Final Presentation

Tumblr

I have a separate tumblr that I use to reblog and store art and images that I like or that inspire me/ are relevant to various uni projects. It's useful to refer back to when I know I've seen something relevant on tumblr and so I can just find it within this blog.

Association of Illustrators.

Tips from the AOI

You should have a website that's functional, simple and links to your social media.

Put your email on your website, not a contact form as people are less likely to use a contact form!

If you have a blog as well as a website / any social media you post on keep it updated regularly! Also keep it professional, keep your personal shitposting separate from your professional life. If you're not good at keeping up with social media, just don't do it.

If you're doing personal projects, keep that updated on your blog - doesn't have to be just professional work.

Don't post work you're doing if you're not allowed to by the company you're working for, or you'll get in trouble and nobody wants that.

Behance is good for posting projects and development of said projects.

With physical mailers (creative CV's etc) make them A5 - A6, introduce yourself and avoid sir/madam to make it more personal, if you know the name use the name! Follow it up later with an email. Don't just send out mass mails with all the same stuff on to different people - check you've got the right name.

You automatically have the copyright on your work unless you hand it over to someone else (don't do it, it's not worth it). To avoid people ripping your work off the internet and using it use a lower res (72dpi which is fine for the 'net anyway) and put the copyright symbol when you post it. This may help people be able to trace the image back to you as well if it is used without your knowledge.

Read your contracts! Make sure there's no sneaky loopholes in there that give the company all rights to your work as they'll use it over and over and you won't get paid for it! You set the licence for how long the client can use your work for, and in what regions they can use it. You can keep raking in the cash if they want to renew a license or use it internationally.

Value your work! Don't sell yourself cheap to begin with and then try and up your prices! Cause work does go for lots of money and companies with big budgets will try to swindle you! (If you want £200 for a piece of work say you'll do it for £300 and let them think they've haggled with you). Do not work for free! When offered a brief find out as much as possible about the client, as sometimes the name cannot be mentioned but you can find out how many branches there are, whether it's international or not and be able to make a good approximation of how much you should charge for your work!


This talk was pretty helpful. I feel like I know a lot more about copyright, licensing and how important it is to find out information and read contracts when valuing your work as it can be easy for baby illustrators to be ripped off, big time! I feel a bit more confident knowing that I can join and seek help from the AOI if I find I have no idea what I'm doing or really need help valuing a project.

Vague Presentation Script

Introduce self: Hello I’m Amber I’m a kooky creative, eyebrow enthusiast and village witch. 

Let’s start off with some high points of the year, I actually found responsive one of the most helpful modules of the year as I got to try out a few different things rather than focusing a lot of time on one project. As well as helping me work to tighter deadlines I learned a lot of new things via the brief’s I did.

I really enjoyed doing the A Clockwork Orange book cover. Book covers are not really something I’d considered but I was interested none-the less and it’s something I ended up being really happy with and has inspired me to do more work with book covers in the future.

I learned a lot about mockups in responsive and I find it really rewarding to see what my work would look like as a finished product.

My substantial brief for responsive was the D&AD shutterstock brief where you had to illustrate 3/7 story archetypes and relate them to everyday life here are two. – The quest for coffee and the tragedy of messing up your makeup in the morning. I enjoyed this brief because it was really open and amongst a module where I primarily made imagery that would be on a product  It gave me a chance to just focus on my practice – as during 504 I found that I quite enjoy working with lino. So here I could experiment with lino and digitally adding texture, colour etc. This is some of the work I;ve been most happy with,

I didn’t know anything about pattern at the beginning of the year, and only ended up doing it because I had to learn how to make pattern for my responsive collaborative project. Here are two of the first patterns I made this year, they aren’t so great. I didn’t know what I was doing. But since then I have really enjoyed making patterns and have basically made a repeat pattern in all my other modules too just to satisfy my own desire to make pattern/

I found COP much harder than I did last year. I’m not sure why though. I had a really hard time writing the essay and narrowing down my mass of ideas into a focused question. Nevertheless the publication I made for COP had a good idea behind it (explain idea briefly). I am starting to find that I work better with a solid maybe meaningful idea. And I still love injecting a bit of humour into most of my work as it’s one of my greatest assets. My crafting however does still need work.

Outside of college I have had a small stall selling prints and badges at the Belgrave Arts market a couple of times. This is good for a confidence boost as I have had a couple of sales. Kids love the badges. Makeshift business cards.

