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.