Squiggly Tea?

Squiggles are becoming a new obsession of mine...

Alfie and the Dinosaur

A friend of my mum asked if I would illustrate a story her friend wrote. Althought I felt the story was a tad boring it did give me the chance to get some practice on Adobe Illustrator. I would have liked to include some hand drawings but they wanted the book ASAP for christmas. I had loads of fun doing it and am really pleased with the end result.

Here are some of my favourite illustrations for the book :)

Squiggly Madness

This is what bordom does to me! I saw this on art attack years ago and thought I would give it another go. You start a line and then don't let it touch itself and have to try and fill the page. I think my line touches in some parts though :P



I really think there is something to this idea. These work well as textures but I would quite like to try and make them into shapes or figures. Could be interesting to try...

Katharine Asher

http://www.illustrationweb.com/illustrators/home_large.asp?artist_id=3295&tc=1293373495525

Really love the bleedy ink textures. Also adore the little penguin and baby bird characters. I like how ink is very unpredicable but also like how she has managed to control it and make it into shapes. Really love the use of colour in the last image of the woman.

Peskimooooooooo!

These two lovely people speak my language! http://www.peskimo.com/web/illustration.php

A big thankyou to Mr Howker in the 3rd year for introducing me to them! I have decided that I HAVE to learn screen printing as soon as college starts next year! Absolutely adore all the little characters and textures!

Inspiration

In a tutorial with Ian I mentioned my inspirational image collection. Everytime I see something that takes my fancy I add it to the collection... It's gotten rather large over the past two years. I thought it might be a good idea to share some of my favourites with you. Most of them are by artists on Deviantart.com so they don't really class as practicing illustrators. However this is where most of my inspiration comes from =)

I think the running theme is clean lines mixed with texture. I also love character design and interesting colours being used together.

Stop Frame Animation

Love this!

Squiggly Tree Jigsaw FINISHED!

Ta Daaaah!

Really happy with how this came out! I think the painting on it could have been a lot better though. Ian suggested I look at arranging a screen printing tutorial in case I do somthing like this in the future...

Photo Sequence Project

This was the photo I was given for the photo sequence project. I did a spider diagram to help come up with some initial ideas.

From looking at the photo in detail I decided that the two figues were probably related and were about to travel somewhere in the car. They look dressed up so could be going for a meal, church or to a family gathering. After talking to some of my classmates we decided that the photo was most likely taken in the 50s-60s because of the background and clothing.

My first thought was to go along the idea of travel. The two in the photo are posing in front of the car in that classic way you see in many photos. I thought that I could produce a set of post cards with them stood in front of several different landmarks. In the end I prefered my 2nd idea and also thought that the postcards wouldn't work because they aren't in a sequence.

My 2nd idea was to do with age. I found it funny that the boy is so young and the woman so old. It's quite a contrast and when looking at the photo we imediatly assume that the woman is his Grandmother. I thought it would be interesting if the woman were to change age. This would make it confusing as to what role she plays. Is she a sister, mother, grandmother?






In each of the original images the boy is exactly the same size, so I thought this set of images would work best as an animation. Unfortunatly I don't have any animation software at home so will have to work it out tomorrow in college...



After producing these 6 basic images, I started playing around with colour and texture.






I prefer the set with the yellow-red colour change rather than the texture set. After speaking with Ian he suggested that I add colour to the boy and possibly have the woman change colour randomly rather than from light to dark.

This final set of images I will try to put together into a looping animation tomorrow.

Squiggly Tree Jigsaw in progress!

This was the final design for my jigsaw... Made it fatter so it would be easier to cut out.

Spent the majority of today in the 3D department cutting out my jigsaw using various loud machines. With the help of Karl (the viking) I was able to cut out and sand down my jigsaw.

However... There is one technical problem with one particular part of the jigsaw. The last thing we had to do was to cut the tree into sections to make it into a jigsaw... I let Karl show me how to do it but unfortunatly he cut the first piece wrong. Its the very top piece... You can see how it is different to the others...

Because it isn't how it should be the top piece falls to the side all the time or falls off compleatly... Managed to get it to stay put for the above photo, but it took many tries lol... I've had fun today and plan to start painting it tonight! The top piece isn't an issue if you do the jigsaw on a flat surface... May try to stick it so that it's connected to the piece below it... Hmm

Little Idea that won't go away...

