OUIL603 - Bucktown Arts Fest

Bucktown Arts Fest is an art festival run entirely by volunteers, who a yearly poster competition, to design their promotional poster. The only rules on the design of the poster, is that it must in some way, contain a goat. I was looking through past winning entries to see what they've liked before hand, obv I can do better though.

The bold white font contrasts nicely with the goat, and I actually like the green in the background, which I didn't at first, but it adds a nice depth to it and helps the goat and text to stand out even more.

This one, apart from the dodgy font, I really like, I like the mixture of textured fabric, sewing and drawn imagery.

I really tried to consider composition and depth in this one, as well as using my favourite colour palette; pinks, purples and blues. I used a lot of texture in this too, I painted with water colour and brusho and then scanned the pages in, cutting it up and using elements of that behind the colour, I think that texture also adds a lot more to colour, especially when it's just block colour.

Overall I was actually happy with this! I submitted it to the website, I haven't heard anything back yet but I'm hopeful. 

OUIL603 - Illustration Friday

So Illustration Friday was a massive fail. I did a few weeks of responding to the weekly word, and some of the images, I do actually like, but I just kind of lost interest with it, I was put off with a lot of the really bad entries that were on the website, and didn't really feel like it was benefiting me much. I understand the importance of being able to respond quickly to briefs, however I feel like I could do this for a much more worthy cause. I also don't think these types of briefs benefit my practice much, as I need to get more into spending lots of time working on one image, instead of just creating really fast throw away things. 

The think this one works well, because I played lots with texture again, scanning in paint textures and combining them with digital collage, and of course, using my signature (haha) pastely lilacy colours. I stil think my work could benefit more for stepping completely away from using digital methods and focussing on creating beautiful hand crafted illustrations. 

This piece helped me to mess around with different brushed for a while, I'd just bough Kyle T Webster's megapack and was lovvinngg all those brushes, so it gave me a chance to indulge in those and see what brush works best for different line qualities. Although I don't particularly like the final image, I enjoyed the process and doing something that was a little bit different.

If I were to do Illustration Friday again I would set a theme to give me some constraints to work to, possibly also a limited colour palette, I'd want to spend more time on each piece to make a beautiful intricate looking image, rather than something that only took me an hour and a bit.

This was one of the weekly drawings, the word of the week was punch, I got really excited with this one, but kept being unhappy with the way it turned out, got too busy with other briefs and had to abandon it, I'd love to come back to it and finish it at a later date, because I do like the looking down from above composition. 

OUIL603 - RedBubble patterns

I had my first sale from RedBubble the other day! Very exciting. I did only make £1.50, but that's irrelevant. I want to put lots more work up to raise my chances of having more sales, so I've made a few patterns to put up and want to make more.

I loooveeee this pattern, I think the lines work really well and give it movement, I really enjoyed drawing the flowy fish, they've got nice curvy lines and the colour stands out nicely against the background. I think it actually works better a little cropped like on the phone case above, rather than a small pattern, when its zoomed in and cropped it's much easier to see the detail.

I do wish I'd been able to make it a repeating pattern, so it looks more like a genuine pattern.

This pattern I made by painting onto tracing paper and overlapping the shapes before I scanned it in. Some of the scans didn't come out very well so the colours are a bit murky looking, but I like the spattering of blue drops that contrast against the pink.

here's the pattern on a pair of leggings, which I think looks right cool! I'd definitely wear them.

This last pattern I made from some olf textures I had from a Level 5 brief, I liked the colours and the shapes, I was really proud of this at the time! So I thought it would look nice if I made it into a pattern.

OUIL603 - Thought Bubble was ACE

Thought Bubble is always both amazing and horrible. I love meeting new people, getting to see lots of great art, and get feedback on my own work. But it's also the most tiring thing, having to pretend to be nice all day and all the effort that goes into preparing everything, when it might not even sell! Luckily I did make a fair profit from the weekend, and met some right nice people. I met Joan Cornella, one of my inspirations, and he signed my Mox Nox book! that was very nice and exciting.

By far my most popular piece of work was the 'You as a pigeon' portraits, people loved them. I did pay as you feel, which I think made them a lot more appealing to people, and a few people came back to my table because they'd seen someone else with one, which was quite a confidence boost. 