I also am president of the comic society when I find time to put it on. This has helped me become a bit more confident in speaking to people and almost leading a group, as well as communicating with people outside of the college about stuff. – Next year I hope to be able to organise my time better so I can do more stuff with the society and be a good president.

Leading me onto my next point. My time management is awful, it started off okay for 504 but everything else has been totally terrible. I have never handed in something late but I definitely am sabotaging myself by not actually giving myself enough time to finish a project to the standard that I want. Time management impacts quality. I am an awful procrastinator and find it really hard to plan my time. I should have done it already but due to my aforementioned time management problems I have not, I will be going to learning support to help me manage my time better over summer and into level 6.

Another weakness has been my inability to narrow down ANYTHING which gets me into all sorts of trouble. I start projects late because I can’t choose a focused topic to do. For example 505 (space / greek mythology mess with products – If I had chosen to go with my gut I would have known  what I was doing from the get go)  - some more stuff about how 505 was a total shambles for me.

Moving on – I keep feeling as if I don’t really have a style so I decided to reflect on what’s working well in my current and past work. Thinking about my favourite thing from last year, similarities between this and current work – Black background, bright contrasting COLOUR, good use of shape and texture. I decided I wanted to capitalise on what’s working well and try and make some more pieces in a similar style – so I did this for my creative presence. I found I really enjoy this technique and style – papercut, not as bad as I thought it was etc.

Managed to make some good imagery that was transferrable from artwork to business card, to pattern, to social media. Little critique of using image of my face with ever changing appearance – explain reason for using this.

I am indeed using social media – facebook, Instagram, tumblr. Keeping personal and professional separate because I’m a terrible person. Aesthetic. Easy sharing. Tags etc.

Made some tote back mockups as sellable merchandise ideas.

Next Year: I’m feeling good about next year. Had a lot of realisations quite late this year but better late than never. Want to do more book covers, posters – shows, films, bands, carry on experimenting with this style I’m working on. Make more patterns. Manage my damn time.

The most important thing I’ve learned

Thanks n goodbye. 

Finding My Style ???

I was having mixed feelings about the style I'm starting to form as I felt like it wouldn't suit things I enjoy drawing so I decided to re-create a sketch I did last year to see how the translation would work.
Obviously I still need to work on the crafting but I feel like I've got the basis of a good thing going here. I especially like it as I've worked into it with paint as well as papercut so I don't have to 'give up' on things that I enjoy to make something that looks good and gives me a bit more of a style. I have always wanted to be better at papercut but put it off due to being so bad at it generally but I'm finding it much more enjoyable as I like what's coming out of it!

I have found that with this style I do have to know what I want to make, I can't just go into the papercut process blindly - there would still need to be roughs and sketches and tests before I could throw myself into it.

Olivier Kugler

An origin story: originally from Germany, mesmerised by tin-tin comics. Would draw images from favourite comic books - eventually wanted to draw comic books. Encouraged to draw from life instead of copying comics, life drawing is important yo.

Being an illustrator is hard. People will say they'll contact you soon and then they never do.

 Shape and line is nice man. - adding colour digitally. Lines are organic and lifey, stuff overlapping, the flow is real nice. busy, movement, there's life to the images.

Drawing on location / Drawing from reference photos - allows for development of imagery - good for that sweet sweet visual storytelling.
You might get called a paedo if you take reference photos of kids.

Reportage - visual storytelling - comics. This is pretty interesting, I never considered reportage illustration but I am interested in narrative and comics so maybe it is something to look into  (reportage graphic novel)
Labelling is nice. (duck!)

Just get drunk and ask for things it's the only way to get work.

(MC) NOODLE KING

the son of mafia man under witness protection plays hitman. Good choice. There's a stories in everyday life.

STUFF THAT I REALISE I DO WELL

I feel like I have been struggling to find my style this year so I've been trying to notice things that are working well in my work so I can capitalise on them - and maybe find a style from here.

I always shoot people down when they say my work with shape is good but surprise surprise, I'm just stubborn because it is in fact one of my strengths.

I find that the work that I am most happy with uses a combination of strong shape, colour and texture paired with some detail. This year I have really enjoyed working with lino, it allows me wot wwith with both shape and detail. I found a lot of the work I've done with heavy contrast of black and colours works really well for me.

