Florence Cathedral - Architype

Designing my next piece of Architype was the Florence Cathedral. It was a pretty tough challenge, it took me many many hours over a course of 2 weeks. The high detail in the decor is amazing and hard to illustrate in pure type. It is a big step up from the building of St. Pauls purely because the scale is 3x bigger and more detailed. 

 I then tried printing out across 9 A4 pieces of paper, to resemble A1 size (purely because I don't have an A1 printer.) There are some slightly inconsistencies between the panels because of slight cropping errors but I think it is one of my most successful graphical pieces of work. I think the image is also quite appealing because it works in the rule of thirds!

 

AQA Results

So today I took my AQA exam and I have now achieved... *drum roll*

Two badges, Photoshop and InDesign. I am officially Adobe certified!

Artists I like #10

Upon listening to some albums to kick off the new year I noticed that the album artwork for the Fall Out Boy album, Infinity on High, had some similar aspects to my photography work. It looks like a small set made up of different elements and then photographed. 

Making these little sets myself I notice all the small details, for example Infinity on High is something that Vincent Van Gogh said and the starry sky painting seems to be portrayed in the background on the album. Also the small little coat hangers in the cupboard and books under the bed catch my eye. As far as I can find out the person who designed the set is Todd Fjelsted and the photographer is Pamela Littky. Pamela seems to work with a lot of A-list celebrities and seems to produce a lot of their album artworks while Todd's work seems widely ranged in many talents yet I can't find any work that looks similar to the set for the album. 

Researching more I found another artist produced artwork inside the album, Chuck Anderson, and his Photoshop work is truly inspirational. Even designed the Windows 7 wallpaper! A lot of Chuck's work is similar to the work I use to enjoy doing when I was younger on Photoshop, bright colours and highly edited images. Almost what I'd call special effects in Photography.  I have no added him to my collection of artists I like and find an inspiration in the Photoshop world!

 

Updated Christmas card #3

I finally got my main design finished for my Christmas card and it's now available for purchase! I re-done the lighting on the card and made some small tweaks, like turning the lamp on. I'm very happy with the outcome and I know have it for sale on Etsy!

Click here to purchase or view on my Etsy shop

 

Christmas cards #2

I finished another design set for Christmas cards, these are a unique idea I haven't really seen before. They're recipe cards so the actual Christmas card has a bit more use to it rather than just being recycled after Christmas!

I'm selling them on my Etsy shop 🎅 

 

http://etsy.me/1kwagPr 

 

St Peter's Architecture

My self directed project for my final third year is The Renaissance. It started off with Rome as a general focus and slowly I decided I love the architecture and artists of the Renaissance period.  I create this image based on work by Cameron Moll who creates images of structures in type. I chose St Peter's because of how impressive the architecture is not just inside but outside too. I used Times New Roman because that's the type face that can be seen on the outside of the building, I only used numerals and letters to create the shape of the building. 

I then took the image and created it into a silk screen, I tried two toned layers as well as including colour to certain parts of the building. I worked at an A3 scale on Photoshop and printed onto A2. You can see the whole collection of prints on my website or by clicking one of the images. 

Cut and Paste workshop

In a workshop by one of our lecture's, Lorna, I looked at using cut and paste methods from pre-exisiting materials to create a new illustration. I had to choose a type of machine/appliance and create a super hero that held the qualities of that machine. We had to consider costume, accessories and a name. I wanted my super hero to be themed around my current subject, The Renaissance, so I chose the pasta making machine. Using some books I had of Michelangelo's paintings I cut out one that featured Christ and chose him to be the 'Perfect Pasta Painter'; his power of being able to paint pasta perfectly and it comes to live. How does this save the world?.. By providing delicious perfect pasta whenever my super hero paints! He holds his best paint brushes and his staff of pasta to provide those who need a bite to eat.

 

See the rest of the groups: http://pompeyillustration.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/lornas-workshop-for-level-6-students.html

Charity shop gold mine find!

I saw this in a window of a charity shop and I knew I instantly had to buy it because all the furniture alone in the house would be worth way more than the charity shop were charging. I got the whole lot for £20 and I know after previous projects that some of the items would cost a lot of eBay. Just the bed side lamp alone would range between £3-£5. Finding a china bath like that would also be an expensive buy, a pretty lucky sighting! All of this will work in future photo shoots!

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Knights and Chivalry - Bookworks

Looking at the book sculptures by Alexander Korzer-Robinson I decided to create my own. I bought an encyclopedia of Knights and Chivalry and one by one began to remove the pages only leaving some images. The book had 236 pages and only 29 separate images were left by the end. It is a long process but very rewarding, you can see the image building up bit by bit and it's surprising how well the images through out the book can layer one into one narrative. A very delicate but fun process.

Coat of Arms Tunnel book - Bookworks

After finding a new love with tunnel books I created a few mock ups and then a final version. I wanted the Coat of Arms to go back in layers with each layer broken down into each component of the arms. I painted by own Coat of Arms for my surname and made a book to resemble the materials medieval books were made from.

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Leather bound book - Bookworks

My new project is based around making and the history of books. My brief is to pick a book written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and then take inspiration from it and move in a certain direction. I chose the book "Sir Nigel" which is the story of Knight from the Medieval period. This lead me to research what books looked like that were made from the Medieval time period. I then created my own book based upon my research, so this is my second attempt at a leather covered book. It still needs work but I'm quite happy with the final look, especially the leather bound strap!

Violence Attracts - Social Awareness

I used a couple of clippings from magazines and decided to create some posters that would draw in the audience via violence. Violence seems to have more of an attraction than positive medias. I thought I'd play on peoples attraction and then once they actually see the poster, it is in fact a positive message. They're just basically watered down acrylic paint splatters with the cut out and some letter pressed facts.

Pixel People - Social Awareness

Trying my skills at Illustrator I wanted to create a pixel animation that could be resized without loosing the "pixel" look. Technically using Illustrator does not allow the creation of images by pixels because it's a vector based program. By using Photoshop I could not resize the pixels so I did a painful process on Illustration using grids.This ended up taking hours because of the process I chose but I'm happy with the outcome!

Screenprint Posters - Social Awareness

I started to try out some visual work for my video game project by exploring how to visual the facts I'd found out. I created the posters in InDesign and tried to play with the words on how I presented the facts. So I tried to make the "Sharpen" seem out of focus on the poster about eyesight and for the gender I did a male and female video game counterpart. The font along the bottom was not a successful choice for silk screening as it would dry out too quickly and result in it not printing. I also think the screen was either too exposed or there was something on the paper because it would print grains. The grains did go after the screen dried out with some ink on but then so did the font along the bottom. I'll have to change the font if I want to print these again. 

  

This one I haven't made into a screen yet because it needs to blur with half tone dots, using an effect blur won't come out on the silkscreens. 

Paper craft - Social Awareness

My new project, Social Awareness, is looking at how video games affect children both positively and negatively. I tried to think of a way that I could portray the message for both children and parents but using video games to represent my message. The most popular video game for children is Minecraft, it also offers a lot of positives to video games. So I created a paper Steve and a friend to represent how playing online allows you to make friends. I want to do a series of these posters but putting the characters in real settings not game ones. It just so happens to be very wet at the moment restricting my use of outside.

Just a mock up poster. Hooray for Steve!