Guest - Bruce Ingman

Today we had a guest speaker Bruce Ingman come in to talk to us about his book: The Pencil.

http://www.walker.co.uk - Bruce Ingman

He spoke to us about his work on a book called "the pencil", a childrens book about a pencil that gains life of its own and runs off to draw a whole new world. But then gets overworked because too many people have requests for it. It solves its problem by drawing an eraser which removes everything again, and they live happily ever after.

www.google.co.uk - the pencil

blogspot.com -  the pencil sketch

It was interesting to hear how he worked as an illustrator, and particularly how his children have played part in his more recent work. Having said that I was very impatient to go home and rework one of my Negotiated Study pieces which is going to be in the Bargate Exhibition, mainly because I could not see the relevance of his talk to us as illustrators or as students working on our FMP. It was less about teaching and more of a man presenting one of his projects.

scan of my sketch book, including a small drawing Ingman himself

Scan from my original PD

Before and After photographs of my Negotiated Study poster (left) and my Bargate Exhbition piece (right)

 We have been told that our private view for the Bargate Exhibition will be at 18:00 on Monday, where we are also expected to set things up. I was also reminded that I need to submit another proposal for my final major project.

Random doodle from my sketchbook

Upon reflection on my new Arthur Conan Doyle poster, I will agree with my tutors assessment that with the new 3rd layer of printing adds a lot to the image. The 3rd layer helps bring up the image, giving it a less flat feel. And helping to give the image a bit more life and a more "painterly feel" - Peter Lloyd. This is something I will have to remember for my FMP, depending on the complexity, style and colours of the image... and of course depending on how much time I have left when the designs are done. I do love working in the print room when it isn't too crowded. But waiting for the screens to dry is a boring task... especially since they don't allow MP3 players in the print room.

Of Printing and T-shirts

I spent the day in the print room, trying to print some t-shirts for our Bargate show. Not only was it to create some merchandise for us to try and raise some money, it was also a good chance to do some t-shirt printing.  Something I have always wanted to try, but not really had access to, as it is only allowed if it is directly related to the course. The technician keeps telling a story of an old student printing t-shirts there and selling them on, and due to a typo, they were returned with the customer wanting money back from the university. Though I am a bit skeptical of this story, I do not see why we are not allowed to print 1 or 2 t-shirts, its not like I am going to be mass producing them. I just want to test the ink on the t-shirts and how accurate the prints will come out.

Above images taken of my t-shirt design as seen in the university print room.

 Above images taken from my old PD

My main concern regarding the t-shirts is whether the ink will survive a trip through the washing machine.. that remains to be seen. However this has been good practice in terms of preparing for our degree show, in the sense that not only is there the finished work, you also have to consider extras. Such as business cards and paraphernalia to sell and give away. I do not think I will make any more t-shirts as the prints came out quite inaccurate, and that only very rough designs would work. Strictly speaking though this will not be relevant to my FMP, as I cannot see the relevance of print t-shirts for it... I may surprise myself as I still have no clear idea of what I am going to do for it yet.

One Day Project... or not + printing

Today we were scheduled to have a 1 day project with Peter Lloyd, but it was canceled at the last minute. Something that I will admit I was quite happy to hear as I need to do quite a bit of printing for stuff to sell in our upcoming Bargate Exhibition. The idea being that the more work we produce, the more we can try to sell as part of our fundraiser for a London degree show. I got my hands on a book so I can begin writing my presentation document in it. I Bought an A3 sketch book, as I feel it would be a nice size to work with in terms of practicality when sticking in images or drawing, and that the A4 book just reminds me of an school book.

We were also given a brief update on the details concerning our degree show.

Scan from my old PD book

Furthermore I presented the first suggestion for my Final Major Project to our head of course Jonny Hannah, a copy of which is below:

FMP: Proposal

Medium:

I would like to use a combination of ink drawings, silk screen printing and photoshop. What I envision is a process of exploring line drawing to create the subject. Using silk screens to form texture and colour textures. Finally the process would come together in Photoshop, where colour editing and touch ups would be its main function.

