Professional Project Book Photos

 The book has been printed. Here it is, I haven't photographed every page. If you want to see it all you'll have to buy one. Very happy with the quality of the print. Final Spec: 180gsm Premium matte paper, Hardback, perfect bound, image wrap, full colour, charcoal grey end papers. 

Front Cover

End Paper

Title Page

Intro & Process

Subject Introduction 

Blue Skies & Adventure

Threats & Eagles

Back Cover

If anybody wants a copy you can get it direct from the printers (so no extra charge added) here:

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2132461

Professional Project: Illustration Number Nine - Roman Army (Revisited)

I didn't like the last version. It was far too simple, I didn't spend enough time on it, just tried to get it done so I went back to it and spent more time and thought about it more. Incorporated a banner, the crossed swords & wreath, the S.P.Q.R of the Roman army, changed the 'Disobey' to simply 'Obey', added a little motto to the bottom and generally worked off of the Obey poster style and colour palette. This is a hundred times better. Aesthetically it is much more pleasing for a start, it also holds a lot more information than the previous version. It's been a good morning.

Professional Project: Front Cover Mock Up

One of the ideas that arose at the last crit was a front cover idea. Basically since I've used so many styles & techniques of illustration in the project, to reflect this in the cover design by illustrating my name using various methods/styles of typography. Sounded good. Here's my letters.

 

Here's the end result that took far too long. This would be printed onto brown paper/card/backing so it wouldn't seem quite as plain as it does here. I think I worked this one out quite well considering types not really my fortay. Got a mix of hand rendered and digital characters, bold and weaker, positive and negative, pencil and pen, simple and ellaborate. I might play around with it a bit more as at the moment the central 'E' is a little bit lost in between all the bolder letters, could sort this out by dropping some of the blacks to greys to give the type as a whole some more mid-tones. I'm also playing around with some photo work which I might substitute in at a later point for one of the letters. But for now, this is what I've got.

Professional Project: Layout selection

After looking through a bunch of illustration/art/design books, analysing and logging the various layouts I came up with a fair few spreads or pages that I felt were quite effective. Obviously they will need to be edited and adapted to fit on one grid otherwise the flow of the book will be quite strange. But here are the ones that I've pulled out of books that I think work well.

This is the selection I will be using to set my work & my text on. I'm not sure how to choose at the moment. It was suggested that I devise a random process similar to the process I'm using for subject matter to choose to give the book a completely random element. That could work well if I structure the beginning to introduce it properly before giving over my design to chance.

Professional Project: Illustration Number Eight - The Age Of Discovery

  

My eighth random subject matter was The Age Of Discovery. Which, after some research, turned out to be comprised of a lot of people sailing around the oceans with no particular destination in mind. They were just trying to find somewhere new. Later this created trade-routes and things like that. But what struck me most was the vast amount of sailing that happened. So I decided to draw a boat. Above is the original drawing. Rendered in Letraset Markers, coloured pencil and of course, fine liner pens. I think this worked really well as the markers allowed me to blend and give some detail to the sails. But I felt it was a bit bland on it's own...

 

So I did this. Simple border (fineliner and markers) remeniscent of old pictures etc. Since the subject matter was all about discovery of new things I decided to go for a multi-media effect, using some torn paper with some lines draw on it to create the sea.Some simple dodge and burn gave it some perspective. Then I went for the photographic sky and clouds to get the really deep blue and the detail.

Professional Project: Illustration Number Seven - Alfred Nobel

 

Alfred Nobel was the man who invented dynamite, amongst many other things, and founded the Nobel Prizes in his will. I decided to go a different route with the illustration through and looked at his love life. He never married but had three deep relationships, the last of which was with a flower girl called Sofie Hess from Vienna. They were together for 18 years until she fell pregnant by another man. Hence the image. Watercolour & fineliner. I wanted to keep it quite simple & stylised and tried to work in sepia type tones in the yellow and browns, due to the time period, but felt that it would be altogether too monotone if it was ill in this shade. So I left in some white highlights and added the blue to the faces and colour to the flowers to pick them out.

Professional Project: Illustration Number Six - Astronomy

 

This illustration took what is known as forever. Too much time on illustrator. I changed the Earth to a live traced version of a photograph, I also used this technique for the other planets. It just makes them seem a lot more realistic and less tacky. I'm pleased with how this turned out, I think it's quite effective to have all the squares black with the various images set inside them. I chose a font that I felt complimented the images and set it where I felt was appropriate given the flow of the imagery. I think the arrows work really well to give flow and direction to the illustrations and help to explain it.

Professional Project: Illustration Number Six - Square Two

 I jumped right passed square one, because that requires a completely new illustration, and just went for one that involves the MESSENGER craft.

