"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!

Insta-new year

Oh my goodness where did all of december go?

So mid november I started a new job working as a christmas temp. I have loved being part of a larger team in a workplace full of lots of creative and interesting people. The nature of the job and training has meant I have not had very much time for myself or my artwork, I am hoping in the new year I can dial it back a little and split my time a little more evenly. 

This post is a little update on what I have been doing and what I hope to be working on in the new year! 

Circus anyone? Ok so anyone who has been following my work in the past will know I am a little obsessed with the circus and I have been wanting to have a go for such a long time! In November I took up aerial hoop and silks classes in bristol which has been ridiculous fun, albeit slightly painful as far as bruises and calloused hands go, but your body does start to get used to it ;) hoping to fit in as much practise as I can in the new year. 

I have been working on some CD cover artwork and text for my dads new EP. Hoping to make a whole blog post for this when it is finally finished and printed up but until then here is a little preview of the unedited artwork.

I got very crafty over christmas and decided to make as many people's presents as I could. Turns out making soap is fairly easy once you have all the materials, my kitchen smelt very clean for a while whilst I was doing this. I have also been making notecards and packaging them up in a slightly more rustic way than in cello bags which I usually use. At some point these may turn up on etsy, we will see when I have the time!

I went to London for the day for my boyfriends birthday and finally managed to get to the Liberty shop, here are a couple of pictures before they told me off (sad face). The christmas window displays were beautiful and their stationary section was a little like heaven for a pattern obsessive like me.

Christmas day itself I managed to gain a pretty hefty stack of art books, my aim for the new year is to try out some new drawing activities from these books and hopefully do a few reviews mixed with those drawings on the blog. I also got some POSCA markers which I am excited to use having never tried them out before, such epic colours!

Here is a nice little picture just outside my new job! I have been kept on for now (yay!) so will still be working but now I am more settled in I can hopefully plan some new projects ;)

What is everyone else planning in the new year? Let me know!

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 :)

Glass Dip Pens and Kelmscott Manor

Last wednesday I went for a day out to Kelmscott manor with my mum. Kelmscott was the home of british designer William Morris for many years, after writing my dissertation on his work I have a bit of an obsession, unfortunately you weren't allowed to take photographs inside the house but you can see some of his work from when I visited the William Morris Museum in London here.

It was a lovely sunny day so we wandered around the gardens and I got some photos of the autumn leaves - such lovely colours!

We had a timed entrance so had a look around the gift shop before we went in, you could buy almost anything in some kind of Morris print.

My mum bought me an early birthday present, a venetian glass dip pen and ink set which is absolutely beautiful! 

It holds the ink in the ridges in the glass and it flows really nicely, I haven't used ink in ages so I did a few doodles.