DAY OF THE DEAD.

not the movie, the festival. i got confused, and there are similarities.

The idea behind these was to create some sort of promotional material or items for our festival of choice. Rather than just create an A2 poster, i had the idea of making some designs for beer mats or something. The characters represented are all a part of the festival in some way. If you don't know much about the festival, have a read, its pretty fascinating. Imagine celebrating our dead loved ones in that way.

So i haven't uploaded anything for months. Half because i lost my printer power cable and half because i haven't done much good work. But here is a few choice things from the past term:

one of the final pieces for a project on newspaper editorial illustrations. basically it's Gordon Brown shooting the man from the Halifax advert. some comment about cutting the money going to bankers.

i thought it was really funny but i was the only one.

Beach Bird

What is below:

What follows in the posts below are some choice pics from my first year at Norwich University College of the Arts. First year has been a bit shit - the illustration third of the year being shockingly underwhelming in teaching and practice. I didn't really understand why they thought we didn't need to be taught anything. I came pretty close to dropping out but then fucked the system up a bit, and got back on track. We have a new head of Illustration, so second year should be amazing.

I have made some pieces I'm pretty proud of though, and I think I have learnt from a few of my peers, and through just trying to get better myself.

And to think I actually applied for a Graphics Degree.

I Just Have To Explode This Body Off Me

With this project, we were given pretty much free creative reign to design an A2 poster based on a quotation. I used "I just have to explode this body off me" from the Bjork song 'Pluto'.

I used acrylics, chalks, watercolours and pencils to create a piece that was actually quite effective, and i'll try and photograph and get on here soon.

Trophy

We had a narrative project where we had to create 3 images for the beginning middle and end of something. I was probably a bit over ambitious as i picked a song to try and break down. I think this was probably because pretty much everyone in my group did a nursery rhyme and i wanted to challenge myself.

I tried to create paintings for the Bat For Lashes song 'Trophy', and some of it was moderately successful, but i found it quite hard to make into a working narrative. I also found that I had worked the images way too much without pushing them forward, meaning I went a bit mental by the time it came to doing the finals, and I definitely don't like them too much.

I worked in actual watercolour paints though which was a first, and i enjoyed trying to new media out. 

The Final paintings:

A right bunch of characters

For this project, I had to create a set of 20 archetypal characters such as prostitute, witch, politician, dreamer, crook, hermit, diva blah blah. Started off with doing a lot of drawing of weird people in Norwich which was pretty fun.

Then I kinda developed drawings based on a big book of portrait photographs, trying to use different media and techniques to describe character. These weren't very successful, and ended up being a bit static, so i went back to the original observational drawings and developed them. I'll try and get a photo of the A2 final up.