Current happenings...

Just a quick overview of whats going on at the moment, firstly the Negotiated Project that I was really looking forward to has taken a backseat, due to the ghosts of the past (in the form of the 7x7 project) coming back to haunt me.

So my 7x7 illustrations have changed some since last summer. I refined the silhouette in illustrator and then also re-did the pattern. After a talk with Ian the silhouette has been refined AGAIN to a much more simple one, to show off more of the pattern.
With regards to the spot, I made the shape of a pocket watch in illustrator then added hand drawn numbers and hands to its face. Then I drew another skull to represent the number 12, and I scanned in a chain to use as the chain on the pocket watch. The requirements of the printers i.e only having blue and black as colours haven't made all that much difference as my illustrations were almost black and white anyway, but the photoshop trickery involved in breaking up the layers has been a massive pain in the arse, so big thanks to Chris Howker for helping me with that.

The 7x7 animation is going well, currently I'm working with illustrator Ste Nuttall and MI students Tom Mathieson and Luke Haslam on the animation for 7x7. Things are going well with some really cool stuff being made by Tom and Luke, and Ste and myself making some elements for the MI guys to animate. They are both cool guys so working with them is a pleasure and I can't wait for the end result.

So, hopefully I'll be able to get 7x7 out of the way soon and really get into this Negotiated Project and get making some Collographs and Screens!

7x7 Final Images

These are my final images for the 7x7 Brief. For the main image, I stuck with the idea of the Victorian gentleman's silhouette, filled with my custom pattern, on a black background. I tried various different coloured backgrounds however I wasn't happy with any of them, and black just seemed to fit. It also fits in with the rather dark subject matter and the funereal aesthetic of the Victorian gent. The idea of the spot image started out when Gary Spicer looked at some of my sketches and pointed out that an open pocket watch might make for an interesting composition, i.e dividing the page out into two circles. I started to make the elements and compose the illustration but the two circles didn't seem to be working. I used my Dad's pocket watch and scanned it in, but it didn't have the design whereas it would open up into two halves, so after a while of experimenting, I decided it would be better to just have one side of the watch in the illustration. Again I used a William Morris pattern as a background and the reason for the black mark behind the watch is because without it, the details of the watch face were lost among the pattern. I tried a perfect black circle but this didn't look as good as a more rough mark. I also included a very faint skull drawing within the watch face again to symbolise that the main character of the story dies.

7x7 brief - some similar work

A very kind person from my class pointed me towards some work that is spookily similar to my own (although much much better), I not entirely sure of the artist, so I'll simply include the link that was given me in the first place...

http://ullam.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/06/tordboontje_pg01601

7x7 Brief - more progress!

So having showed these images to Ian and Gary and receiving positive feedback about the idea, I decided to make my own pattern and try and include elements of the story within the pattern. So it was essentially a pastiche of a Victorian pattern but it would include elements from the story such as a skull (to symbolise death), street lamps, the stairs (that the main protagonist falls down to his death) and his pocket watch. The first image I have included is one of my attempts at this, and the second one is another go at making my own pattern but this time only including the skull and the stairs.

7x7 Brief - progress

Using the stencil left over from cutting out the silhouette I included on the last post, I tried a technique of using some Victorian pattern (courtesy of a fine William Morris book from the Library) to give the left over shape form, further progressing the idea of using shape and texture together, as the pattern is quite textural. You can see by the two images here what it looked like. I'll also include a couple of patterns from said William Morris book so you can see what they look like in colour.

7x7 Brief

I've not posted anything for a while so the next few posts are going to cover the past few weeks of progress on this brief...

As I said in the last post, I was having real trouble with ideas generation for this brief, I was getting really bogged down in my sketchbook doing useless doodles, so Ian my tutor gave a task to do one morning. It was to find 40 images. 10 that I liked, 10 that I thought Ian/Gary would like, 10 that were relevant to the story and 10 that were irrelevant to the story. So I set off to the library and over the period of about 3/4 of the day I had plastered my walls with images.

The images I found were very varied, obviously the relevant-to-the-story images were of the Victorians etc, but the others were very varied indeed, they included Albrecht Durer, Henrik Drescher, some Japanese woodblock prints, Samurai armour, South Pacific tribal art, Frank Miller graphic novels, Noma Bar, illustrations from a book on alchemy and mysticism and more...

But one thing they all had in common was the combination of strong shapes and texture or mark-making that was quite textural. So, using this I began to make some work combining the two, strong shape and texture.

The two images included in this post are what I came up with...