I think this works well, I tried not to use any black in the craft so that it would stand out from the black background, I put a couple of gradients on the Earth to make it look a little more spherical. I think the colour of the arrow works well also, taken from the colour of the ones in 'Instructoart'. The typeface is bold but unobtrusive and I think I will have all of the text sitting in this position if possible.

Professional Project: Illustration Number Six (The Beginning) - Astronomy

Subject matter for illustration Number Six came out Astronomy. I researched this and it seemed like quite a difficult subject on the surface and all the information was really generic and dull. I delved a little deeper and looked at what is currently happening in the world of astronomy and discovered that the MESSENGER craft, launched six and half years ago, is nearly at it's destination of orbit around Mercury. This seemed much more interesting so I looked into this and found loads of facts like it's travelling at an average speed of 133,200mph and on entering orbit will have travelled 4.9 Billion Miles. Thats pretty far. So I'm illustrating it's journey with some of these facts thrown in. Here's my messenger.

It's not entirely accurate obviously as the real craft has so much on it and I needed it to be simpler.

Professional Project: Illustration Number 5 - Heathrow Airport

My process for creating random subject matter threw out Heathrow Airport. Which I though was a really boring subject to illustrate and I literally couldn't think of a single thing to do for it for ages. I tried to find some stats on lost luggage and cancelled flights but couldn't. In doing so I came across a couple of waiting time stats, I researched further and found a few more that I thought would make a good little illustration.

 The times are:

31 Minutes wait before you can check-in.

24 Minutes wait before you can go through security.

98 Minutes after that before you can board. (Based on arriving 3 hours before your scheduled departure as Heathrow advise and an average delay of 18 minutes.)

45 Minutes wait on the plane before it takes off.

As these were all at different point throughout the process of going through an airport I thought a sort of guide of wait times could be created in a sequential format. Which is exactly what I did.

I think the icons have worked quite well. I spent a long time changing the check-in icon over and over, i'm still not entirely sure about it but feedback seems to be that it works well in the context. Having the colour as grey I think is effective as it doesn't overpower as black would. I tried to keep the icons as simple as possible and I think this has worked well with the strip format.

Professional Project: Illustration Number Two - Richard Bartle & The Bartle Test

 Managed to finish up illustration two from my series.
The reasoning behind the imagery is thus. Richard Bartle put forward a theory that there are four groups of people who play online games. These were Killer, Socialiser, Achiever and Explorer. Each group was interesting in different aspects of playing online. A test was then divised to see which of the groups someone fell into and depending on the percentage of their answers they fell into the categories as shown in the image.

It took about 10 times longer than I ideally would have wanted but in the end I'm pleased with the outcome. I think it looks quite a lot like the old school game graphics - pixelated, limited use of colour etc. In particular I like the wine glass as I think the shading works well across it. The medal also works well, although I've just realised where I set it against a background the part of the ribbon that supposed to be white isn't so that needs fixing. But the wreaths around the 1 looks really good, simple use of two shades of square. I think the percentages also work well, I like how the numbers aren't quite perfect, it gives them a little bit of character.

Professional Project: Illustration Number Three - Hermes

 

Hermes

If you're wandering what happened to Number Two, it's still being made. This one came from Terry Pratchett's 'Making Money' through some random words and ended up at Hermes. I had a look at those old Greek jars with the black imagery on them so that's where I took the colours and sort of the style from, lots of black blocking.

Professional Project: Illustration One - Rio Carnival

 

The first illustartion for my professional project is complete.

Book = Spiral

Word = Sway

Wikipedia = Sway DeSafo

End Point = Rio De Janeiro

I'd say my process for generating random subject material seems to be working on that one. This is done almost entirely in marker pens. I bought some Letraset ones. They are amazing. Outlines in fineliner and background in black ink. I think this is a good start to the project and I am pleased with the outcome. It reflects the mood of the carnival in the colours. I tried to input some influence from Brazilian artists work that I looked at, but this mainly just came through in colour as their styles were so far removed from mine that it would have gone totally wrong had I tried to go any further.

Professional Project Update

Earlier today we had the pitch/initial critique for our Final Major Projects. Mine did not go well to say the least. Below is what I presented. 

 

It's essentially an idea for an art/illustration book containing my artwork similar to that of many that can be found in bookshops/art shops/libraries. I got shot down because it was generally felt that the idea lacked a little substance/context. It needed a reason or a theme that could run throughout the book and make it more interesting rather than just a compilation of my work. There were many suggestions for this but one quickly rose to the top which was to base it around my 365 drawings from last year. After some thinking I decided that I don't want to just document these in a book though as that means my entire project is InDesign based. So what I'm going to do is use the process idea from my 2010 work, in which I would find something to illustrate and respond to it within a certain time period. I want to look more into the methods of finding the subject matter and the process that goes into it. I will be trying out various methods from scrolling through links on wikipedia to simply asking people on facebook to looking at trends on twitter.

It's all about the process.

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.