Summer show time!

After the final deadline we were then tasked with setting up our summer show which was only weeks away!
There was painting to do, posters to hang up, promoting to occur and much more before I could even think about having a celebratory end of course pint!
Each student was to be allocated a space on a table as well as a wall space for their images to be showcased. I was lucky enough to score a wall partition which meant that my work would stand alone and away from a wall, only 5 other students got this opportunity so I felt very honoured.
The table had to include our portfolios, a copy of our CV, a quick description about out work and some business cards and postcards, the rest was up to us.

Above is what I went for. Additional things included:
- A copy of my children's book
- A double fold out post card set complete with perforated edges for easy tearing
- My fully functioning children's menu from a previous project

And this...


Is my wall space!




                    

I even got to include some large character cut outs from my children's book.

AWESOME RIGHT?


It took a lot of moving around until me and my lecturers decided on the pyramid shape. I was overjoyed with the way it turned out.



Next up: Private Viewing!

Summer work - The write up

Over the summer I wanted to keep a constant flow of work going to get me ready for the fast deadlines to come in the third year. I wanted to keep it fun though and I would often draw my own stuff to stop me from thinking that it was a chore. This however was not the case as I started to enjoy creating my sketchbook pages for the upcoming module; I finally homed in on a style or two that I am confident with and because of such I could just jump straight in. A lot of the pages were just working from the text book that we were given, I would take parts of the text and just go my own way with it really. I also included a bunch of random things that I myself found during my summer, there are a few pages dedicated to musician Bob Peck who just writes these ridiculous yet catchy songs. There are also illustrations based on nursery rhymes in there, they actually started the ball rolling and helped me gain an idea of what I wanted to do for the chosen story task. I made a bunch of posters over the summer as well, some were influenced by text from the book, some were my own quotes that I found and others were just for fun.

The large ‘Bug Wars’ piece was lightly inspired by the section of text about collective nouns for insects, one of which being an army of ants. It’s also nice to reflect on these images now that the module is almost over as another workshop involved us creating images based on those collective nouns and my outcome was completely different.

The piece named ‘Under Da Sea’ was just for a laugh, I wanted to see if I could make an image out of nothing, I did not map out the composition of that image, my goal was to make up elements as I went along as composite them accordingly. I think for a first attempt it turned out pretty well and also helped me gain some ground when dealing with my synchronised swimming workshop as it helped me understand how I emulate water.

The piece name ‘HYDE’ was another one for fun, I was looking at monsters for my dissertation and Jekyll and Hyde was one of the more popular searches, a lot of illustrations I found depicted the two characters within one image which I found interesting. After getting inspired by these illustrations I wanted to give myself the challenge of making my own depiction of Jekyll and Hyde. This poster ended up being my favourite just because I feel that the colours and my emulation of smoke really set the scene.

‘The Early Bird Catches the Worm’ was one of the more solid images for me, it started off as just a doodle but I just couldn’t stop working on it, it was a good training session that helped me speed up my process as this image was completed within the day. After printing it out it got some good feedback on my Instagram and Facebook page. Over the summer an art collective group got in contact with me over Instagram and wanted to showcase one of my pieces, they also wanted to make it into a tee shirt which was pretty awesome. The guy never set an exact deadline for the submission and mentioned that I could email him whenever I was ready. After starting the module I completely forgot about it but once the hand in has happened I think I will use this image for the tee shirt design, I get some percent of the sales if the sell any of my shirts and it is free publicity which can’t really be frowned at.

The image named ‘MANTIS 3D’ was an image I made in response to some text from the book about putting 3D glasses on a praying mantis to see how they perceive depth, apparently they are the only insects to be able to do such a thing. I thought this was fantastic and had to draw it out, in my sketch folder there is a version that I attempted to make 3D but I wasn’t sure if it actually worked. Either way I wanted it to look like a retro horror movie poster and I think I captured that pretty well. One of my favourites from this series.

I worked on a bunch of other images and sketches over the summer but as they are either on a digital space or on spare bits of paper I would have found it hard to psychically include them in the project but all of it has gone on one of my portfolio pages which I will include here just to cover everything.

http://instagram.com/jiantillustration    

Stormalong - cartoon connections?

My chosen story is about a giant sea captain who goes by the name of Alfred Stormalong. He appears in various sea shanties and folk tales and is one of the greats and shares the throne with other folk giants such as Paul Bunyan. I have already written a story synopsis and began character generation in my sketchbooks so I won't post it all again on here but I wanted to post some thematic research on here because I dislike sticking images in a book. There is an awesome cartoon that runs on cartoon network called the Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack which has some beautiful characters and scenery. That stuff aside I have recently noticed that the harbor in the program is named Stormalong, coincidence? Maybe but the harbor is large, so large in fact that it is it's own island, Stormalong's ship was so large that he could never dock it meaning he was constantly at sea. The Fan art above also shows this giant creature dwelling below the harbor which matches Stormalong's description pretty well, both Stormalong and his ship the Courser were incredibly huge so the harbor could be parodying either.

If we look at the image above you can see that the harbor has a mini village on it, there is also a giant galleon which could even be the Courser. 

Above is a screen cap from the cartoon, there appears to be a large octopus character which lies deep under the harbor, this character is also seen in the first image at the bottom of the sea. Stormalong had a famous feud with a giant octopus like creature which further supports my theory that this entire island and show is loosely based around the old Cap'n Stormalong, which I think is pretty cool!