Wild Place Project

      I read a blog post a while ago about photography tips to get you inspired. One of those tips was to make the effort to keep going back to the same place a number of times to get yourself more familiar and to challenge yourself to create new images with the same subject. I went to Wild Place in Bristol at the start of April, it is kind of a cross between a zoo (with much larger enclosures than Bristol zoo in the city) a kids play area and wild gardens. 

      I really enjoyed walking round the area as it is very open and quiet, even if it is just off of the motorway! There are lots of wild flowers all around with lots of different colours and they also have their own gardens which are maintained by staff. The walk round takes you to different animal enclosures - the meerkats and lemurs are the most fun I think. There is also a lot for kids to do including lots of mini playgrounds with tyres and dens and also a barefoot walk with lots of textures and materials, including mud, for kids to run through. 

      I signed up for an annual pass after the end of my first trip and now I have been back twice. I have only been in the week but even though there are lots of kids, the area is so spread out it has felt incredibly quiet and nice to just walk around alone and explore in the woods and gardens. 

      Each time I have visited I have taken a different lense with me which I think has helped get different images each time. With my Nikon D5100 I use:

Sigma 17-50mm f2.8
Nikon 35mm Prime f1.8
Nikon 55-200mm f4-5.6

      Todays shots were with the zoom lense, which was interesting as it helped me get some super close up of animals faces like the meerkat below:

      The lemurs are in an enclosure you can walk around which means I could get really close to them. There have been a few new babies over the past couple of months which has been good to capture. 

      These brown lemurs (feel free to help me out with the species) are very friendly, I got the photo of this one in the tree just before one poo-ed on my arm... not so fun!

      As well as the larger animals I have found this area great for getting up really close to flowers and smaller bugs. I think I may have to get a macro lense or extension tubes at some point so I can get even closer! 

First lesson In Image Retouching

     I have spent the last week watching another lynda.com course, this weeks lesson was called "Retouching Bridal Portraits". It covers all different ways of enhancing and retouching different types of portraits. I have done a little bit of retouching in the past, but this was a really great eye opener into better practises of using lots of layering and masking so you don't make changes to an image that can't be undone if you make a mistake. I liked the face that the course focused on enhancing what was already there rather than completely changing the person in the photo. 
     I have tried out a few of my own images from the archives, turns out I really don't have a lot of good quality portraits to mess around with! So these were the best I can do and my sister is a little mad I picked a "moody" photo of her... Sorry Flo...

This first image I chose was based on one of the images on the  course being backlit. I got rid of some flyaway hairs, retouched small areas with lens glare and warmed up and brightened the whole image. The screen shot below shows some of the many layers and masks I used in creating this image.

     This next one is a holiday photo of one my oldest friend Missi, this one didn't have too much work done to it. I cleaned up the background, smoothed the skin and brightened up the teeth and sunglasses and added some contrast and curves adjustments. 

This final image was by Hannah Nichols from Pink kitten Dance School where I take aerial circus classes. I chose it because it gave me a chance to try lots of different types of clean up on the background. I used lots of different filters to remove the dust and add blur. I also copied areas of the curtain across to cover the lights before blending these in and adding spotlights and colour edits in the Camera Raw filter tool. 

I still need a lot of practise with this but it is good to know some more skills and tools I can use to clean up images and enhance them in a natural way. 

The Girl and the Bird

My course leader Ashley Potter from Plymouth University has been running a project to investigate how different people tackle illustration work and how this may relate to their personalities. 

The project was entitled "Girl & Bird" this subject has been tackled many times in the past in all different ways and we were asked to interpret it however we liked, and then answer a questionnaire about our work which involved questions about ourselves, the work we did and about our personality types. 

I used this project as an opportunity to do a "real" illustration project, after months away from university I have found myself spending much less time on research and drawing development in the work I do and I wanted to push myself further in this one to try and create something exciting.

I used Pinterest to collect a variety of images to inspire me. Since I started learning aerial hoop I have been collecting different poses to motivate myself and I found myself drawn to the idea of including this in my work for this project as the grace and elegance of aerial artists posing in hoops reminds me of birds sat on branches. 

The first aerial girls I drew were ok, I found myself reverting back to the style I used when drawing the circus characters for my final year project. Whilst the facial expressions for that worked well, I wanted this girl to look less juvenile and more sophisticated.

After researching pierrot makeup and fashion illustrations I spent a while experimenting with different face styles in the drawings shown below. 

