from the side/top of the page. I hope this will make the booklet more interesting.

These are a few of the inventors. They are only in collage so far but will have details added in ink for the final booklet:

Megan Thomas Portfolio Talk

Illustrator Megan Thomas visited us this week and gave lots of great advice on starting our own portfolios. I was unsure of what I needed to include when first told to create a portfolio but after Megan's talk I feel a lot happier in starting my own. Here are a few bits of advice which I found very helpful:

• Start and finish the portfolio on your strongest pieces of work with the weakest in the middle.
• Start with a cover page - Name/logo/image/web address/other contact info etc.
• Balance images on double page spreads - by shape/size/subject/layout/project etc.
• Try to show work in context - mock up and photograph
• Try to have images all landscape or portrait, or them separated in portfolio.
• Have images fill the page, don't have to much white space
• Try to feature both coloured and black/white images - shows you are able to work in both.

We were also told to have a 'portfolio' everywhere by making use of social media to get our work seen by more people. 
I also liked having a chance to look through some of Megan's work. The style in which she works in isn't what I'm usually drawn to but I really enjoyed seeing some of her pieces.  

 

Image from Megan Thomas

Drawing at Manchester Museum

We all got the chance to visit Manchester Museum for a drawing day, taking advantage of their collections of stuffed animals and stores of insects. It ended up being quite relaxing to just be drawing something for the sake of it not for use in a project. As I usually work in collage I haven't drawn anything in detail recently and looking at the two examples of my drawing day work below, my lack of practice sort of shows!

Drawing the fur on this eagle took so long to do I ended up running out of time.