Because of this I have experimented a bit more with papercut and am finding that I do enjoy it and can make some really interesting pieces using that method, especially when I'm creating my own textures. Papercut allows me to make distinct shapes as often when painting I can have a bit of a wobbly hand.  After doing these experiments I have realised that this style is something I could push, as it doesn't have to be exclusively papercut, I can work with paint or digitally and still have this texture driven stuff.

Mad Max Poster

Film society were showing Mad Max Fury Road which is a film that I absolutely love so I thought I would get involved and do a poster for it!

I started off by roughing out ideas, taking themes/ imagery from the film that were recognisable - steering wheels, Max's back being tatooed, Characters etc.

I went for this idea of a close up of the neck with the tube coming out of it from Max being used as a Bloodbag as I liked the idea of swirling the tube into the title. 

This is the final poster, all in all I think the idea was good. I decided to use a lot of red/orange and brown as these are colours that are really prominent in the film. Something I struggled with was choosing some text for the date and time, as nothing looked right and I hadn't thought about positioning when I had roughed this out - something I should think about for future posters I may do. 

Jonathan Barnbrook Creative Networks

I decided to go to this as I had studied Jonathan Barnbrook at A-Level and thought it might be interesting to get a better idea of his work, as I appreciated the typfaces he has created throughout his career.

This talk was absolutely one of the best, funniest, top notch artist talks I've ever been to. Barnbrook has so much personality which is evident in his work. It was so much better than I thought it would be because even though I was familiar with Barnbrook's work, for some reason I still expected him to be clean-cut, graphic designer cliche, but he was awesome. Anti-Consumerist, pro artist and changing the world kind of guy. (I also appreciated that he talked about Bowie a lot)

A lot of his work is pretty controversial, but that's good because he has something to say. 

He talked a great deal about not being a hypocrite. If you're going to be anti-consumerist when a big company calls you and asks you to do some work for them you've got to decide whether it's really going to benefit you to take on the work. 

You should stay true to your identity and working style, even if selling out could give you a lot of cash. 

Political statements through art should be out on the street. You can stick your stuff out there, you might have friends willing to help you out too by wearing high-vis jackets or sneakily using their place of employment to help get the message across. 

Something I found interesting was David Bowie's ★ is an image because it's universal and recognisable to everyone (along with other symbolic images within the album art). It relates to emoji's and the kind of universal language of emoticons in todays culture. A quote from William Burroughs was mentioned I don't remember it exactly but it was something along the lines of writing should be a mixture of hieroglyphics and airport signs 

Feathr

I didn't do this for responsive, just for a bit of a laugh really. 

I submitted the pattern that I had made for the cover of my COP book to Feathr. Mainly because I thought the whole thing was totally hilarious and since it was such a weird idea and horrifying pattern it'd be really weird to see it as wallpaper. I was right. But on the other hand I love how there is such a juxtaposition between the nice living room and this completely wild wallpaper. 

It's got me thinking about how much of my work I use a large contrast in. I really like combining completely different things. 504 I combined Edgar Allan Poe with hipster beer culture, 505 I combined greek mythology with modern culture etc. It's something I think I could definitely capitalise on next year. particularly with COP because I like to subvert views and ideals of women through it. 

Dr Sketchys

I have been going to Dr Sketchy's for a couple of years now, it is an alternative life drawing event, usually with some form of Burlesque or an interesting theme to work around. For me this is more fun than regular life drawing as you can get a bit wild with it, and also there's prizes and challenges. It also does help me improve my life-drawing skills but in a way that is relevant to my interests.

Women's Day & Artificial Womb Zine

For international Women's Day there was a fair and talk from Kate Evans - who has done a graphic novel of Rosa Luxemburg's life (Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg) down at Leeds Museum. The talk itself was interesting as the writer / artist had really become totally enthralled with the subject matter - it emphasized how much knowing about and enjoying the project is important in the process of creating.

 

While I was looking around the stalls I mentioned I was an Illustration student to a group who make a Zine called 'Artificial Womb' (https://artificialwombzine.com/). Creatives can submit their work each month, there is a theme per month and  the artists are paid for their contribution if it gets in. I have not had the chance to submit anything yet but I would really like to look into it more and perhaps make a project out of it for extended practice - as it will be good to communicate my thoughts on issues and make some more meaningful work. 

What even am I interested in?

Trying to think about what I'm interested in so I have a better idea of what I should be looking at next year. I simultaneously know that there are a lot of fields I want to dabble in but also in the spur of the moment forget everything I like in a split second.

