On Location

 Kingfishers Lunch!

A couple of paintings from yesterdays trip to Tuillie House. It was good to be challenged to try different painting techniques, styles and media.

Recent personal projects

 I'm currently working on a stop motion animation at home in which I needed to build my own set. So armed with my craft knife and a cardboard box I got to work.

A recent tutorial and brief focused on 'old school' where we had to produce hand crafted items to a specific brief.  This included saddle stitch books, perfect bound books (which I particularly enjoyed), cutting out perfect circles\lettering to a specific size with a craft knife, hand painting posters... and
so on.

Once the project was over I really wanted to have a go painting an Oyster Catcher using acrylic. I wanted to try rubbing the acrylic in to create a matt effect.  I hadn't properly used canvas before so I added that to my kit list for this too. The type I added in Photoshop which on reflection didn't work that well.

From an earlier typography project I created this abstract using the Futura typeface.  I really liked the final piece so decided to change the colors from the original and screen print it on to a grey t. shirt.

I'm having a lot of fun with Illustrator - this is a bay in Scotland.

Double page spreads

It's been a while since I've updated my Uni blog so thought I'd best resolve that now! 

A recent brief was to design 3 double page spreads on given topics.  We were given all the text that had to go into the spread but no indication of type hierarchy - that was for us to work out.  There where also typos and others errors thrown in for us to find and correct.

The above was my first attempt at the streaking double page spread but I felt the body text didn't quite sit right so I started again and arrived at the following final design.                                          

Typography Project

My two final designs for our most recent typography project.  We had to design a poster promoting a typeface on each poster.  One poster had to be in colour, the other in black and white.  I really enjoyed creating the abstract images from the letters found in each typeface.

Storybook songbooks

Today we start project 7 which is to design an album cover with a wee mini book included.  So I'm currently researching the song and artist I have been given and looking at the design styles from the era it was written (1970s). 

I found some examples of Sainsbury's own design package labels in an old Guardian magazine I was looking through for the last project. The packaging examples are taken from the book 'own label' showing exmples of their 'own brand' label between 1962 - 1977 - very striking designs.  I liked them so much I cut them out of the magazine and stuck them in a frame in my studio.

Imagine my excitement when I then found the book in the University library!! I'm hoping to get inspiration from this for my colour palette and 70's design. 

Composition 2

Not sure whether this demonstrates good abstract composition but I'm really pleased with it anyway.  I really like geometric form and colour. Getting that and the composition right is the challenge!

Composition

We had an interesting lecture on composition yesterday morning.  So I've had a go at at my own abstract composition. I sketched them out last night and am slowly creating them in Illustrator - two more to add soon.