The Ever Changing Malvern Hills

      So here is a short little blog post to bring in the new year! I spent my christmas with family and old friends up in their lovely house looking over the Malvern hills. I took a lot of really lovely photos but their view was one of my favourite things to look at. The light was constantly changing, on the final day before we left there was so much mist you couldn't even see the hills!
     

      It was nice to be able to photograph the same view in many different ways. It was a nice little challenge dealing with the different light. I am starting the new year excited and nervous for change. This year has made me learn that I have great friends and family, it has been a long year with a lot of change and we are all just trundling along on the same confusing journey. 
      I wonder if anyone remembers this Honda ad, very silly but it has become a little motto for me recently so I hope you can all watch this and hum it to yourself if you ever need a little motivation! Happy New Year to all!

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!

Templar Publishing Paper Watch Project

Today I have been working on something for a charity project run by Templar Publishing. As part of a bid to raise £5000 for Breast Cancer Care they have asked various illustrators to decorate a paper watch to be sold at auction. 

I set about doing some sketches for ideas

I decided to add colour using some metallic embellishment pens which have a 3D effect on the paper

Before moving onto my final watch:

I added an extra bit because the flowers weren't big enough on the watch face ;) 

You can see some images of the other watches over here on their facebook page! 

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. 

Fieldview Festival Build Week

I moved back from my Plymouth house last monday (sad times) and have spent the past week avoiding unpacking and rocking around fields in Little Somerford helping build the last ever Fieldview Festival.

After this incredible week working on the festival site and then attending it I have to say I am extremely sad it is the last one as it has been so much fun; great music, great atmosphere and wonderful people :)

I was working in the creative team run by Lewis from Tea In Dreamland, my friends Alice and Zoe were also helping out so we ended up working together on lots of bits and pieces:

Tax evasion sign (not the Fieldview sponsors...)

Painting walls and letters.

Helping paint the back of the main stage.

Hanging very long pieces of material in very windy weather (I swear the gold material drove us slightly mad)

Along with draping never ending bunting through the woods and all around various tents!

Here is some of the amazing signage and painting by the rest of the team:

Some seriously good stuff! Everything was ready on time and the sun was shining for the gates to open :). Heres some photos of the festival in full swing:

Until next time ;)

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...