Monday, 18 May 2015
Time management
My largest failing this year has definitely been my time management and organisation. I was already terrible at these but this year I have just let myself continue to be terrible without putting into account how much things like New York and finding a place to live over Christmas took away from the time I had to waste. I didn't realise it at the time but the start of my stress for ppp, responsive and cop started when I went to New York. As I was already a little behind on 504 before I went I had to put all of my energy and focus into making sure I would be able to finish it for hand in when I came back. I had told myself that it would be fine if as I'd be able to work over christmas. I was not able to work over christmas, I had to prepare a christmas for boy and try and find somewhere to live before I started uni again. This whole process meant that I became very single minded about the modules and ended up saying that I'd be able to catch up on them over Easter. Yet again this didn't work out like I'd hoped I had one beautiful week where i was able to come into college and make progress before I had to look after boy all week and as soon as I was able to get back to work I got the flu. This flu was the type where you're stuck in bed for over a week and by the time you're able to leave bed you still feel like you're brain has melted into puddle for most of the day. This combined with how stressed I can get about coming into the studio and how a childish argument removed my place in the studio meant that for the past month or so I have had to work near constantly. Working 9-9 has worked really well for me as it meant that I didn't stress about when I left at 9 because I knew I had done all the work I could have done for that day. It also meant that in the evening hours there would only be a couple of others in the studio which suits me much better than having everyone in and working. However while working those hours saved me they also have been incredibly draining when kept up for so long. For the next year I'm really going to need to work longer days and organise my time better as I can't do this again. Also I'm hoping to be better when Hollie, Rowena, Adam and Becky move in near me as I'll want to leave with them on the morning. I'm hoping this will mean that as my lateness will effect others I'll be better at coming in. We will see ....
Sunday, 17 May 2015
Promo pack and contents
This is my promo pack and it's contents. Surprisingly it was harder to do then I planned, I changed it from A5 to A6 when I realised that A5 is still quite big and that made everything a little easier. I printed at my mums house again as I did not have the time to try and get into the print room. However this meant that I also had to cut it down at my house rather than college, I do own a little guillotine but it's one where you pull the blade down rather than across. This means that it bends the page each time and cuts it at an angle instead of a neat edge. I've tried to minimise this as much as possible but there are still some issues. For actually giving my promo pack to a professional I'd want to recut these and make the package a bit neater. I had a real issue with the blue pencil ones as well. I hav never tried to keep the pencil lines when neatening things so it became quite difficult to keep a white background and the pencil marks. As well as having trouble initially keeping the pencil marks I also had trouble when printing them as they kept coming out too pale. As I don't have photoshop at home I had to use a regular photo editing program that i had less control over, so I'm less happy with how they turned out. The business card also had issues as after buying some card to print on, it was too thick for my mums printer. To solve this I ended up printing it on to a heavy stock and then gluing it to the card I bought. It's not as neat but it seems to have worked reasonably well. All the examples of my work I included have a purpose, they each show a different example of my work: comic, book, character design, analog, autobiographical and stand alone. To finish off my work I printed some stickers of my potatofinch to seal my pack. I really like the look of this but it wasn't quite strong enough by itself, so I added a small bit of the plain, clear sticker to hold down the inside pages. If I'd had the time I would have liked to have printed an "open me" sticker so the the inside sticker didn't look so out of place and so the receiver of the pack knew it was meant to be opened completely.
Saturday, 16 May 2015
Creative cv
These are what I've made for my creative CV it's loosely based on Adam's one but mine is made with the knowledge that I don't have as much time as Adam did and with the idea in mind that it should show how I work. To do this I showed the tools that I work in and coloured them with blue pencil as I am near constantly using blue pencil to sketch my work out. I also wrote what illustration I am interested in and most often do. I would have liked to have put some more information down but I have no prior experience in anything really. I suppose I could have put more personal information but as it's about my work I didn't really know what else I could say.
Presentation
Here is the presentation that I've made. I think it could look a lot nicer but I definitely don't have the time to spend ages making it look amazing.
