52 Weeks - Hitting The Ground Running

       So if you have me on Facebook or Instagram you might have noticed a little series of photos going up every week! In January I knew i would be changing jobs into a position less focused on photography, but which would give me better work/life balance and freedom to do more with my spare time. 5 weeks I am really enjoying it and being able to use my evenings and weekends to take photos has been great! 
      I wanted to keep motivated in the new year, I am into week 8 of this challenge and I have tried to do something new and different each week. The theme changes every week but on top of that I want to push myself and try new techniques and ideas. If anyone wants to join the challenge there is a group here to submit your photos and hashtags to share on social media. 

Week 1 - 52 steps from your front door. 3 exposures in and out of focus at the end of my road!

Week 2 - Sun. There was not a lot of sun in January, I shot some film but my local developers was out of action so this was what I had!

Week 3 - Black and white. Shot on my film camera on Ilford HP5, Stokes Croft graffiti makes for great high contrast photos. 

Week 4 - Landscape. My new job in Avonmouth has a nice walk I can go on on my lunch break with views of the boats! 

Week 5 - A childs laughter. This is my cousins little boy Jack who has the greatest big blue eyes and who is very hard to keep still!

Week 6 - Animals. I went to Wild Place in Bristol and caught this cheeky lemur having his lunch. 

Week 7 - The colour red. Valentines week, I was so so busy and ended up having no good ideas, this experiment with ink droplets came out rather well though.

Week 8 - Water and Ice. I froze some flowers and had fun smashing them open and playing around with composition.

Week 9 - Macro. I had a plan for this which looked horrible so in the end I just explored my living room and found this great cracked candle holder to photograph. 

Week 10 - Transport. Rather uninspired by this theme so I went to the village of Lacock and took photos of vintage bikes and lovely street stalls.

Photo walk around Lacock Village

      Last week on my day off I decided to get out of Bristol and go for a bit of an explore. My parents house is near Grittleton in Wiltshire, and there are many villages in the area which I used to frequent, whether on my bike or driving over for an explore! Lacock is one of my favourites, it has kept very traditional with its cobbled streets and quaint houses with decorated windows! Lacock is also famous for being featured in TV shows and films including Harry Potter, Cranford, Downton Abbey and Pride & Prejudice. 

      The lighting on this day was very flat and subdued, the skies were overcast and gray meaning a lot of the buildings I photographed needed a bit of a boost in the contrast. I have been using Lightroom more and more recently to experiment with adding my own levels of vintage style filter. I tend to do an initial lighting and colour correction edit before making a virtual copy which I then edit more heavily! 

*Quick tip - Creating virtual copies in Lightroom is great to make different versions of the same photo without losing or overriding your initial edits. Click Command+' (mac) or Control+' (windows) to create another copy of that image before adding your edits! Great for creating a colour version and then one in Black and white or sepia, or for trying a few crop variations. 

      I have been using lens correction tools to create vignetting and also playing around with split toning and camera calibration to add different tones to the images. 

      This raspberry bush really came out with this filter! I loved the subtle colours it creates. 

      The two above images both needed some contrast to bring out the patterns in the bricks and the shadows from the vines.

      

      Just a few of my favourites from the day! Let me know what you think, what are your favourite photography/drawing locations?!

Wacom Intuos Playtime

After finding out I have been overpaying my tax all year (soon to be resolved yay!) I decided to treat myself to something new. I have been meaning to buy a Wacom tablet since my final year of university when it was recommended by my course tutor. I finally got around to purchasing this Intuos Pen & Touch Tablet and decided to have a play with it. 

I started off by watching a large chunk of a "Wacom essential training" course on lynda.com, it is a subsciption site, but totally worth it if you want to learn new skills on all things design based! From this course I learnt about the history of tablets and how they work, and also how to set up useful shortcuts on the pen and tablet buttons so they work differently in different applications (through system preferences on a mac). 

I set up my desk with the tablet to the right of my mac, the hope is that when I move house I can get a bigger desk and have a better set up with a wireless mouse and keyboard and the tablet in front of the mac! I started just playing around with colours and different types of line, drawing font seems to work quite well as you get a really smooth line. 

Still in need of some practise I think.

While I didn't come up with anything super impressive it was good to just have a play and try out some things to get a feel for the tablet. I will likely use it mostly for colouring scanned in line-work rather than digital painting but I think using it for hand rendered type is definitely something I want to try more of. 

What is your experience of Wacom tablets? Anyone have any tips?

Tigerprint Gifted Competition 2013

Hey everyone! so I have been very busy recently working lots and spending time down in Plymouth for graduation so haven't been posting as much... sorry! Getting settled in now back home though so I will have more to show over the next few weeks.

For the past few years Tigerprint (who make greetings cards and gift wrap for M&S) have run a design competition for new graduates called "Gifted".

This year it ran over a whole month, each day had a new theme and you had to make a square design based on that theme. You could enter as many as you wanted but obviously the more variety you could show the more likely you were to win the prize which was a 3 month placement creating a range for Marks & Spencer.

I managed to create 13 designs and was selected as one of the commended winners (yay!) - you should check out the rest of this lot they have some lovely work :)

Anyhow, it seems like forever ago I did all of this work as it was back in July and I had to keep it secret until the end of the competition!

"Alphabet"

"Express Yourself"

"Back To Nature"

"Typographic"

"In Bloom"

"Freestyle"

"All About Colour"

"Make Your Mark"

"Spot"

"Summer"

I am hoping to release some of this work as prints and put some patterns on products soon. This may take a while as I am saving up to move out currently and working a lot but doing well in this comp is definitely motivating me to keep making stuff :)

Bucket List - The art of getting started

I recently started following a blog by Lee Crutchley of Quoteskine which is entitled "The Art Of Getting Started". This blog sets ongoing assignments to get people to go out and do things, to think about things in a different way. The first 3 are as follows:

#001 - Write your bucket list 

#002 - Go for a walk and document it in some way

#003 - Take a "selfie" that doesn't show your face

You can then submit what you did/made to the blog, anonymously or otherwise. This is a great thing to do if you are stuck in a bit of a rut and need some motivation. I used it as an excuse to make myself use illustrator a little more, using it to colour the text on my bucket list :

I should probably stick this on a wall or something so I don't get lost and forget to keep working! The second I took a series of photographs of a bike ride I went on (same idea as a walk...) 

And for the "selfie" I took a picture of my current desk setup, as right now art seems to be all I am doing!

Timelapse flowers and patterns

Today I started working on a design for this months Tigerprint competition to create a purely black and white pattern design. This was a bit of a challenge for someone who likes using colour so much and I had some fun with it.

As a bit of an experiment I started using a time lapse app that I downloaded to record my process and see how it came out. I recorded myself doing some of the drawing and then the digital editing on Photoshop. I found out it is really hard to get a straight on angle of a computer whilst also being able to use the keyboard (hence the sideways view). Let me know if you like this video I want to do a few more, though it does make me feel a bit more self conscious and slightly distracted whilst drawing...

And here is the pattern I came up with :

Edited the black and white design a bit further than in the video (its harder to focus when theres an ipad practically leaning on your shoulder...) 

I also got excited and wanted to use some colour (I don't think i am a monochrome artist!) so I came up with this mini range from the drawings I had. 

Oh and I got excited and put them on some things:

Buy these over at Society6. 

By the way this is all I am doing now I have graduated so if you have any commissions or projects you may need me for drop me an email at josiethejump@gmail.com and say hi :)