Character -

 Films, TV, Comics, Video games

Narrative

Concept art

character design

world building

stories

Book Covers - Sleeves, boxes

Tattoos

Feminism

zines

Music - record sleeves, Gig posters, Event posters

Film posters? 

I've highlighted some of the stuff I've been thinking about a lot as of late. As I've gone through this year I've had a lot of thought about what I want to do based on what I've enjoyed doing. One of the projects I most enjoyed was doing A Clockwork Orange cover, so I'd definitely like to look more at book covers. 

I feel like I have more of a drive to do work when it's something I care about, I had a lot of fun with my COP so maybe some more social issue related things? More into the lo-fi zine side of things rather than editorial 

Livia Falcaru

(https://illustrationage.com/2016/04/19/raw-emotional-illustrations-by-livia-falcaru/)

I found this artist while browsing through websites and loved the look of their work. With this image I particularly enjoy the colours and textures, as I personally really enjoy pink and blue together. There's something a little bit abstract about the image as you can tell there's a girl in a bed but there's not a lot of other information - The shadowy background could be a wall or a cityscape. I think it's nice how there's something left to the interpretation of the viewer. I also really love the line quality in this artists work, its like the lines are smooth but also sketchy, which gives it a more human feel to it.

Comic Arts Society

This year I have been attempting to be president of the Comic Arts Society along with Abi. 

I haven't been the greatest at keeping up with it, it started off successfully but people stopped coming around the stressful times of the year and I found it difficult to make the posters quickly enough. 

Next year I plan be better with my time management so I can get on this a bit better. I have a few ideas for activities so I plan to make some posters and plan what to do over summer so that I won't be rushing to make posters closer to the time. Hopefully with better planning I can get some more traction behind the society. 

Off The Page

I was part of the PR team for the Off the Page exhibition. I had wanted to do the poster, but I thought that some other people had expressed interest so stepped back from it (a wrong move, no one else actually wanted to do the poster. I should have just gone for it) but I still enjoyed being on the PR team.

The ream was pretty big so we split into different sub-sections. Social Media, Poster design, Invites, Photography, Flyering etc. Me and Molly mostly did the social media side of things, where we documented people's work and showed snippets in the run up to the exhibition and reminders after the exhibition that work is still on at CMV.

This was a really good opportunity to  practice more professional social media, as I am active on personal social media but I definitely want to keep those two things separate because I'm a terrible person. We tried not to share all the images, or full images as we thought putting a full show of the images on facebook would discourage people from seeing the show because they would have already seen the art online. 

I think showing images of the framed prints, and everyone framing their prints etc. was good because it built a sense of anticipation for the exhibition. 

"Lord of Masks" / Camille Chew

I love Lord Of Mask's work! It's so spooky but also quite cute and modern. There is a great use of shape and flat colour, and I love the way they incorporates pattern into different areas, like on the bat's wings or the witches socks. It is clear that this artist works mostly with digital media. They have posted a few gif's on how they build up an image which I have included one of in this post.

Their creative presence is mainly online; using platforms such as tumblr, instagram, society6, twitter, behance and threadless to showcase their work, as well as having their own website. They have translated the style of their work onto their branding - Logo's, titles, background of tumblr etc. to keep their look recognisable and consistent throughout the platform.

I think Chew has a really distinctive and unique style to their work. Definitely the kind of images that could be applied to products easily (I'm pretty sure they do sell products with their work on using Society6, etsy etc.)

Arts Market December 2015

A friend had seen some of the prints I had been working on for my About the Author project and said I should sell them at the Arts Market, which is a small market that runs in the upstairs of the Belgrave while the feast is on downstairs. The weather was pretty dire that weekend (12th and 13th of December), so I said to myself I'd be happy if I sold just one thing - as I wasn't sure what kind of people would be coming in and whether my work would really be suited to the demographic that visit the belgrave. 

I got some older drawings printed out on nice paper and made extra lino prints of images I was doing for About the Author. I also made some badges from DAS air dry clay as I thought since a badge is a tangible product more people might be interested than in the prints. 

I could't really afford proper business cards so I just did some makeshift DIY ones instead. Hey all of them will be unique! 

Not many people came along because of the weather, but I did manage to sell a few items (as well as some online too) which gave me a bit of an ego boost. I would definitely like to to more tabled events as I think even if the demographic isn't right you can still hand out business cards and get people looking at your work. It also gave me some more confidence in the marketability of my work, as I sold more than I thought I would!