Thursday 25 February 2010

Inspiration - Jim Flora







Some visual inspiration that Ian M pointed me towards, in the form of Jim Flora. His use of shape and positive and negative space is very similar to what I have been developing for my "birds in the tree" idea.

Social Networks Editorial Brief Progress




So, this was the evolution of some of the ideas I created on monday. After a chat with Ian, I decided the emoticons could be the main cover idea, and that the birds in the tree and the growth (spider web) ideas would be the spot illustrations. I decided that the tree should be more of a stylised tree to better represent a network. Also, the growth idea changed from a spider web, to the idea of different things competing. So each website would be represented by something and some would be doing great, and others would fail as soon as they started, to represent the fortunes of social networking sites. The rocket one was my favourite so I decided to go with that eventually.

Social Networks Editorial Brief (Initial Thoughts)





So these were my initial ideas on the social networking brief, after reading the article I was trying come up with some metaphors and realised it was pretty much impossible to come up with something that hasn't been done before, so I thought I'd just go for it. The web was a metaphor for the growth of the social networking sites, how they steadily get bigger as more members join. The different colours represent how the website is expanding.
The birds in the tree was a simple metaphor for members of the Twitter website, and the tree was another metaphor for a network in general. The other idea was very simple, emoticons (the little smiley faces) joined up in some sort of network.

Wednesday 17 February 2010






More posters for Inglorious Basterds from www.ffffound.com

Inglorious Basterds Posters








Some amazing posters for the Inglorious Basterds film, images found on www.ffffound.com

Thursday 11 February 2010

Spider




This is the creature I have come up with, various found images mixed with scanned in bolts and steel plates, as well as an ink wash to disguise where the various elements meet, also a joystick-spinneret made in illustrator. As I said all I have to do now is come up with the character to resist this monstrosity...

Resistance Brief Further Progress

So, after deciding that I was to create a grotesque creature that embodied computer games/ the internet etc, and have someone resisting it, I set out to get some visual reference for the creature itself. I braved the college library, usually a den of deliquincy inhabited by all the scallies and G-stars stockport college has to offer, you wouldn't believe the shit ive heard while sat at a PC in there... anyway I digress...

I acquired some good visual refernce on snakes, octopi, bugs and other such interesting creatures and set about making a couple of animal-frankensteins from the cut out appendages of said creatures. This was mostly to get a feel of what it looked like to have the different photographs mashed up. After a couple of attempts it was clear that a solid silhouette needed to be established, i.e it needed to be definitely a spider or a snake or an octopus, not somewhere inbetween, as it wasn't communicating very well. Also, I got a lot of visual reference and found imagery of technological things, to begin making creatures with. I found Scart leads, TRS cables, circuit boards, games console logos and controllers, and soon I had created a spider like creature. I used a pen to hatch over the points at which the photographs met, to disguise them a bit.

After a talk with Ian M I realised that I had made my creature quite friendly looking, and also that it didn't have a strong enough spider silhouette yet. So I set out with renewed vigour to get this spider right. I established a better silhouette, one that was defined the creature clearly as a spider, and found some better elements to make it meaner looking.

So after a couple of attempts, I'm happy with the spider, it has a good mix of found image, hand made marks, and some real nuts and bolts in there to give it a mechanical look. All thats left now is to create the character that will be resisting this grotesque demonisation of computer games....