OUIL404 - Screenprint and Hotdog Books

Although I wasn't there for the session where we made the actual images for the hot dog book, I went to one of the screen printing sessions so that I would have an idea of what to do when I decide to do some screen printing by myself.
Although the images didn't turn out perfect and parts of the image didn't transfer because the correct pen wasn't used, it was useful to see how easy to is to make a simple book, that, when done correctly and carefully, can display illustrations in a simple and effective way.

I think the format of the book would allow for many possibilities when making comics or zines, I would like to employ this book making technique in future briefs.

OUIL404 - Shape and Texture

I started using different materials to make the shape and texture, using the media in different ways made different textures, using more water with the ink gave a more unpredictable and messy look.
I liked using small marks to create shape and texture rather than block colours, I think it worked well in the images below because it went well with the ink that I was using.

When I was doodling at work I started using a pen on the till roll and found that it gave different results with the pen than what using it on normal paper would. So I gathered some old receipts and experimented with shapes on there. I decided I wanted to simplify the shapes I was creating so I went for a more abstract approach, I wanted the general shape of a squid so that it was recognisable, I made sure to have some identifiable features that signified squid, such as the tentacles and the shape of the eyes. I wanted to create a simple shape so that it was easy to replicate.

I found that different pens gave different results and it was quite easy to create a texture by screwing up and making the receipts wet.

Using dry ink on the receipts also made a very different texture, although I was using the same ink it appeared a lot lighter on the receipt paper than on the normal sketchbook paper. 

OUIL406 - Studio Brief 3 - Albert Einstein

I decided on looking at Einstein because I find him to be the most interesting out of the 3 people I chose. I was thinking I would begin by looking at some of his popular theories and maybe trying to visualise them through illustration.

FACTS

• When Einstein died in 1955, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered, as was his wish. However, before his body was cremated, pathologist Thomas Harvey at Princeton Hospital conducted an autopsy in which he removed Einstein's brain. Rather than putting the brain back in the body, Harvey decided to keep it, ostensibly for study. Harvey did not have permission to keep Einstein's brain, but days later, he convinced Einstein's son that it would help science.
• A few days after Zionist leader and first President of Israel Chaim Weizmann died on November 9, 1952, Einstein was asked if he would accept the position of being the second president of Israel. Einstein, age 73, declined the offer.
• Part of Einstein's charm was his disheveled look. In addition to his uncombed hair, one of Einstein's peculiar habits was to never wear socks. Whether it was while out sailing or to a formal dinner at the White House, Einstein went without socks everywhere.
• When Albert Einstein was five years old and sick in bed, his father showed him a simple pocket compass. Einstein was mesmerized. What force exerted itself on the little needle to make it point in a single direction? This question haunted Einstein for many years and has been noted as the beginning of his fascination with science.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/legacy-of-the-big-bang-a-century-after-albert-einsteins-predictions-scientists-discover-gravitational-waves-in-one-of-the-most-important-goals-in-cosmology-9197739.html

Some of the articles I read on Einstein, to better understand some of his theories

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/17/gravitational-waves-bicep-inflation-big-bang

Gravitational waves are ripples in the space-time continuum, which was envisaged by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/17/astronomers-discoveredechoesofbigbangexpansion.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/03/07/einsteins-lost-theory-describes-a-universe-without-a-big-bang/#.Uyg8M_l_t8U

http://guardianlv.com/2014/03/albert-einstein-debunked-the-big-bang-theory/

http://life.time.com/history/the-day-albert-einstein-died-a-photographers-story/#1

Einstein's office the day he died.

Quotes

• Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
• The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who won't do anything about it
• A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new
• A true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination
• It's not that I'm so smart, It's that I stay with problems longer
• I have no special talent, I am only passionately curios
• When the solution is simple, God is answering
• The only source of knowledge is experience
• The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education
• Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

OUIL404 - Studio Brief 2 - Observed drawing session

I found this exercise really useful, because I'm not used to drawing things true to real life, I prefer to make things different, but drawing from reference and trying to get things as close to real life as possible, helps you to get the general shape of things, which you can then change to get exactly what you want. I think this would help improve my drawing a lot, and make everything a lot more recognisable and easy to communicate a message.

