"Almost an Island"

Hot on the heels of the Illustration and Digital Arts MA exhibitions is the latest student-curated show, being handled by MA Printmaking. Taking a slightly different stance from the previous shows, the starting point for this exhibition is the poem, The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud, with each participant choosing a different stanza from the poem to use as the basis for their work.

The piece I selected goes as follows:

I should have liked to show to children those dolphins

Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.

–Foam of flowers rocked my driftings

And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.

My intial sketches and my main idea focused on the imagery within the poem of dolphins, waves, flowers and wings:

Having worked further from my sketches and developed the final drawings which I hand-coloured using felt tip pens and then scanned and composed the final image in Photoshop, I decided that I wanted to incorporate the text within my final piece. But rather than just adding the text using the computer, I decided to set the type by hand and print it using letterpress, then scan the finished result and add it to my final image (...I am Johannes Gutenberg).

F is for...

After drawing my letter for the C is for Camberwell project that our MA group has been working on, I was thinking about continuing with my own illustrated alphabet as part of my Project Proposal. As luck would have it, this week's Creative Project subject was: "F is for...", and so I was able to kill two birds with one stone*...

F is for:

Fox

Full moon

Fence

Frying pan

Furious

F**k!

Giving the Finger

Frankenstein

Fancy dress

Flying

Fire

French bread

Fosters

Frozen

Fruit

Fungi

Fencing

Fork

Facebook

Flowers

Field

More letters to follow...

*No birds were actually stoned during the course of this post

Super MAssive Blog Update part 2: MA Illustration

So, I'm doing an MA in Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, which is a lot of fun. Here's some of the work I've done so far as part of my course:

Alphabet letter:

We've started a group project among everyone on my course, where we each take a letter of the alphabet and illustrate it in whatever style we wanted. I signed up to do K, and after making up a list of words beginning with K, I decided to use Koalas as my main theme, and draw a load of koalas doing things beginning with K...

For the record, the list of things beginning with K is:

• koala
• karate
• kimono
• kite-flying
• karaoke
• kipping
• Special K (okay, maybe a bit of a cheat, but it was a good image...), and
• Kiss (as in the make-up clad rock band)
• I also used a kitchen for the background setting, and also drew koala'sknitting and knife-throwing, but they wouldn't fit into the final composition...

I scanned all the individual images, and then coloured them in Photoshop and arranged the final composition. I enjoyed doing this, and might actually create an entire alphabet as one of my side-projects during the course... watch this space!

Website:

I took a series of Dreamweaver courses to learn how to create my own website using tables. I really enjoyed it, so much so that I've now gone into full-geek mode and am learning how to create my site using html and css. Here are some screen grabs of how my site is currently looking, before I've carried out the coding, but it's close to how I want it to look. As soon as I'm done learning html, I'll be buying a domain and putting it live, until then have a look at this:

My home page - I created the lettering by hand...

About me - I made a cartoon of myself to introduce myself. (when you're in a section, the text becomes black)

Sample gallery page - the images all fall from a set drop point, and the arrows at the top enable you to move forward and back...

Contacts page – I created three illustrations for my postal address, mobile number and email address.

Drawing A Lecture:

This week's exhibition is being curated by Digital Arts, and the subject is "Drawing A Lecture. I decided to scan all of my extremely extensive (ahem) notes from our Wednesday morning lectures, and then create a collage of sorts in Photoshop, adding drop-shadows to layer the individual pages, like so...

Lucky that I often use different coloured pens when making "notes", and also that I pay such close attention to what is being said... (ahem!)

I'll be attempting to keep this blog updated more regularly from now on, so stayed tuned for updates... probably...

Super Massive Blog Update part 1: Creative Project

Okay, so we had a talk this morning about blogs, which got me thinking, "I should really update my blog!", so here we are...

I've got stuff I've been doing for my MA course which I'll post in a moment, but first I thought I'd stick up my entries for Creative Project. For anyone that doesn't know, Creative Project is a Facebook Group set up by my friend Cathy Sison, where every 2 weeks, she posts a new subject with the aim being for everyone to post their own creative responses. It's good for giving my creativity an (often much needed) adrenaline boost, as well as producing some new work for my portfolio. 

Ghosts:

For this one, I decided to draw the Ghosts of Rock: Cobain, Morrison, and Hendrix (who all died at the age of 27!). I drew the figures using a blue biro from reference images, and then scanned them and added an 10% white layer in Photoshop, before dropping in a stage background that I found online and desaturated.

Magic:

I did this one quite quickly, as I was a bit stuck for time. Fairly straight-forward: what's more magical than a pulling a rabbit from your hat? How about lots of rabbits! 

Superheroes:

I actually went back to a drawing I'd done while I was doing my BA for this one. I'd drawn a cartoon for a student magazine to illustrate an article about the glut of movie sequels being released (Men In Black 2, Spider-man 2, Scooby Doo 2, Stuart-freakin'-Little 2!!!). I took the image of Spider-man I'd drawn, and scanned it, added colour to the black & white original, then drew Doctor Octopus in the same style, and ta-da! 

...In search of a sunrise:

I wanted to do something different from all the (admittedly very beautiful) photographs of sunrises submitted by other people. I opted for a small boy, having a nightmare featuring ghosts in a forest, and searching for a sunrise so that he can wake up. I sketched out the image, scanned it, and then – in a slight change from my normal way of working – traced over the drawn lines in Photoshop using the brush tool. I did this to try and get a shakier line to my drawing, to give the drawing a slight dream-like quality. I created the ghosts in Illustrator using anchor points to create a curved appearance (...and because I'd just had an Illustrator workshop that morning). 

You are what you eat...:

I took a slightly different approach to this topic, creating a comic strip. Taking my cue from those people that look like their dogs (you know the ones!), I thought of people literally looking like their food. Poor Pizza-face!

More updates very soon...