I much preferred these to the simplistic expressions I used to use and decided to carry this as a theme within the bird character. My first birds were fun, but rather fat :

I developed these using longer, curvier lines and more sophisticated faces, I wanted them to look more like birds of paradise.

For my final piece I chose a hanging pose for the girl on the hoop as I really liked the pose, I decided to use textured watercolour paper as it gave the line work a rougher style.

After scanning the drawing in I coloured it using Photoshop, I chose a palette of bright, fun colours to fit the fantastical theme, I was very happy with it and I hope to put prints online soon!

"Winter" Cd cover design

So a few months ago my dad told me he was recording a new EP to be released sometime around christmas. For the past few years I have dont the artwork for all of his CD's along with doing a bit of backing singing on various tracks which is always quite hilarious! 

 My parents took a trip to Alaska and a lot of the lyrics were inspired by that, one song in particular was about sitting outside with a glass of whisky looking at the night sky. I decided this was a pretty good visual so I decided to run with that. 

I wanted the image to use flat perspective with a lot of pattern and strong shapes. Here is a bit of my research looking at fantastical Illustration and book art - the Never Ending Story cover is my favourite!

I used a thick italic fountain pen for most of my sketching. Most of my linework is usually done with thin Rotring fineliners but I wanted the drawing to be quite rough and rugged and this pen gave more of that effect.

I drew the figure on an Adirondack style chair, I sat on a lot of these chairs in my time in New York and they take me back to that feeling of being out in the countryside surrounded by trees and beautiful forest landscapes. 

I wanted to create a patterned border to frame the piece as I have always loved illustrations with borders like this but I have never tried to create one myself.

Setting up my "studio" on our kitchen table to start the final artwork.

Inking up the pencil line

Getting to the final stages

This is the finished artwork after I had added pencil shading for depth. 

For the typography I sat for an evening and ruined my wrist everything using my glass dip pen in a simple font style. It hurt but I enjoyed the effect once it was finished.

I then had to scan it all in to be digitally coloured and edited together. The final CD arrived this week yayyyy!

I used the same border and elements from the main image in the inside and reverse cover so it all linked together and I put the trees on the main CD because I liked the shapes they made (plus I love pattern so I hate empty space...). Let me know what you think of this, has anyone else done any CD art they would like to share? I will put a link to the tracks when they are online which should be soon!

Christmas Fayre Poster - Hand Drawn Type

I have seen a lot of beautiful posters about recently using hand drawn type mixed with illustration to give a more "hand made" style to the events they are advertising. This works especially well when it comes to advertising craft fayres as the whole premise behind these events is buying into hand crafted goods. I find hand drawn typography to be a lot more charming and interesting to look at than standard fonts. 

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I have wanted to make a poster like this for a while now so I jumped at the opportunity to help out a friend who is running a christmas craft fayre in Chippenham to raise money for a local charity on 21st December. Check out the event page here.

I thought I would go into a bit about my process when it comes to hand drawn type. I usually loosely sketch out a composition of what my piece of work will look like. I am no graphics/layout expert but generally just looking at the shapes of different letters and words and seeing how they fit around each other helps when working out a composition.

To come up with the different type styles I usually use dafont.com where I will look at a variety of fonts before choosing one and experimenting with drawing it out in my own style with different drawing implements. It usually ends up with the text being a hybrid of the chosen font and my own style due to the different tools I use. 

One tip I have for hand drawn type is to experiment a lot with your tools. I prefer my designs to have different line weights and textures as I think it looks richer and more interesting. This is a small selection of what I use for type:

 Left to right: Berol Italic Pen, Rotring Mechanical pencil, 3 Rotring Rapidograph pens of various weight, Graphite pencil, Graphite stick, Alex Wonder Pen (alternative to brush pens, click for how to make), Calligraphy Fountain Pen. 

Graphite sticks for example have a really great grainy texture and chunky ones can easily be manipulated to create different thicknesses of line.

These presents are drawn with 3 different thicknesses of fineliner.

For this I drew out my design roughly in the chosen fonts in pencil before going over with various types of pen/graphite pencils. Here is the scan of the finished design:

I then went into Photoshop to tweak the composition, retouch because am not the neatest of artists, and add colour and layers of texture. Here is the final result:

I enjoyed this project, hoping I can do more like this in the future! Feel free to share your own hand drawn type projects, I love to see what people are working on :)