Tigerprint christmas type competition

I was excited when reading the brief for this months Tigerprint competition because I have been needing an excuse to work on my hand drawn type and this seemed like the perfect project! I spent a lot of time working on different phrases in different styles and played around with different drawing implements. The photos below show some of my sketchbook work using brush pen, graphite pencil, italic markers and rotring fineliners to create different lines and textures. 

I played around with 5 different phrases for final designs, two I just couldn't get to look right so I scrapped them, these 3 are the ones I will be submitting for the competition:

This was my first design, I like the type, still not entirely sure the colour palette is quite right - I think I work better with a smaller selection of colours!

I loved drawing the frame for this image, I wanted it to be quite decorative with simple colours.

This one is my favourite - I love burgundy and I think the type fitted the shape really well.

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 :)

New work - Type experiments

Whilst I am at home and still job searching I have been trying to work on my portfolio, specifically working on my hand rendered type. 

After speaking to an agent at the end of third year I was told if I was going to use it I should really push it. She also told me to try a less digital approach so my work still looked slightly hand made which is why a lot of my recent work uses more pencil and crayon line. I remember being pretty annoyed when she first said that but i think it has added more depth to my work having more textured lines and backgrounds.

These two I made for the Tigerprint "gifted" competition but the balloon one ended up being quite dark and the photographic one didn't show my illustration skills as much as I would have liked so I submitted different images (which I still have to keep secret and it's driving me crazy - want them to publish the results!)

These two I made yesterday after seeing a project to describe yourself in your favourite type I got inspired and I am hoping to do a few more fun experiments over the next weel or so. 

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! 

Tigerprint female pattern

So last night I submitted designs to Tigerprint's monthly design competition. This months theme is "female surface pattern", the brief being fairly open, asking designers to re-invent female pattern, thinking outside the box and using designs which steer away from the obvious flower designs you see everywhere.

I have been using the Ipad app "IOrnament" a lot recently to draw my own digital designs. It takes a lot of the work out of figuring out repeats and the more I use it, the more I see how much you can do with it. Once you have drawn your pattern, you can see what that drawing looks like in different repeat styles, and you can then Email the tile to yourself to use in Photoshop as a pattern.

For this competition I opened the tiles I wanted in Photoshop and tweaked the colours, saturation etc. before submitting them to the competition!

I have also put some of the designs on Society6 if you fancy a cushion or phone cover, check them out in my shop here.