I don't know how relevant Thought Bubble will be to me in a few years time, I think I may out grow it, unless I suddenly get really amazing at making fan art, but I think I want to stay away from that for a while, as great as Thought Bubble is, it's a lot of stress to have a table, I think I want to enjoy going as just a consumer next year.

OUIL603 - Always Sunny

Thought Bubble happened to coincide with my obsession with watching Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which has quite a big, but nice audience, so I thought this work would be perfect for Thought Bubble, which has the biggest market for fan art.

I made this pair of prints which I sold together, and they sold out pretty quickly. I think I could have applied them to different things to expand the range and make more money, but Thought Bubble is not the time to do that, there's too much other stuff going on at the same time, and people only really want to buy prints.

I also made this character pattern, which I applied onto a notebook, these ones didn't sell too well because I think the paper was too poor quality, and the print itself wasn't too clear. Now that I know the technique of making a real pattern, I think i could improve vastly upon this design.

OUIL603 - Scully sketches

My screen prints sold well at TB last year. so I want to do some more! Carrying on with the x-files theme obviously, I drew an alt looking suicide girls esque Scully, these are some development sketches, although I didn't do many because when I'd finished this composition I was really pleased with it.

I decided to keep it simple and do a two colour screen print, I had a lot of work on at the time so I didn't want to push it for it to all go wrong! I'd love to push myself though and see if I can start to build up the amount of layers in a print.

OUIL603 - Ohh Deer Cushion Competition

One quick brief I though I would complete is the Oh Deer cushion competition, which was simple and could be completed quickly, I wasn't massively happy with all of the outcomes but it was a nice little break from the rest of my briefs and gave me the chance to just make cute little images. 

For this entry I was just messing around with texture and some weird looking colours, I was inspired by 80s patterns and was trying to go for 80's workout clothes.

I took this image from a responsive brief from Level 5, I thought he looked nice on his own and would work well on a cushion, because everyone likes animals.

I ended up carrying on with the animal theme, with more of a seasonal design. I thought that my cushion designs should look homely and inviting, so I used warm autumnal colours to go with the woodland themed pattern

Another homely design, I was looking through pinterest at pattern designs and notcied that most of them have something to do with nature, so I drew this. I'm really digging the joined up style writing which I've used a few times now, but I don't think it works very well looking back at it, I think the white is a little bit too harsh compared to the other warm colours.

My final design, I just wanted to have a bit of fun with, so I used my Sad Pupper character.

I mocked two of the cushions up and I actually think they look good! The placement of the images on the actual thing could be better, I think the designs would work if they were a little smaller, probably because they aren't repeating patterns.

OUIL603 - Guardian initials

First brief of the year!! woo!!

So this brief came through recently, Guardian want three illustrations for an article, the three prompts are:

1. Creating a perfect protfilio
2. Careers in the arts and creative industries
3. The revival of analogue methods in a world of digital advancements 

Editorial isn't normally my thing, but I thought I would give it a go and see if it can make me a fan!

Here are my initial sketches:

I found it quite difficult to find a balance between drawing something I liked and something that would fit the brief. I didn't really feel like the way I liked to work fitted with the imagery that I could come up with, that I thought would also fulfill the brief. That's probably just because I don't like doing editorial or massively conceptual work.

OUIL603 - Hildur Logo

As well as the merchandise designs, Hildur asked me to design her a logo to use on her new branding. She showed me some pictures of watercolour fonts that she liked, and asked me to do something swirly and soft looking. I tried a few different ways of painting her name, scanned it in and tried messing around with the colours, but it looked a bit naff.

In the end I decided to make a nice watercolour texture and scan those in, so I could just write the text on top digitally, way easier than painting it, you can't get rid of paint mistakes sadly.

I tried inverting the selection so that the text was the paint texture, but to me it made it a bit hard to read and looked really choppy and low res when you zoomed in, so I made a few blocks of water colour textures, combined them in Photoshop and wrote the text on top of that, which was way easier to read and looked quite simple. This option would also be a lot easier to place on different documents and images without being too distracting. 

I actually really liked these logos, I'm beginning to become a bit obsessed with trying to get good at hand drawn font things, I've been told a few times that it is one of my strengths, which I want to work really hard on improving. 

These were the final three logos that I sent to Hildur for her to choose from, in the end she chose the top one, which to be fair is probably my favourite one too. 

