Sorry I haven't blogged, my parrot got in the way.

Wow so I've been MIA for a while, I'm fairly certain I haven't blogged since around last summer. Whoops? As the title indicates I've been fairly busy. Between extra hours at my "real" weekend job, babysitting little cousins and yes, buying a miniature parrot that needs constant entertaining and likes to eat sketchbooks. However! I'm now a third year student aka final year before the dreaded jump into being "professional", taxes, kissing my beloved student discount goodbye and what not as so will be blogging like there's no tomorrow.

Meet Bixby

Possibly the worst pet for an illustrator

So as I said I am now just over half way through my final year *gulp* and so far I'd say this year has lived up to the expectations of higher stress levels.
For the last couple of months I've been refining my illustration technique, an alternative for my printing method and also altering my design and thinking process. It's been tough, many curse words said and after numerous rants (and even a few stray tears) I hopefully have it cracked. maybe.
I realised that I had previously been drawing up my ideas and finals in a way that didn't reflect my chosen medium of linocut printing and so I've spent the first semester altering my methods whilst trying to complete the projects.

Here's a peak:

Now this year we had to come up with our own briefs, and so I won't disclose the details for this just yet so they may not make sense out of context but all will be revealed soon enough.

Half finished rough inked with indian ink 

Taken into print

This is for the competition project "Picturing time", I chose to work with the quote "Time sometimes  flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail but man is happiest when he does not notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly".

This was for the penguin book cover competition for "The Big Sleep" but it got rejected by my tutors at feedback. 

The Big Sleep definitely caused me some grief, my initial idea was thrown out by my tutors just before assessments and so I redesigned it (i'll probably post it later). But it was a learning experience and will probably still go in my portfolio.

So like always any feedback or comments are welcomed. Until next time!