AD33 artist Research - Jordan Race

I have had this illustrator in my bookmarks for a while but have only recently started to look at his work again. I have two different ways of illustrating and sometimes I cannot decide which one to use. This has resulted in a divide in my portfolio and it was worrying me a lot because I didn't know what light that would shine on me in the industry world, does it make me diverse? or does it show that I am indecisive as to where my art style is going?

My way of illustrating one image using both of my styles, an interesting idea and looks pretty good, could maybe be used as some sort of self promotion later on, maybe hand written and digital type could flow around the image and bullet point my skills.


MOVING ON!

I chose Jordan Race because he has two illustrative style and they are both frequent in his online portfolio meaning that they are both relevant, it just depends on what is needed by the client. I also chose him because Jordan is influenced by cartoons from his child hood just as I am.

There is quite a lot going on throughout his portfolio, it's colourful, dynamic and full of some great textures. His style is quite cartoon/ comic themed, there are also elements of humour throughout his images. Most of the images seem to have left a digital signature but perhaps the line work originates from a hand drawn background, I mean some are totally digital like the image in the bottom right hand corner but other pieces such as the one on the bottom left feature a lovely scratched texture.


Jordan is a children's illustrator some work is also acceptable for teens, above is a small collection of images from his site, there is a bit of surface design for skateboards in there along with some backgrounds for video games and also some pages from a children's book so it is all pretty diverse yet it still fits into the children's publishing market.

His children's book titled Bigfoot's small feet is a fairly popular book on amazon maintaining 5 stars in the reviews. From what I can see it was produced and sold by Amazon which is a brilliant client to have landed.

Jordan worked on a small brief for Deviant art which was about the true meaning of tobacco. that site in particular is not a favorite of mine but the concept is a pretty cool one that would have been fun to work on.

As far as promotion goes he doesn't actually have much of an online presence, I mean his website is fairly good but not everything has a label so I can't see the context behind the work. Also I guess his work is promoted through amazon when and if people come across his books but apart from that there is not a lot of promotion going on.


His about section on the webpage is not really that informative and I can't really find any information elsewhere so it is unknown if he is part of an agency or collective.
Jordan's web page has a mix of commissions and personal work but there is no online store where you can get any of his images. Again it is unclear if he has any other jobs that go along side his illustration career but seeing as his site seems a little out of date I would imagine that he must do something else to keep the money coming in.


This guy makes good work, however he does not really promote himself as well as he should and that is something that I should take away from this, my final major project needs to be well documented and published on my professional website for everyone to see. I should also consider sending work off to the right clients.

AD33 - Artist Research - Lee Hodges

I was shown this artist by my lecturer way back at the start of third year, his style is so inspiring and not too different from how I make my own images.

I not only chose him because of his similar style but he also has a unique way of utilizing textures in his work to make it look less digital which is something I have wanted to try out considering the new methods I am implementing in my own work. 

His style is very abstract and surreal. I am sensing a Mexican day of the dead theme coming through in his illustration style with decorative motives such as bones, stripes and flowers. It is extremely colourful and some images have elements of collage about them. A real good use of textures make it look far from digital although it is clear it originates there. 

Lee has a select portfolio consisting mostly of posters and album covers for various artists and events all over the world. The hand rendered type along with the bright a decorative images allow themselves to the advertising genre well.  He has also landed illustration jobs for Readers digest and his work fits into that context which gives him a good chance of being hired by different clients.

I'd say that his work, if toned down slightly, could reach out to a younger audience but mainly I would say that it is aimed at 18 - 25 year old's who enjoy music culture and abstract art. He DJ's at a club named Rambunctious which is a social club for the "creatively curious" so his posters also ensnare a slightly more refined art based audience. 

Most of Lee's work seems to be for local and national music events such as a Movimentos gig in London but he has also landed jobs with RHS where he illustrated a range of posters to promote children's events happening in the RHS gardens all year round. ( See top left corner for example)

Lee also had the chance to illustrate for a section in readers digest which is another commendable client.

Lee got to do another piece for Readers Digest and this time he got to complete a cover for the magazine too. The brief was based on how YouTube changed the world and it would have been a cool brief to work on as there are so many different visuals you could use to demonstrate the theme, the internet is a large place after all. 

Because Lee designs a lot of posters for clients he is getting some of the best publicity as posters get spread all over cities and are often blown up large at the actual event for all to see. He uses a few different websites to host his portfolio and he seems to have a recurring job designing posters for the Rambunctious Social Club which he also DJ's at thus giving him a bit of a social following too. 

It has already been made clear that Lee gets a lot of commissioned commercial work but I could not see if he has an agent or anything like that, nor could I see if he was a part of any kind of collective or association. To get a better answer I actually contacted him through Facebook so that I could find out how he works as an image maker. Lee is a part of the Illustration Ltd agency who are a very well established group that do a very good job of promoting and showcasing each of their clients.

Lee does not really produce anything to sell individually and seems to work purely on commissions which is a fairly hard thing to start off with with but he seems to keep himself afloat just fine.