It's been drifting around my head for the past two days... It obviously needs me to put it into some kind of perminant form...

Can't remeber how it came about but it's an idea for a children's book. Possible title could be "The boy who lost his mind" or "The boy without a mind".

The story would start with a young boy, probably aged 4-5. He has lost his mind somewhere. His friends try to find it and offer him a tree branch. This obviously isn't his mind but they put it into his head anyway (which will open like a trash can lid or something...). He will then act as a tree would. Then other people/animals will try to help him by offering their favorite things eg, Dog gives him a bone, Cat gives him a ball of wool and so on...

Eventually his mum or dad will give him one of his toys and he will go back to normal... The end...

Anyway... I feel better now that this idea is writtain down so I won't forget it! May possibly use this for my 2nd personal project... However already chosen to do a children's book for my first personal project... Hmmmmmm...

Stefan G.Bucher

http://www.dailymonster.com/344_loves_you/ <---- Blog

Stefan G.Bucher is the creator of the daily monster. I came across him on youtube a while ago and really loved his videos. He starts off with a random patch of ink and then blows the ink into an interesting shape... He then turns this shape into a monster.

I really love this method of working. It's so unpredictable and requires a great amount of imagination. Here is a video of him talking about his work and how he does it.

3 Tree Puzzle Designs

I think that the final product will either be 1 or 2. I do like 3 but think it may be too complicated as a jigsaw...

My Baby Girl

Kim Smith

http://twsketch.blogspot.com/ <----- Her Blog

http://www.tuckedaway.com/illustration.html <------- Her website

Sadly there isn't much information about her other than that she is from Alberta. I absolutely love her style of working! Her character designs are amazing and she always uses really nice colours. Love love LOVE!

She also does quite a lot of work in 3D. I'm not too keen on the sculptures, however her paper cut images are fantastic!

The above image is one of her paper cuts.

Mattias Adolfsson

http://mattiasa.blogspot.com/ <----- Link to his awesome blog!

Thought I best start showing you guys who and what inspires me... So first off we have the fantastic works of Mattias Adolfsson. A freelance illustrator from Sweden.

I came across him on the art website Deviantart (where I find most awesome things). I really love the way his work looks like doodles but at the same time has an incredible amount of detail... The more detail the more I love it! He works with inks, fountain pens and watercolour paints. I don't think he is very well known but he has mentioned in his blog that he has worked on childrens books and computer games. Here are a few great examples of his work.

Personal Object Ideas and Plans

My first idea for this project was a cusom cookie cutter in the shape of the little dinosaur character I draw all the time. After looking into it in a bit more detail it became apparant that it wasn't the best choice. I would have to simplify the design so it would work well as a cookie cutter, bend the metal myself which would make it end up uneven or distorted and would also take up too much time.


My second idea was to make a wooden jigsaw. Have had them befor growing up and felt it would be a more simple object to create.





These images are just some examples from google images that I found. I thought about making a dinosaur jigsaw but the design is a bit simple for this and I wanted to push myself more. Ive started sketching out plans for a squiggly tree jigsaw and then touching up the line art in illustrator.






I'm really excited about this idea and hopefully will be able to make more than one in the end. This is one of 3 designs I have sketched out at the moment. The final thing will have green leaves and will have colourful stripes down the trunk. Going to ask about using the jigsaw wood cutter in the 3D department on tuesday :)

Final Swap (Bit late)

After the persentations on friday I realised that I hadn't posted anything about the last swap for the summer project! Whooops!

So here it is...

This image is made up of lots of different elements I found on the internet (all with permition to use)

This was my responce to Vicky's 2nd image which mainly featured black and white cut out and a photographic background. I've taken the idea of using photography and kept the whole thing black and white to tie in with Vicky's image.

First Swap

For the first swap I was given a piece of work by Vicky Hall. It's really interesting to see how other people respond to the same image. Vicky had obviously chosen to experiment with photo montage and collage. The idea of collage would have never crossed my mind.

I started off by photoshopping the original image in different ways.

I don't really like how these two came out. I also don't like the fact that there is no hand drawn element to the work anymore. For the next lot of experiments I went back and redrew the woman from Vicky's image.

Really love how this one came out. The shapes are really pretty and organic but you can still tell when you see the image as a whole that it's the woman from Vicky's image.