Style:

I would like to use the style used in the previous years Sequential narrative. 

 Part of my Squential Narrative project, 2011

The basic makings of the female nymph figure would form the subject, where I would incorporate line work in a similar manor to the old copper plate prints (see Hogarth's the Harlots Progress) to work the background. I enjoyed working with these styles and having learnt more about printing since the sequential narrative project I could combine what I know now with the techniques I used then.

Subject:

At first I toyed with the idea of taking old epic scenes from the bible or history (for example Moses parting the Red Sea), but I can not see myself being interested in the subject for 13 weeks. A more appealing idea I feel would be to focus on the everyday but give it a bizarre spin. For example it would be taking the characters and background distorting them, yet leaving enough visual clues that a viewer could identify with the situation.

Insipiration:

James Jean

William Hogarth

Amy Sol

Pages 17, 18, 19 and 20 respectively from my Sequential Narrative Project 2011

extracts from my old Presentation Document

I hope to find out how the prints of my old Negotiated study project come out once I have added this third layer to it. If it is successful and looks good I will settle for creating 3 layers for each of my FMP posters.

 

Week 2

Schedule Scan for the second week

Today I gave up on trying to create a blog. After talking to my flat mates who studying media design, I worked out that trying to use tumblr is infinitely more difficult than blogspot to customize your website... if they had told me this from the start instead of wasting quite a large amount of time trying to explain to me some of the more basic elements of HTML programming, I might have been in a better mood yesterday. Once I got a basic account sorted on blogspot or blogger.com, I reached a point where I gave up on the whole blog idea.

For two days I have stared at a blank computer screen, and found it incredibly difficult to get my thoughts written down, well more difficult than writing down on paper. I chose to instead fall back on the idea of creating a good old physical book as my presentation document. My mind would simply shut down when trying to type... perhaps an unfortunate side effect from writing my dissertation. Something which I still remember as a bad experience of late nights typing in the library. Anyway I have always found that writing down my thoughts on paper is easier than typing them on a screen. I will start writing it in the next few days when I have found a book to do so in.

Today I posed as a model with my course mate Lucy Ross for the second year students doing their Sequential Narrative project (I offered to take my clothes off, but they didn't seem interested). Our tutor Ceri asked us a few days ago if we would be interested in spending the day posing, she also mentioned that the university would pay us for it, which significantly improved my motivation. It was a full day of standing in slightly awkward poses wearing fancy dress... and briefly being told to fight over an old suitcase, something I have never been asked for in my life. All in all it was good fun and it was quite amusing to see some of the results the 2nd years came up with when drawing us. I was quite pleased to see all the work once it was done, but I did wish that we had been asked to do a few more seated poses, I got tired of all that standing on practically one leg.

Ah second year, I do remember enjoying the sequential narrative project. I had never tried writing a childrens book, but found it fun because I learned several new photoshop techniques and a thing or two about writing for children. These are some pages from my Sequential Narrative project

 Some samples from my Sequential Narrative Project from 2011

Blog I

Today I spent the day trying to start my blog, as it has already been a week, and all I have done so far
is wrote up my Negotiated Study project (for the purposes of continuity this has been published earlier here). I spent a few hours on tumblr trying to make a theme that was more presentable.
 This was more or less a waste of time, as I was not able to edit the HTML effectively and I spent ages trying to select one of the premade themes.

 Screenshot of a preview of my blog

Compared to my earlier version (Day I) it is an improvement, in terms of layout and colour (though not by much). This was not really what I was aiming for in terms of colour, I would have preferred a paler colour palette and adding a background of my own. However editing such things in tumblr seems to require an almost ungodly knowledge of HTML coding and an account on imageshack of more than 64gb. (bit of nerd humor there i suppose). Anyway after fiddling with the codes in Adobe Dreamweaver with no real result, I gave up on it thinking I would get back to it later after consulting one of my more technically minded friends. Instead I felt I would actually write down a post or two.