Whilst interviewing Lee he said that " I have many arms to my work as an artist, Illustration is the main one, I also run a nightclub called the Rambunctious social club, which makes a bit of cash, I DJ make the sets, create posters etc..."
This is quite interesting as Lee is practically living the dream at this point, he is able to sustain himself doing all of the things he enjoys, each task seems to bounce off of each other and the work circulates and links each of his interests together.

If I were to take something away from this study I'd say that I want everything to link together by the end of this project, I mean I want my interests to show throughout every project even if the themes are different.

In addition to this I even got the chance to meet up with Lee as he came to our college to give an artist talk. Above are some of the many images he brought with him to show everybody. After his talk I got the chance to show him some of my own work and he seemed very excited to see what I had to offer.
We talked for a while about different textures and ways of creating images and it was all very useful to me, in fact I would say that it offered me a new perspective towards my imagery and it made me want to explore with colours and abstract concepts. More on that a little later!

AD33 - Lee Hodges inspired doodle and 200 followers on Instagram!

After having an awesome chat with Lee Hodges I got really inspired and wanted to try something ever so slightly different with my artwork, this time focusing more on flow and less on accuracy.

Around about the same time that this inspiration struck I also found out that I had hit 200 followers on Instagram which was exciting!

I combined the two events together and came up with this piece which I think perfectly sums up both occasions.

Very abstract but I like it, it is full of energy and the colours are so punchy!
There is a stronger consideration into texture in this piece, there isn't just one texture slapped on top of the image but instead there are multiple layers which add a lot of depth. Happy days!

Hopefully I will make more images like this in the future!

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

AD33 - Okido spot the difference brief

I chose to take this brief on because Okido is a very popular children's magazine and it would be great to have some of my work published by them as it would give me a lot of exposure. Also I am wanting to go into children's publishing so this seemed like an appropriate brief for me to take on. Unfortunately the deadline for the 'dinosaur' theme had already passed but I still had time to go for the 'seasons' theme though the deadline was around 10 days from when I caught wind of the competition, the pressure was on.

For some strange reason I must have misread the brief and I thought that it was just Autumn that we had to illustrate so I started basing all of my designs around that season. This wasn't a problem as I would have imagined that they would want us to select one season and then go for it but I would not have felt so restricted had I known that I could have done any season.

Lesson learned, read things through properly, I knew what the brief expected of me but it was tunnel vision that gave me a slight disadvantage as I limited myself.

In my sketch folder you can see the process and character development and below I will show the digital pathway that my design went through.

I played around a lot with the idea of a pumpkin character, I eventually refined him enough so that he would be cute and acceptable for the target audience. I was going to have three floating pumpkin characters but I thought that it would work better if I included a boy and girl instead so that the characters can work together, it also added a little bit of realistic context which didn't hurt.

So here is my first digital layout, as I previously mentioned I tried setting out three pumpkin characters but that quickly changed.

So now the pumpkin characters was refined and digitally reworked to give him a slightly geometric body type. I also changed his eyes as I thought they looked a little more cute and they sort of matched the existing characters from the Okido magazine so I thought it would flow much better this way.
I also added a mound for the bottom of the image as I needed somewhere to put the text and it this seemed like the best place for it to be without obstructing the rest of the image.

After drawing some boy/girl characters (see sketch folder) I added the scanned line work into my image and started rendering them digitally to match the main pumpkin character.
Prior to starting my design I wanted to find an appropriate colour palette so I looked through a couple of pictures on Google to get some inspiration. I thought Autumn colours would consist mainly of oranges and browns but I was wrong.

There is a lovely mix of greens, yellows and even purples which was a nice surprise as it gave me even more to work with. From this point I made my own colour palette that was inspired by these images and used it to continue on with the brief.

Just some more progressive shots of the boy and girl characters, the image on a whole is nearly complete at this point and just some final tweaks were needed before I add the text.

The image is pretty much finished now and it just needs the text, I am really happy with how it looks and I like how I managed to add in some of my signature decorative motives such as the dots, arrows and a stitched line. This is pretty much how it would work on a page, the top image would say 'spot the difference' and the bottom would say 'find all seven'

At first I did try some digital text on the image but I decided against it because Okido has a lot of hand drawn elements so thought it best to try my hand at hand lettering. Time for some light box action!

I printed off a copy of my image and started playing around with different fonts and styles, I tried using thick pencil and brush pens to give me a nice textured line.

After trying a few out I thought it best to scan them in and see them on top of the actual artwork.

Here is the final image, I ended up going with the pencil text as it gave off a really nice grainy texture which stood out from and yet complimented the digital subject matter.
I also added a light patchy texture in and around my characters which gave them a little bit of life. Finally I added a graph paper texture which added a bit of character to the image. I don't think the differences are too hard to find but they are definitely not easy so it's a nice balance. This image is another milestone for me as an artist as I believe that I have found a signature way of illustrating people which has been something I have been trying to figure out for a long time.


This is the first time in about two years that I have tried including texture in my work as I tried it in first year and soon turned away from it due to inexperience and the fear that it ruined my image. After two years of learning who I am as an artist I think I have the skill needed to incorporate texture so that it adds to my image instead of taking something away from it. This opens up some new doors into my illustration style and I am excited to see where it takes me.