I've been trying to catch up with unfinished work these past few weeks, slowly but surely making progress. Took the feedback that the tutors gave me, just hope that the motivation stays with me!

Jeremy Clapin is an animation genius! His work carries so much meaning aswell. We were shown his work a little while back in an animation class so I looked him up and LOVED his other animations aswell as this one. Personally, i'm pretty rubbish at animation due to the fact i'm not a very patient person but it only makes me admire his work more.

Brilliant animation and it's a festive one, what more could you want?
If you haven't seen any of the Simon's cat animations check them out on Youtube or at www.simonscat.com/

We were given a brief to do some self promotion by creating an image that best describes ourselves and what we like to draw. I chose to draw a mad scientists lab, although i'm not sure what that says about me. I don't usually draw crazy things but I do like trying to include alot of detail in my work and I felt that by doing this piece i'd be able to add alot of detail. So I began to research what I could use as reference, and then began looking at old style blck and white Frankenstein movies. Then decided to base my mad scientist on the Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein crossed with doc from Back to the future.

If you haven't seen the film, go see it! It's pretty ace :) Now I just have to finish off the final version and it's done!!

I made this little guy as a result of extreme boredom. So I decided to make something semi relevant to what I was supposed to be doing. I made him out of blue tac and if he does dry out then I may just paint him. I usually prefer to work traditionally but on the odd occasion my hands get bored of pencils and graphite and I end up constructing something. This was one of those occasions :)

Oooo I love seeing signs of Christmas everywhere!!

Illness + snow + a camera

So before I actually found out what was actually wrong with me, I decided to make the most of the days that I had off from uni and improve my photography. I thought i'd look out the window and just point and shoot, but with the snow all that was in the garden were the birds desperately looking for food. So they were my subjects and I was determined to get a photo of the classic robin in the snow. I'm still getting to grips with my Nikon, steadily.

Wire models

We had to make wire models of our shoes for an assignment in uni, first we drew them then constructed them. I was dreading it at first, I saw it as a bit pointless considering it's an illustration course and i'd never used wire before but I actually quite liked it. I like working in detail with my work so both the drawing of the shoes and making them fitted my style rather well. We then had to photograph them in different environments and lights after which I enjoyed, I want to improve my photography so this helped! Overall a pretty cool assignment, although if I were to do it again i'd work harder on the second one we had to make, I kind of ran close on time so ended up quickly making a watch (I conviniently didn't take any pictures of said watch!) Anyway i'm quite happy with the end result of the project.

Good ol' winter blues

So i've been feeling pretty crappy for about a week so I thought i'd check in with the doctor to see what was up. Turns out i've got PNEUMONIA, just bloody great. Luckily we caught it before I needed hospital treatment so hopefully forcing myself to swallow these god awful antibiotics will do the trick (insert crossed fingers and hopeful face here).
I never thought i'd say it but i'm actually upset about not being able to go to uni but I am! So i'm trying to stay on top of things, so far kind of unsuccessfully considering I haven't touched a pencil in about 4 days due to these flippin' illness. Another bad thing? I'm missing handing in work when i've actually been doing it! Had three briefs on the go; Monster munch, animal character design and a personal development design (a mad scientist in his lab for me).
Anyway promised myself that when I started to feel a little better i'd blog so that it doesn't go completely down the pan! So yes I thought i'd post a picture of my first typography attempts on photoshop for the minster munch brief. I'm turning the monster into well known 90's characters. I'll keep you updated.
Are you afraid of the dark?mosters? anyone?

MONSTER MUNCH

I was never a huge fan but i'm quite partial to a pack every now and again, although I haven't had them since they've been redesigned. Anyway, new uni brief involving relaunching the brand and so here are my ideas so far.
I prefer the monsters that were around in the 90's so they're the ones that I am mainly using, so to get people thinking of the 90's again I thought why not bring back some of the best characters that I remember seeing around. I've been sketching out the pickled onion monster in battles with said characters, such as monster vs pacman and monster vs scooby and the gang, not perfect but i'm still thinking! I also have a rough sketch of the monster with the goonies but might end up drawing it doing the truffle shuffle, not quite sure how that'll go down when I have to pitch it but hopefully everyone has seen the film otherwise it could be abit awkward!

Everything so far

So 2 months down and we've covered things I never even thought we'd be doing. We've had assignments on wirework, animation, architecture, dip pens, 3D work and more, most of the things i've never really worked with before.
We've just finished a brief about British wildlife, and are moving onto character design. This led me to an artist that I recently found and already love. I bought his book, "The Daily Zoo" and the illsutrations are ACE!

The artists name is Chris Ayers and he has some crazy talent! http://chrisayers.blogspot.com/

Start at the beginning

Im currently a first year, studying general illustration at Glyndwr university. Nearly 2 months down and time has already gone soooo fast. I'm loving the course so far, not so much the workload but i'm managing.
Coming to Uni I thought i'd be out of my depth having not done an art foundation before hand but i'm hoping i'll be able to keep up.
It's cool to see how others on my course work though, it's so mixed but I like that. It amazes me to see how we are all good at different things: some are sooo good at using photoshop and how others can just draw whatever's in their head at that particular moment; both things I need to try and improve on. But i'm trying and hopefully i'll get there.
So yes, basically this is the beginning of my blog. Here we go . . .