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.