"Egg, nest, house, country and universe"

This is my submission for the latest exhibition at Camberwell, jointed curated by MA Drawing and MA Designer-Maker (nope, I've no idea either...). I had some fun with this one! The theme for the exhibition is "Egg, nest, house, country and universe", a Victor Hugo quote, taken from Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space.

I played around with a few different ideas to begin with, trying to include all the elements of the quote, before deciding to focus on just egg, country and universe – although it could be argued that there are probably lots of houses and nests populating the Earth being cracked open.

I found the space background from doing a search online, and adjusted the levels and colours, and added a colour halftone screen to give the appearance of it being viewed on a monitor (and to hide the fact that the image was low resolution). I did numerous sketches to get the hands right, photographing my own hands for reference, and looked online for references of an egg breaking and the yolk falling. My initial idea just had an image of an egg being broken in space, but while working on it, I developed the idea so that the "egg" was the Earth, which I like.

I coloured the image using a combination of colour pencil, felt pen and some Photoshop work. I am very happy with the final work!

"Disappearing"

The new year brings with it new exhibitions, and this is my submission for the MA Graphics exhibition at Camberwell. The subject of the exhibition is Disappearing. The title of my work is "Up In Smoke" and was inspired by the fact that when I looked through a selection of newspapers for reports on the situation in Palestine, I could find very little, but I could find endless columns about the comings and goings of multitudes of vacuous celebrities.

I created the drawing by hand and then scanned and coloured it in Photoshop, adding collaged newspaper articles into the smoke. I printed the final work on a sheet of newsprint paper.

The Man Who Drank Too Much Coffee - page 1 (mid-point review)

My main project for my MA is to produce an illustrated story book, based on my own narrative, The Man Who Drank Too Much Coffee, a cautionary tale about the perils of consuming too much caffeine. Last term I did some preliminary work, establishing what my story would be, and doing some rough storyboarding, but for my Mid-Point Review, I wanted to dive in and begin work on producing an actual page.

Where my initial sketches and plans were more directed towards producing more of a picture book, with single full page images on each spread, after doing some background reading and research into narrative illustration, I wanted to be able to develop the character and story a bit more, so that the reader can begin to understand him a bit more. To this end, I've decided that my book will be a combination of comic strip style panels and larger images, to allow me to expand on certain areas where needed, and also so that the full page images, when they appear, will have more impact. I need to rework my storyboards to take in this new direction, but for now, I've produced the opening page, introducing the central character of the book.

I wanted to set up the main character as being someone who is rather lonely and as a result, consumed by his work. The opening panels show him working late in the office, and introduces his reliance on coffee to help him stay awake and work long into the night. I tried to add little details into the images to build on his character – the pencil on his desk in the first panel is chewed, to show his nervousness, and in each of the panels, he's surrounded by trembling lines, a hint to the effect the coffee is having on him.

In producing this page, I've developed the technique that I began to experiment with earlier (see Colouring experiments), combining hand-colouring with computer-based work to create more of a textured appearance to my drawings. After drawing the outlines by hand using pen, I scanned the image, and then applied the flat colour in Photoshop. After working out the basic image, I then added shading effects using a range of greyscale pens and ink pens, scanning these and adding them as layers to my computer file. I'm very pleased with how the results this has achieved, and feel it adds an extra dimension to my work.

I sketched out the overall plan for the page, and then worked on each panel as a seperate piece, building the composition in Photoshop to create the final page. In terms of colours, I've tried to keep to a relatively simple palette, using different shades of a single colour to build the backgrounds, and then letting the shading pick out the individual elements. The foreground elements are more colourful, but still keeping the range of colours as limited as possible. I like the effect I have achieved and the way in which the panels relate to one another. I've framed the panels with a black background which helps to bring the colours forward.

As the story continues, the Man heads home after spending five days in a row at work, not sleeping and drinking a LOT of coffee, and as we follow him home, he sees all sorts of wierd and wonderful hallucinations, a result of the increased level of caffeine over-stimulating his brain (I tried to foreshadow this slightly, by his visions of an angelic and devilish version of himself talking to him in the third panel on the first page).

I would like to continue using the same colouring effect throughout the book, but experiment with using other mediums to achieve the shading. My ultimate aim is to have produced enough of the book to be able to approach publishers with the complete plan for the book, plus a substantial amount of completed spreads, plus a cover proposal.

Colour in Time

...so this week's exhibition is being curated by MA Book Arts, with the title: Colour in time, Colouring in time, Colouring time. Unlike the previous exhibition subjects, I didn't really have any instantaneous ideas for this one. But then I thought of the "colouring in" and the idea of "time", and decided to produce a sort of colouring book page on the subject of time - people from various periods of history each contemplating a different form of time piece (...and a Back To The Future reference). Then I coloured it in using Crayons for that authentic colouring book feel.

I wanted to leave some of it unfinished to emphasise the fact that it was meant to be a colouring book - colouring-in time. I'm not sure if I've managed to completely convey the idea, but I like the overall composition...