Presentation notes
This is the instagram that I already had. I changed my photo to that of my logo and added my facebook page and tumblr. Aside from that there wasn't really anything more I could do. I had already been posting my work to instagram really regularly so I didn't have to upload loads like I did for facebook and tumblr. Which should make it really easy to keep promoting my work through instagram as it is the way most familiar to me.
Tumblr
This is the tumblr I created to promote my brand. Apparently I already had a tumblr under that name so I had to go through deleting all of my past posts and making my page look less terrible. I found it quite hard to use so I'm not very proud of the result but it will be easy to link to my instagram so I can post to both at once.
Facebook page
business card
This is the final design for my business card. I feel that some aspects could be cleaner around the edges but aside from that I'm really happy with how it all came together.
logo
I found my use by compromising and having both the logo of myself and two little potatofinch's underneath. This meant that I could still go by potatofinch and I could use the more complicated drawing. At first it didn't have the branches underneath the finches but without it they were just floating and with the simple addition of them it seemed to really round it off as my logo.
potatofinch
Business card tests
I found another drawing of me and fixed it up in the same way. I then started making and testing the layouts that I had sketched earlier. However I did this process for so long that it became meaningless and time consuming for no good reason. I did managed to make some designs I particularly liked but as they were the black lines on colour, I decided that they didn't actually show how I work well enough and I would rather my business card shows how I actually work.
possible logos
I found these drawings of myself I had made at various points and I thought that they would work well as either logos or just as a header for the about me page. I coloured them and cleaned them up a bit ready for testing.
Potatofinch
I already go under the name potatofinch on instagram and as my email so it would be quite good to remain under it. It would also work well as a unique name as I doubt anyone else goes under it. I also really like this as a logo design as it would work very well on multiple media and still efficiently show that it was part of my brand.
Promo pack sketches
These show how I would like my promo pack to work. I am aware of what time I have to make it in and I know that I won't be able to print something special to make the pack out of so I had the idea of using a bright colourful card to make the pack with. I want to use the card to make a sort of parcel that will open out when it's opened. after making stickers for 505 I thought it would be good to use a sticker of my logo to seal it. This would also mean that I have a tiny piece of my work that can be seen from outside my pack.
Pie tree sketches
This is an idea I actually really like but seems more like a collaborative brand or a collective to me and i think I'd rather save it for an occasion more like that than my brand. I also had a nice comic idea I could make from it instead.
Gillipug illustration
This was another vague idea that I liked the sound of but just didn't really work. It came from how when my mum was little they had a breed of pugs named Gillipugs as their name was Gilligan. It was a nice idea but it was just too unrelated to me and my illustrations.
Rose wood sketches
This was for Rose Wood as my brand and I kind of hate it. It works alright as a making something out of my name sort of thing but I find it way too twee and not really about who I am so I doubt I'll carry it any further.
Rosalind wood logo sketches
After I highlighted a few choices of brand name, I started drawing out some sketches for each one. These mainly featured a drawing I had already done of myself as the logo as it would be a brand of myself. However I also drew out an idea I really like of having my childhood toy as my logo as It'd be really lovely to be able to carry him with me into the professional world as well.
Brand names
I started anew with names of what my brand could be. I'm not a big fan of my brand being Rosie Wood as I'd quite like to separate myself from my professional self and I don't really think that wood makes a good fancy illustration name.
Notes
After my rather poor start I wrote some notes on how to think about this project and how I should start it off properly.
Initial response
These are quite literally my initial response to having to make a brand of myself. I'm not very happy with them but at least it's a starting point.
Comic
Tiff giff
Mockups
These were the first mockups I ever made. I know now that it isn't daunting or hard but before I was terrified of doing it and now I can make my work to a higher standard than before.
Collaboration
This is what I did for my collaboration project. I just wanted to say here about how this one, while not perfect and definitely in need of improvement, was much better than last years. It made the prospect of working together with someone not seem so repulsive, which is how I felt about it at the end of the last collaborative project. This one left me interested in trying it again at some point.