OUIL603 - Beard shirt design

A previous customer of mine, Tom of The Lion and the Wolf, asked me to design another t-shirt which would be sold on his upcoming tour . His design specifications were pretty simple, he literally just wanted an illustrated image of himself with the band name incorporated somehow. I genuinely liked been given such a precise task, there wasn't much room for failure, apart from messing around with colour, and it was a fairly simple brief that I finished quite quickly.

Here is the design in context, which to be honest, I don't think looks as good as on screen. I think it's because of the blunt cut off point at the bottom of the design, which I wish I could have fixed, but I was never asked to, so didn't find out until after it was printed, which was a bit annoying. Regardless though I think the clean, thin linework works really well in the bold white ink. 

Tom originally asked me to make the design into a poster too, but decided a bit later that only the t-shirt design was needed. However I had already started to make the poster, and started playing around with colour palettes and font. 

I spent quite a bit of time shading behind the hair and beard to give the image a bit of depth, and I really loved the composition of the poster, I actually think the design worked a lot better for the poster than the t-shirt design, but oh well!

OUIL603 - Film Society

Me, Adam, Hollie and Joe all decided that we would like to take over the film society, seeing as there wasn't anyone currently running it.

It was decided that I would design the logo, which I was pleased about, I like doing nice type, and I want to expand my typography skills anyway. It needed to be quite simple and bold, so that it would be noticeable at both a small and large scale. I went with a simple black and white colour scheme, so that we could easily change it to fit the colour scheme of any poster.

 

Each week we will design a different poster for each film, and also put out a call for submissions, as we think this is a nice way to get other people involved, and promote the society. Our first showing was The Grand Budapest Hotel, which has a very recognisable aesthetic, so I used the colour scheme from the film and a recognisable scene.

I have moments where I love the text on the grand budapest poster and moments where I hate it. I think I could have tried using an actual font rather than hand drawing it, but I always prefer to draw it myself.

The next showing after that was Clueless, which was really popular and plenty of people turned up to it. I wanted the poster to be attention grabbing, so I used a famous quote from the film, that anyone that likes and knows the film well would recognise.

OUIL603 - First Thought Bubble Pieces!

Despite this work also being fan art, I'm really really pleased with it, I really thought about composition, especially with fitting the text around the building at the top. 

Just to toot my own horn a little bit, I'm pleased with how the highlights went from the blue lights/text, I really like the contrast of the neon blue against the softer brown colours.

I think you can see a very big improvement from my Thought Bubble work last year, I think I'm considering colour and composition a lot more. I'm usually not very pleased with my work, but I right love this!

OUIL603 - Travelling Man

 In the run up to Thought Bubble, a group of us are having a mini exhibition at Travelling Man, in the hanging frames that they have running down the middle of the shop. We decided against working to a theme, because a lot of us had already decided what we wanted out poster to be, so we went with having a unifying colour scheme of red, blue and yellow instead.

I was struggling a bit trying to decide what to make for the mini exhibition at Travelling Man. I usually feel a bit bad about doing fan art, but I think that the type of crowd that frequent Travelling Man and Thought Bubble like that sort of stuff, at Thought Bubble last year my most popular pieces were fan art, rather than my original art work.

I'd recently been re-watching Futurama, so I decided to do something based on that, seeing as my love for it was fresh in my mind and ALSO at the same time as that, I have started doing roller derby! So obviously I had to do something roller derby themed Leela. Being a strong female character in Futurama I think that Leela would go well in the derby crowd, so I think this is a perfect mashup of fanbases.

I looked into other roller derby posters and they all seem to be quite busy with dense imagery like this:

A bit of a nicer illustrated one, I love the blue and purple with the contrast of the yellow, obviously I can't use colours other than the specified palette but I still want to make a highly contrasting poster with the colours I can use.

This was the final outcome, I enjoyed working with the limited colour scheme, I think it really gave the work a different edge to it and will make it stand out. I tried to use the lines of the track to create a line of sight that draws your attention up the poster. I think the poster is a little bit text heavy, but that's okay, I like the text itself, they all work well as a seperate piece, but I think the poster would have looked better if it was more image heavy.

