Work In Progress: The Gypsy And The Moon

So this is an extension and recreation of a piece I did on December 13th 2010. I liked the elements it had in it and I felt that it could be bigger and better and more colourful and detailed. So that's what I'm going for. I've scaled it up from A4 to a large board. Probably A1 height but a bit slimmer in width.

Drawn out in marker. Usually when I use markers everything goes horribly wrong but this seems to have gone quite well. Good strong lines.

Close up face.

Close up goat skull.

Started painting it. Acrylics. Like the blue.

More to follow.

January 28th 2011: Diamonds And Guns - Pin Up

 

Finally got around to doing something. Painting is good. Pin up with some tattoos, piercings and shaved head and stuff. Pretty happy with this although the left hand is a bit too small but it's not so easy to see. Loving the filligree pattern and little icons of the background. The guns pretty sweet as well. This is the first time I've done anything largeish in ages. It's been enjoyable. More to come I think. 

 

Here's a close up of the facial/gun area, also with the best tattoo bit and showing the background more. The crop looks pretty good to be honest. Better composition.

More D&AD and Launch of Professional Project

I'm still unable to reveal any information about my D&AD project but we're onto a  solid idea now. It's been knocked about and changed, tutorial-ed, changed back again, evolved, crumbled and started over but ideas are sorted, planning is well underway so we're finally at the stage where we can go into production. The illustrations are shaping up to potentially be really interesting pieces.

Professional project also launched today. It's been a day full of information and taking notes on what to do but I've got some pretty clear ideas of what I wanted to be aiming towards already. Essentially: self-promoting book design. These are the types of books that I love to own, read what artists have written about their work and their techniques and learn about them. They generally have the most imagery of any type of book as well which is great for reference. Got to write up a learning agreement first though apparently. 

My hits have gone down since I stopped doing a picture a day which I don't like. I'll have to try and post more drawings/paintings again soon. Should be finishing one in the next week or so.

D&AD Illustration/Diesel Brief

So I'm working with Eddy Mac on my D&AD brief. We've been working on ideas generation for a while now and we're getting close now. The Diesel brief is to create two pieces of work inspired by two tracks of a chosen artist. The main idea is to be stupid as this is the rebrand of diesel that happened recently.

We had our first tutorial on this today and our basic idea was received well but it was agreed that we need to push it to connect a little more with the brand and possibly also with the musical side of things as this is heavily music based as a project. At this point I would upload some visuals but since it's a competition brief you'll have to wait.

Last Touches To My Website

From the final crit earlier today there was only one issue that arose. The logo in the top right corner seemed to be superfluous to the design, a random element of useless vector, floating meaninglessly in the gale force of the world wide web. So I removed it from all pages and simply moved the title of each page across to the top right corner to fill the gap in. 

The only other problem that I had was with my contact form which was sending messages to my email that just said "submit:submit". So I've replaced the entire form with a different one which worked perfectly first time. It also has a captcha which will make the form more secure.

January 12th 2011: Always Looking Jealous

 

First draw of 2011. I'm sticking with the dates thing because I like it. It shows progress. Jealous because of the green eyes. Contrasts well with red glasses. Few mistakes here and there, that's what you get for slackig off and not drawing properly for nearly two weeks. Stupid lazy new year.

Fav Icon And Finish

Uploaded everything to the server. I'm Online. The last thing to check was that my favIcon would work... and there it is, right in front of my name on the tab, and on the adress bar. Nice. I chose to use the logo I created as that seemed to fit with the branding/style of the website, is consistent throughout and also is simple enough to be reduced to a 16px by 16px square. I've also run this through a few different browsers to make sure it works. It's a little different depending on browser, but only so that the text on the bio page moves down by a line so it's working consistently and effectively. So I guess that means I'm done for now until I create more artwork to upload. Overall I'm really pleased with the outcome of my site, I've managed to follow my plans from the beginning, making a few minor changes to get around the difficulties of java script but it definitely still resembles the original design. The layout is simple yet effective and works well with the imagery as it serves to emphasise the work. I feel that the work I chose to display on the index page was a good choice. It has a variety of styles and media which contrast well with each other but fit together through the use of a common colour: green. The colours on the index page really pop out aswell due to the plain background. The imagery on the bio and contact pages I feel also works well, I selected pieces which could be made to float in the space provided so that they wouldn't be in a box format and could fit more naturally into the layout. I'm also really happy with the typeface and how that works within the confines of the page and in conjunction with the imagery and layout. The whole thing really portrays my work/style/personality well. In particular I'm happy with how the gallerys work, the categories are well thought out, and the rollover on the selection screen adds an extra element. Then the actual gallerys themselves have an enlarge function which makes the site a little more interesting than just a basic click and replace. All my links work, all the functions work. Website: done.