Tove Jansson
at some point over the winter I watched this documentary on Tove Jansson, who is probably one of my biggest influences. It really inspired me in how she led her life and how she treated being creative. It really showed how I could make books if I put the time in. It was the first time I have ever felt a desire to write, I had always half assumed I would have a writer and i would just illustrate but watching this really made me want to do it all myself and to be able to see the worlds that I create come alive. I'm really excited by the prospect of making my own children's book. This excitement also caused me to binge read her books and I started doing some really Tove style drawings for awhile.
Flying eye books
I've really got into flying eye books this year, I collect children's books that I find beautiful and I noticed that four of the books I had already bought this year were flying eye books. I started to notice the quality was to the same high standard in all of their books and I started to look out for them whenever I'd be looking for children's books. After a while I realised that they are the exact type of books that I would like to aspire to. It was only after going on their website did I realise they were part of Nobrow, Flying Eye Books (FEB, for short) is the children’s imprint of award-winning visual publishing house Nobrow. Established in early 2013, FEB sought to retain the same attention to detail in design and excellence in illustrated content as its parent publisher, but with a focus on the craft of children’s storytelling and non-fiction. That's what they say on their website and I should have realised straight away that FEB was part of Nobrow as it really does have the same attention to detail in design and excellence in illustrated content. These books really show the quality that children's books can be. I would say that these have been the most inspiring to me this year.
Off the page
I really enjoyed off the page I had never pictured my work in an exhibition and it was really lovely to see that it could be there and I could potentially have it in another exhibition in the future. I was in the hang team and I did try to be helpful and did some sorting there wasn't a lot I could do. It felt a lot like a too many cooks in the kitchen scenario where there were too many people with too many different ideas to make any progress.
MOMA
While in New York I went to MOMA which was really interesting to see and visit, but I didn't find it all that inspiring for my own work. I think I'll have to put more time and effort into going to find more design/illustration based exhibitions, as they will be more useful to me as inspiration.
New York
Nomadic presentation
I have to thank Emanuel here as while we all did our own research and played our parts he ended up being the own to design the logo and actually putting most of the presentation together. While I did stumble a bit, forgot half half my lines and spoke too quickly, I think the presentation went quite well. The feedback we got was that our idea for the type of van was based too much on the aesthetic than the practical, so it'd cost too much to actually drive up and down the country. Aside from that all the feedback was positive, we were told that if were going to do it for real we could even get government funding. The one issue I have with this project is that my group divvied up the sections to research and from that moment on I was stuck with resources which I didn't and don't really understand. That being said I need to thank Emanuel again as he helped me try to figure it out.
Nomadic
I know it's a bit silly but I'm quite proud that I came up with the name for our group. It was one of those times when you get a niggling thought that doesn't go away until you actually suggest it. After it received some approval we looked up the definition on wikipedia to see if there was anything we could use. this was the definition for nomad:
A nomad (Greek: νομάς, nomas, plural νομάδες, nomades; meaning one roaming about for pasture, pastoral tribe) is a member of a community of people who live in different locations, moving from one place to another. Among the various ways Nomads relate to their environment, one can distinguish the hunter-gatherer, the pastoral nomad owning livestock, or the "modern" peripatetic nomad.
While this did tie into our roaming van idea, there was another definition underneath that suited what we were doing perfectly:
Sometimes also described as "nomadic" are the various itinerant populations who move about in densely populated areas living not on natural resources, but by offering services (craft or trade) to the resident population. These groups are known as "peripatetic nomads".
A nomad (Greek: νομάς, nomas, plural νομάδες, nomades; meaning one roaming about for pasture, pastoral tribe) is a member of a community of people who live in different locations, moving from one place to another. Among the various ways Nomads relate to their environment, one can distinguish the hunter-gatherer, the pastoral nomad owning livestock, or the "modern" peripatetic nomad.
While this did tie into our roaming van idea, there was another definition underneath that suited what we were doing perfectly:
Sometimes also described as "nomadic" are the various itinerant populations who move about in densely populated areas living not on natural resources, but by offering services (craft or trade) to the resident population. These groups are known as "peripatetic nomads".
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