Paint and Trees

This week I have been doing some workshops with autistic children as part of Plymouth Universities widening participation scheme. Todays workshop was run by Jo LB of Drawing Together, and we were making trees with the children to be put together into a magical forest.

The children were given large sheets of paper to draw their trees onto. They then could draw any kind of tree shape they wanted and use collage, drawing, stencilling and printing techniques to create their trees. 

There were some wonderful creations :) 

As they were happy to get on with working, we decided to get involved and make our own trees and have a general play around!

Jo used stencils and printing

Jordan did some paper engineering.

and I played around with some UV paint and drew some colourful leaves! Sometimes I wish I was a child again, painting things is so much more fun than I remembered...

So Many Projects!

The past week has been truly crazy! Since I got back from London I have been attempting to enjoy the sun whilst also improving my portfolio and working on new things in an attempt to secure any job that doesn't require me standing behind a till!

Tigerprint are running a daily design competition up until 26th July where you can enter as many designs as you want based on the themes they set each day. I have been working on all sorts from patterns and typography to greetings card designs. 

Because the final work might be used for M&S I can't show anything yet but here are a couple of previews of a couple of my drawings! 

I also signed myself up for the Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search competition. The prize is representation by Lilla Rogers' agency for 2 years. I wanted to try my luck at the competition, even though I knew the standard would be very high and it would be unlikely I would get that far. After receiving the brief however, I scared myself a bit and avoided starting for way too long:

Consequently the deadline is today at 5pm, and I started my artwork design (which I thought up last night) at 10am. 

Note to self - do not leave things to the last minute it will leave you shaky and panicky whilst trying to Photoshop well and mean you make lots of mistakes and don't feel too great about the whole thing! 

The brief was to create a Journal cover imagining the client was Paperchase. The theme was vintage playgrounds and playground equipment and you could interpret this however you liked. It seems my new autopilot mode is to revert back to drawing circus performers after spending so long focusing on them for the Opticians artwork I did! Anyhow, I drew a girl reading a journal sat on a static trapeze/swing. 

Here is my final artwork as it was submitted :) for 4 hours of panicky drawing and Photoshop it came out better than I thought. It got to a point where my goal was not to get into the shortlist, but just to submit something that wasn't embarrassingly awful and I think I got there just about! 

William Morris Museum and Gallery

A lot of my friends know I have a love for William Morris after basing a large chunk of my dissertation on his work. If you do not know anything about him already he was a British designer who focused on bringing back a high level of quality in design after the industrial revolution. Morris's designs are heavily focused on nature and his wallpapers and fabric designs are still being printed today.

This museum is in Walthamstow in North London, you can reach it by getting the tube to Walthamstow centre and either walking for 20 mins or getting a bus. The museum is free entry and is hosted in the house where he was born, there are over 10,000 objects in the collection ranging from fabrics and pattern designs, to books  and metalwork.

I took some sneaky photos of things I liked!

These were sketches of designs for fabric and wallpaper, it was really interesting to see the original pencil line next to the fully worked colour.

Wood block for printing

Wrapping paper on sale in the shop

And however strange it is to take a photo of a toilet I couldn't resist!

I also took some photos of the beautiful gardens which were full of so many different types of flowers. Would be a great place to go and sketch (i was feeling lazy so just took pictures for later reference)

London Show - New Blood

So last week I went to London for 4 days to help set up and invigilate our uni show for D&AD New Blood. This show hosts universities and colleges throughout the UK with courses spanning many areas including graphic design, animation and illustration.

We arrived at 8.30am last tuesday to set up the show which involved making up portfolios, sticking together lots of velcro pads and lots of awkward lining up of images on foam board. I managed to drop a stack of about 100 portfolio pages on the floor which is always a fun thing to sort out... too much sleep deprivation causes silly thing to happen!

That afternoon I got to travel across London with 3 others to have a portfolio surgery with agency Phosphorart. This was really enjoyable as we got feedback about our work and got to look through some of the portfolios of artists they represent. 

We then went back to Spitalfields to get ready for the private view at 6pm - no rest for the wicked!

I didn't get a chance to take many photos but here are a few of other uni's work I liked:

We also had a wander around lots of other parts of London including Camden where I stumbled across some pretty amazing street art.

Was a great few days hanging out with everyone and looking around London, now just trying to figure out this whole job business and working on a few competitions! Hopefully I will be able to post some new work soon :)