Design Gallery and Finishing Touches

So I finally got round to sorting out the design gallery. This presented a few problems in the form of missing loads of formating on pictures and then having to go back and change loads of CMYK to RGB and stuff like that. But I got it done in the end and there it is. I also added a few more photos and illustrations to their appropriate gallerys since I found a couple of extra bits, double checked my code, live viewed everything and as far as I can see it's all ready to go live. So tommorow I will upload. And then we shall see the results.

Rollover Images in Dreamweaver

Today was mainly filled with sorting out/adjusting some small niggles again. Little things like aligning text in the right place and editing my bio a little bit. Then at the tutorial I got good feedback. It was agreed that my website has a good design, is reflective of me and my work and is pretty much finished other than the design gallery which is yet to be filled. The only other issue that came up was that the front page was really bold and colourful, and all of the other pages had some element of colour in there as well apart from the gallery category page. So I've added in some rollover imagery. The page appears exactly as it did until the mouse rolls over one of the pictures when it turns to colour. I've also added a favicon to my pages. That's that little bespoke image that displays at the start of the url in the address bar but since that will only work when the website is live I can't screen shot it yet.

More Weaving

More web design today. 

Bio page. Think this has worked really well. I like having an image to one side of the page and then the white space and text on the other side, this fits in really well with the whole feel of my site. I wasn't too sure what to write in my bio so I've left it a little generic and chatty for now. It works. I might change it at a later date if I decide I don't like it but I think it describes me pretty well. I think the text align right works well here as it sits against the imagery and leaves the space on the left

Contact page. I went with the image to the side, content on the other to keep the theme going throughout.  Although I've switched the sides over because I wanted the lion facing inwards like the masked man is on the other page. I think the imagery works well but there's not a lot I could really do with the form as it needs to be pretty standard for people to be able to use it effectively. I might align the text to the left though. It looks a little disjointed in the middle. There were a few other little niggles that needed working out today, finally got my email link at the bottom working. Added the copyright line to the bottom of each page with the © symbol (alt g on a mac, new found hot key). The main problem though was that I discovered that on my gallery pages when you click a thumbnail the image was stretched across the entire main image box regardless of size. This was solved by removing all height/width measurements from the placeholder image as this was effecting all the other images. Then hooked up all my links at the bottom of the page. The only thing left to do now is create my 'design' gallery and then upload and check everything works.

Back To Weaving The Dreams

So now that 2010 is done and dusted and all of my drawingly requirements are also done for now I had time to get back to what I supposed to be doing with my time: building my website. Filling up my gallerys was priority one. It took a long time to format 100 or so images and make thumbnails of them as well but it got done. It then also took a long time to insert aformentioned imagery into said gallerys in the requisite fashion and a pleasant order. Yes. That's right. Requisite. I chose a dead pigeon to be the fron of my illustration one because I like it. And that is the best reason to do anything and everything.

The next step was to input an animation into my website. Since I've only ever made one animation to date this was exceedingly easy. I simply clicked on a backing box and hit insert - media - swf - browse - file. Then resized it appropriately. At some point I'm sure that I will make some more animations in which case I will be forced to integrate them into a gallery system similar to that of my illustration gallery. But as it stands I have no need of such a system and this will be updated when necessary.

As you can see here, it works.

Then I realised that I hadn't actually put any imagery on my front page yet and It was in essence, a white box with a few bits of text sitting in it. It took me a while to decide what images to use. I didn't want to go for just one image as I think that this would narrow the field down too much and visitors to the site might think this is the only type of work that you do. So I went for a mixture of styles and disciples, focusing on illustration as this is my fortay. So I've got a colour illustration, a bold black and white one, a painted one and a line work one alongside a book cover design and a black and white photograph. I chose to focus the images in on a small detail as the larger images are available for viewing through the galleries. I think this works well as it creates an interesting composition, and a small insight into the variety of work that I produce. I chose to arrange them as below due to the fact that 3 of the images I chose to use were predominately green. So I split them up as much as possible.