AD33 - Initial children's book research

Before I even really know what I wanted to do for my final major project I knew that I wanted it to fit into the children's illustration category. Because of this I went on a mission to Waterstones and raided the children's section for a few hours to conduct some "Primary research".

The first books I went for were the crazy circle and find books as they were sure to be bursting with busy double page illustrations, I was not disappointed.

My original idea was to invent a character and then place him within three separate illustrated scenes where you would have to not only find him but an array of other thematic objects too. After illustrating my children's menu I wanted to keep that busy style flowing.

I then moved on to sticker based activity books, I had a big soft spot for this kind of books when I was younger and I had a rush of nostalgia after looking through all of these books. The image on the bottom left corner was a section from a range of Usborne sticker books, they had aliens, monsters, cavemen and more, I liked them so much that I ended up leaving the store that day with the alien version!

There were a lot of different styles of children's activity book, I mean some were purely based around stickers where you had to extend an environment and add characters, others were based around busy imagery and you then had to find a lot of different objects within the confusion. Additionally some books seemed to be a bit of a mix, the ones above were a bit more broad and it involved a wide range of tasks so it seemed like every page was completely isolated in terms of the task being delivered.

Finally here are a few more interesting activity based illustrations I had found. There were a lot of super heroes and robots on the shelves, a lot of which had activities that allowed you to either build your own robot or become a super hero yourself, the D.I.Y element was definitely something to take away from it.

Songs for the lovers and the broken hearted - Exhibition night!

I guess before I didn't really mention the event too much, I got a little carried away with the devil explanation. Anyhow, the event was an art exhibition which was first being held at Beerwolf books in Falmouth, various artists had gotten together an illustrated some vinyl record sleeves and were then auctioning them off. We got the opportunity to make some zines that would fit in with the theme of vinyl's (that's why our images had to fit into squares) and then sell them at the event. 

I was in charge of organizing the finished zines and selling the concept to the person in charge of the exhibition, we emailed back and forth and she seemed very excited to see the full product. I opted to take the zines down to Falmouth as I thought I might as well see this project to the very end, I could also make a day of it and enjoy the exhibition. 

Fellow contributors Tom, Meghan, Sam, Micah and Jade also opted to join me on my quest to Falmouth. 

Famlouth was lovely, we all went to a restaurant called the Stable which has some of the most delectable cider. Also there was a boar head... 

And here is the whole team preparing our taste buds for the most epic of pizza based cuisines.

 Moving on to the main reason why we ventured to Falmouth, the exhibition! 
Now this wasn't as it seemed, we thought that it was going to be a huge gallery space with a bunch of people and we would have a fairly large space in which to show off our work. 

Well the space above was what we were given and it was... snug to say the least.
Yes that's right, this small table was all we had, we couldn't even fit our entire stock on this table but we made do with what we had! 

The prints made by Tom and I looked very nice next to the finished zines and although we didn't sell any of the prints we managed to shift around 10 zines so that was a nice £30 to go in our New Designers money pot. 

We all got a little excited and I think perhaps we over-sold the event to each other and we felt a little disappointed come the end of the night. the day ended with smiles all round however as we remembered what a good day we had and our effort was recognized as a lot of people were complimenting our work at the event. 

                                                   At least Tom had a good time! 

 

Songs for lovers and the broken hearted - An illustrated zine - Collaboration project.

A few weeks ago I was selected to take part in a two day workshop lead by Illustrator Tom Hubmann. I didn't really know much about it but our lecturer mentioned that it could end up with us having some things to sell which could help to raise money for New Designers which was great news. Tom was pretty chilled out and really down to earth, we spent the first half an hour just rummaging through his portfolio website and asking him questions, it was especially useful to me as his illustration style intrigued me.

His work was very simplistic and naive, because of this he was more free with his lines and could explore more abstract ideas, this was something that I had wanted to come to grips with and be able to do it at a professional level.

Tom started out by giving us some very quick drawing exercises which involved us drawing each others hands, faces and random objects throughout the room. We then moved on to drawing word combinations that we had picked out of a hat and we got some very strange results, I enjoyed it non the less.

At this point he then briefed us on the actual task, well the first part of it anyway; we were to get into groups of 4-5 and start collaborating together on doodles based around a Valentines day theme. A lot of us drew hearts, arrows, cupids and things with similar stereotypes, Tom encouraged us to try thinking outside of the box and go for some unconventional ideas such as the personification of passion and desire.
He got me onto the idea of fornicating demons and the idea that hell embodies a sort of heat which rises into a lustful sweat, it all got a little strange and my group started drawing perverse things but all of the joking aside Tom actually encouraged it, he just suggested that we handle such subject matter in a more mature way.

After an hour or so of drawing he gave us the actual brief which was to get into teams of two and work on an image that would be inspired by what we had previously achieved and brainstormed in our groups of 5.

Along side the valentines day theme he wanted us to perhaps refine the image even more and have it relate to one of two love related songs that he had chosen. We could use any cover of the chosen song but he wanted them all to match in theme so that we could make them into a zine to sell.
I chose to work with my friend also named Tom and we decided to go for a relaxed approach, we wanted to take something from Tom's book and not worry too much about line quality or neatly colouring things and instead focus on the image and it's meaning.

Tom and I went for a very simple stripped back style, we spent an afternoon just doodling on a large piece of paper armed with only a large red marker each. We made random shapes and then gave them a little character!
After choosing the ones we liked we took them to Photoshop and made them all fit into the square template we were given.

We were pretty happy with our collaboration, so happy in fact that we took it even further and made our design into some screen prints!

We made a load of colour variants including the original red, I was very keen on the green and black outcome and Tom was fairly partial towards the blue ones.
It was nice to see our work all the way through from small task, to drawing, to Photoshop file and then to a screen print.
Tom and I were still not finished as we had to incorporate our design into the finished zine which would also showcase everyone else's images.

After a few days of all of us working together as a team we managed to finish it just in time for an event in Falmouth which Tom mentioned our zines would showcase in as long as they were finished on time.

It was a long day...

But they looked really good once they were printed and wrapped in their red covers! 

Here are a few spreads we had chosen to send off to the book event site as to showcase our product before it went on sale