Avid Liongoren - Project 365

These images are from "project 365" by Avid Liongoren, he draws one picture everyday and adds them to photographs in hopes of inspiring people to create something new each day. These a really great images and the little creatures he adds in, even though they are clearly not of this world, somehow seem to blend in and not look too out of place. I have decided to take a new direction with my photografik project in that I am trying to show more of my personal interests, fantasy art and literature, somehow intruding on the real world. I have done a couple of drawings but they seem to look very crude on top of my pictures, and really out of place, so hopefully I'll come up with something that blends in a little better. I hope to show the fantasy world somehow entering the real world in rather dull situations livened up by fantasy characters that will be added.

You can see the rest of his work here - http://project365.multiply.com/

What It Feels Like - Finished Illustrations

These are my finished illustrations for the "what it feels like" brief. Again I am happy with them considering the time limit and I feel the ideas were fairly good. From bottom to top they are; to be really, really tall, to have tourettes, and to be bitten by a shark.

The idea for the really tall story was based on a part of the text where the man describes being like a contortionist getting into his car, so I tried to show the figure very cramped inside the silhouette of his car. However I possibly could have spent more time on the figure and done more versions of it to get exactly the right one.

The next one is the "to have tourettes story". I made a simple figure shape to communicate the person in the story and then made his body out of the different words he said, such as toast, butter, and monkey; to show that these words were constantly inside him ready to burst out at any moment. I also made the figures head a scribble to show how chaotic it must be to not be able to control your speech. Unfortunatley it didnt have as much impact as I would have hoped on a smaller scale.

The final illustration is the one I chose to be the front cover, to be bitten by a shark. I was quite happy with this although personally I feel the rough's work better as putting it through photoshop seems to have sucked the soul from it. I did many different sharks but I realised that they were just nice sharks and had no real idea behind them. So I chose to try and represent the shark as just what really matters, eyes and teeth. I put a swimming figure in the eye as a sort of a reflection to try and show that the shark was eyeing up the swimmer ready to strike at any possible moment, and to reinforce how vulnerable we are to such a predator, and in doing that reinforce the amazing story of survival from such an attack.

Social Networks Finished Illustrations

This is a little late but here's the finshed illustrations for the Social Networks Editorial brief. Hopefully its evident how these ideas evolved from the ideas I posted earlier. I am fairly happy with them considering the time limit, and I think the ideas are quite good but its the execution that I didnt do too well on. One thing I learnt for certain was to consider the size that the illustrations are going to be in the format, as both my spots looked quite pathetic in the format. I now know that if the format given is quite small, then decisions need to made to ensure the illustration has a lot of impact for the small space.

Photo-grafik project

My initial ideas on the photo-grafik project (after speaking to Rick M) were to use shapes to block out photographs leaving only a portion of them to be seen through the shape. These turned out quite good as the images were being framed in interesting ways. However, it became even more interesting when I used the shape itself on top of the photograph to block out some of the image. This worked well as it forced the viewer to imagine what was underneath the shape and also to try and piece together what was missing by what was actually there. It seemed to force the viewer to establish the identity of the person by what was surrounding them, taking the focus away from their facial features and onto what was around them to give a sense of their identity. Ian M pointed me towards a book called "the commissar vanishes", which details the disappearance of members of Stalin's political party from official photographs. These started off being cleverly removed, but eventually became rather brutally inked out, which interestingly also served as a warning to other members. These are a couple of photos I have found from that book. Hopefully I will be able to do something similar with my work, although what that is remains to be seen...

"What it feels like..." Brief - Noma Bar

Here's some inspiration for the "what it feels like brief" in the form of an illustrator called Noma Bar, Ian M alerted me to this fantastic illustrators work, and it has provided some good inspiration for what I am getting on with at the moment. I am trying to carry on with the method of working that has been relatively successful at the moment, dealing with line and shape and contrasting the very clean scalpel lines with messier ink made marks. Noma has such a great use of shape that often has two meanings and it takes a while to work out the two things contained in the same illustration, the use of positive/negative space is something I would like to try and replicate.

Noma's portfolio is here