At first I started by focusing on one certain part of my jacket that I was drawing, but it made it harder to get everything in proportion in relation to each other.

My favourite one, and the one I think worked best, was the last one, with the texture in the background and then the line work added on top. I really like the contrast between the clean line work and the inconsistent tone in the texture.

OUIL406 - Brief 2 - Final Postcards

Overall I'm quite pleased with my final postcards. To say it was the first time I had properly used illustrator to create work I think that it came out alright. Using Illustrator definitely opened my eyes to different ways of working, I was always really against digital image making because I had never used it properly, so everything I did always came out really poor. This brief definitely made me want to keep using Illustrator as I was really pleased with the outcomes and did not expect it to work so well. I think the thing that makes me like digital illustration so much is that you have complete control over your colour palette and can easily change it.

I like the general layout of this postcard, but I think I made it too busy, I was scared that the background would look boring if I didn't put anything in it, but I think the amount of detail I have included makes it look over crowded and I think it would have looked better with less background pattern. Also I found out that using Google Translate to make arabic text doesn't actually make a sentence that makes sense, which is something I should have checked before I finalised the design.

I am quite happy with the composition in this piece, I think that through testing and evaluation I came to the best conclusion, as the design is not too busy yet not uninteresting. I am pleased with how the background patterns turned out, and this is one of the things I enjoy most about using Illustrator, making something any size I want and then resizing it without losing any quality.

I really think this particular postcard worked very well, the composition, colour palette and imagery work well together to communicate the gang that I was trying to illustrate. I enjoyed tracing over an image and using shapes of darker and lighter tones of the same colour to create the image and give it dimension and depth.

OUIL406 - Studio Brief 2 - Testing

I started drawing up ideas for the postcard for The Yakuza but I found it quite hard to come up with ideas, so I switched to looking at the Pink Sari Gang

First I tried the more realistic look, and used images from Pinterest as reference. But I really didn't like the graphic look, probably because it's not what I usually do and I'm not used to using such neat and bold tools like felt pens.

I was trying to decide whether or not I should show the whole gang or just one woman in the middle. I thought it would be better just to have one woman in the middle so she could be larger in order to show more detail and pattern.

This was just me experimenting with making pattern in Illustrator, seeing as it took A LOT of time to create each little bit of pattern I decided I would just repeat it instead of drawing lots of different individual shapes.

I felt like seeing as there isn't much of a wide variety of imagery related to The Bloods that I couldn't really do much experimenting. I knew that I wanted to include the hand symbol seeing as it's the most recognisable thing, and the other things related to it, like street signs, didn't really go well with the design of the rest of the postcard.

After doing a little bit more research into The Bloods, I found more visual imagery that I could include in the work, Piru, which is related to where The Bloods originated from, helped me to develop more compositional sketches for that postcard. I began to like these designs much more than I had before.

I kind of had the same problem with the Neo Nazi postcard as what I had with the Bloods postcard, as their is a very limited amount of visual imagery that is easily recognisable and associated with the Neo Nazis. I played around with a little bit of the imagery and ended up finding a source image which I used to trace over.

La Cosa Nostra was by far my favourite gang to work with. I found the imagery associated with them the most visually interesting and easy to put down onto paper. I started out by looking at what they used to wear, as I thought this would be the most obvious thing to work with, in particular the suites and hats.

Again I found some reference images to draw from, and put them into Illustrator to trace over the top of.

After some visual play I decided on how I wanted to layout the final postcard, I did some rough sketches because I knew that once I put it into Illustrator, the way it would look digitally would help me to decide on the finishing touches to the image, for example, the background.