OUIL603 - Thought Bubble brief

The Brief
For Thought Bubble I intend to create a range of different pop-culture themed illustration, which will appeal to a wide audience, mainly fans of geek culture/comic book culture. I need to make high quality work with a range of processes in order to make a profit.

Products I want to produce

• X-Files prints
• Always Sunny In Philapelphia prints
• Orange is the New Black zine/prints
• Cute puppy badges.
• Futurama prints
• Clay products

Audience

The majority of people who attend Thought Bubble are fans of comic book culture and fan art. Based on my sales at Thought Bubble 2014, I know that the most popular work is fan art, so I intend to make more of this in order to maximise profit and sale ability.

Context

The work will be sold at Thought Bubble convention, among many other tables, so the work must stand out.

Mandatory Requirments

Business Cards

A range of prints

A range of crafts

My experience from last years Thought Bubble definitely gave me a better understanding of what that kind of audience want to buy, last year I printed way too much so had a lot of extra stock, although I could sell it afterwards on my Etsy I think it would be much easier to just print less to avoid losing money. 

OUIL603 - Live briefs

I have already completed one live brief, a collection of commissions I have been asked to do over summer.
As for the other ones, I intend on using Thought Bubble as a brief, as I will be doing a large quantity of work for this.
I quite enjoyed doing Secret 7 last year, so I think I want to do it again this year, I enjoyed responding to a physical thing, like music, I think this year I need to concentrate on doing more album covers.
I was considering doing either the YCN or D&AD brief again, however last year I kind of fell out with D&AD because of the submission cost, which I think is a bit silly. I'll wait and see how my other briefs are looking before I decide to take on one of those, because I did really enjoy collaborating with Paul during Responsive level 5.

OUIL603 - Guardian Brief

I decided to take on the Guardian brief, because I've never done editorial illustration before, I thought it would be nice to give it a go and to get back into the flow of reacting to a specific brief, rather than just doing illustration for fun, like I had been over the summer holidays.

The brief asked for three illustrations on the theme of working in the creative industries.

I wasn't too sure what to do for this brief, I felt a little rusty after the holidays.

The first image was for an article about how to build the perfect protfilio.

On reflection, I wish I had swapped the colours round so that it looked more like a set, I think this one stands out a little bit.

Overall, I was pleased with my submission, I think that considering I'm not really a fan of editorial work, I managed to create something that reflects the way I like to work and the recognisable aspects of my work. 

OUIL603 - Choosing my briefs.

After Freds 603 workshop, I feel pretty confident in choosing what briefs I should go ahead with, and what kind of brief category they go in. I think I have way too many Big Kahuna briefs at the minute, so I definitely need to narrow those down and decide which go best with my rationale.

I'm a bit stuck between these three massive breifs:
1. Making Illustrated homeware and accesories for my Etsy shop (badges, clay stuff, toys)
2. Publishing a set of childrens books.
3. Designing furniture.

I need to speak to Fred really and see what he thinks, but I know that with the amount of time I have, this would be definitely too much to take on all 3 at once.

For the other lot of briefs, I know that I want to do, Secret 7, Pan Macmillan, Offlife, and Thought Bubble, which is a semi Big Kahuna.

OUIL603 - 83 Photography Mockups

I mocked up the logo onto some business cards and stationary sets, the simplicity of the logo allows it to be transfered onto different contexts without being distracting. The logo also works really well on Robin's social media sites, it gives me a good feeling to see something I've designed all over someones business and their websites.

This is the front page of Robin's website, the wedding photography section, and look how well it goes with the rest of the site! very pretty, I'm pleased with that.

OUIL603 - 83 Photography

I was recently approached by the lovely Robin, a photographer from Leeds who needed a new logo for his photography company, 83 Photography. He wanted a new logo that would help customers associate the wedding photography side of his business '83 Weddings' with his normal photography.

He saw my work on Instagram and liked the cartoony, bright colours I had used in some of my previous work. So this was the approach I took when designing his new logo.

These are the original sketches that I sent Robin, of two potential designs I had in mine, and also a vague colour scheme, which was pastel obviously. He told me that he wanted a simplified version, something that was easy to use as a logo and could go on anything without being too distracting. 

SO I came up with the below idea, which had Robin holding a camera, which was a must for the logo, and also the heart and name in the middle, which are the two other important aspects that Robin specified must be in the design. 

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