Degree Show Hanging Talk

Scan of the schedule for the week.

Today Peter Lloyd had an early morning talk (too early) to us about the how to hang the degree show which is now only a few weeks away. He ran through the many different techniques, their advantages and disadvantages and some basic dos and don'ts when hanging a show (see below for notes)

Scans from my sketchbook

From Pete's talk I have decided to use magnets to hang my degree show. This seems to be the most elegant solution, and as an added bonus one that is very easy to pull off. Though I will need to order the magnets online as it is apparently impossible to buy them in Southampton.

I also managed to completed my war poster late this night, spending another 6 or so hours on it. Now all I need to do is test whether it prints well, and if it does I am 1/6 of the way to go... yay (sarcasm).

FMP Work II

Having spent most of night working on my war poster, I am pleased to see that the first layer is almost complete. Thought I know that I am miles behind everyone else at this point, I am still pleased that I am making progress now.

First layer of my FMP war poster

FMP Work I - War

Today I spent another few hours working ony my FMP. Still working on the war poster.

My FMP war poster 

Almost all the elements in this poster have a reason for being there, and I will explain this once the final print is done, so it will be clearer to you (the reader) what is going on. In my mind it make more sense to do it this way, as it will demonstrate how the research was used. Instead of the reader having to scroll backwards to figure out where that element came from. Much to impractical.

Presentation Document Disaster

The day started well with me presenting Jonny some of my work as my submission for the degree show catalogue. He liked two of my images (see below)

my work

He suggested perhaps combining them, and playing around with some of the colour functions in photoshop. After a few hours fiddeling we managed to reach this:

First test (my work)

He then told me to continue tweaking it it Photoshop and to show him once I had something I was happy with. I finally settled on the below image, where I think the image as a whole is more powerful than the one ontop, and the off red allowing to see the complete design of the background image.

Final Submission for degree show catalogue, to be submitted on monday

However the day came to a bad end when I had my presentation document meeting with Alexandra. I brought in my presentation document (a book, the scans of which are plastered all over this blog) to show her. Alexandra looked at the book, and told me that I had misunderstood the entire concept of the presentation document. It seems that weeks ago there was a second meeting, shortly after the introduction (here) where a guideline document was handed out. This document I do not have. By the end of the talk I had come to the conclusion that I could either rewrite the entire thing in either a new book or blog format. Or I could try to edit my old one, which would prove very difficult as the only way to do so would be to physically add more pages to the book itself. Alexandra expressing that she would like to see certain elements from my old book carried through, I decided that I would do a blog. That way I will be able to scan in the images of my book and reuse them later, instead of them being a complete waste of time. Below are some of the notes I took:

scan of my sketchbook (ignore the green writing)

When my tutorial was over I left feeling quite empty inside, that changed to anger/frustration at the fact that all the work I had put into my old presentation document (56 A3 pages) was more or less a waste of time. Now not only do I have to struggle with my FMP being very behind, now I basically have to redo my presentation document. I am going to go home and sleep, I can't deal with any more bad news at the moment.

Catalogue Tutorial

Today was our first official day back at university, and we started off talking about our degree show catalogue. Jonny briefly explained to us that we will get  a double page A4 spread and we need to start thinking about submissions. I had hoped that I could use some of my FMP for that, but being very... VERY behind at this point, I just need to concentrate on actually getting it done. I do wonder how they will chose a cover.

2010 illustration catalogue cover by Jon Clark (http://jonclarkdesign.blogspot.co.uk/)

We also had a fundraiser meeting later in the day to talk about serious ways to raise money. We are still far short on our £3000 target, and as far as I know no one has any real suggestions. There have been many talks about trying to raise money by selling work at the university, but nothing ever seems to come from it. As I suspected we did not have any real suggestions this meeting, but we did seem to waste a lot of time repeating ourselves. At this point to be honest I don't think that we will reach our target. Either there will be no London show, or we will all have to pay out of our own pocket to make it happen. Derek our tutor did suggest that we could raise money by holding club nights, as the last few years of illustration have raised large numbers at these events. He mentioned that he might be able set something up with one of the local night clubs... though we all know that might just be an excuse for him to DJ again.