responsive: end of module evaluation

responsive: project report

responsive: collaborative practice design board

YCN BEAR

responsive: individual practice design boards

Penguin Design Awards:

Illustration Friday:

Delicious Mess:

responsive: collaborative submission!

so today was the day that we finally submit our collaborative responsive brief! it's been a good journey for me, as a creative i feel like i've learned a lot of things about myself. i hope that in the future i will collaborate more so that i come to understand myself more as an illustrator.

here is the final proposal that we wrote for our project:

For BEAR, we wanted to do something a bit different. Fear is something you often try to avoid talking about with children, but it is such a fundamental part of life and development. We wanted to create a set of cards, showing how fear doesn’t have to be too scary. I think children will also find comfort in knowing that they’re not alone in their fear. Fun facts and jokes to make the fears not seem so scary anymore, making children more confident and able to overcome things.

Kids will be able to collect stickers to add to their BEAR poster, giving BEAR his ‘armour’ and able to join him fight against fears. We want kids to know that it’s okay to have fears, and give them confidence that they can overcome it.

here are some screenshots of us submitting the work:

the email i received!:

responsive: last minute decisions

the last task that i wanted to do was to create a mini mock-up poster of the 'sticker' poster. i wanted to do this because i feel like our project was lacking and i wanted the people reading our submission to know what we meant when we said we wanted a poster. i just used the bear drawing that had already been done, as there wasn't another i could use:

i think that for last minute mockup before we submitted it came out quite well and you can get the idea of what we were going for. 

responsive: development of our cards

 A little presentation with a collection of things i've compiled together which i think are important to show the development of our cards. It's a bit of a random collection with some some timeline.

responsive: doing the text

so i've been given another job to do, my teammate doing the layout has said that they are not confident with doing fonts/typography. i myself do quite like to do fonts so it's not a problem for me to do it, it's just something else that i need to make sure i have time to do. i decided to just use a simple handwritten font, because it's for children i don't really want something too complicated, just easy to read.

inspiration: 

finished writing:

I used a simple ink brush, so that the letters were bold and easy for children to read. I didn't want it to be too complicated. However I used a different brush for the main titles so that they stand out a bit more for the front of the card!

responsive: finally colouring!

so this weekend i have finally been able to do my bit to help my team! i have started the colouring of our little bear project. i'm really excited as i have felt like i wasn't helping as much as i could! i'll be using my new photoshop brushes and getting a nice gouache feel!

here are the finished colourings! i'm really happy with how they game out and i feel like the gouache works really nicely, tying in different effects and making the digital not seem so rigid. I feel like kids will like looking at things with more of a painterly feel rather than such a rigid feel.

we decided to leave out heights and spiders, although we were going to do this, we were pressed for time and thought that making more work for ourselves wasn't worth it. there was also no drawing for heights, so i didn't have anything to colour. 

we were also going to do a mockup of the poster where the kids could put 'stickers' on but it hasn't been drawn so i don't really know what to do. whether to try and figure something out myself, because my teammate supposed to be doing the drawings has something they need to be at home for.

responsive: i get stressed easily

So last night I was having a bit of a stress. My group member sent me the work that they had done for the layout, and I didn't like it. There's something in me that makes me such a perfectionist when it comes to doing work, I always have an image in my head and when it doesn't turn out like that, I go into some sort of meltdown. 

I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do or say, is there a way to tell someone that you don't like what they did? That feels so awful. Working in groups is hard. I have such a particular way of doing things, I feel like I turn into some sort of dragon lady when it's not going my way.

After stressing all night on what I was going to do, the next day, I talked with my other group member and they agreed that there is some changes that we need to do. So we set about doing some sketches and working more things out on how we wanted the final designs to look. This made me feel more relieved and that I could chill out a bit more.

When it came to talking with my group member about the work, it was totally fine. We worked everything out together and she agreed with the new designs that we had come up with. I felt so much better, and through this, I've learnt that when it comes to critiquing other's work, you have to be honest. Working together is about creating something between you that you are all happy with, and when you're not happy, all you have to do is talk it out and be reasonable. Through this process I feel like I've come out with a better level head and being able to collaborate easier.

responsive: leaving it late

there's one thing that has been difficult with this project. time management has not been great within my group and i think we really could've done much better. as i am the last step, the colouring, i have been waiting for my other team mates to do their part. i've been trying to help here and there, giving ideas, brainstorming and finding the facts and names of the fears. 
however i can't help but feel like i'm not doing anything. i want to do more. i sort of wish we had made a timetable of when we wanted things to be done by.

EDIT: 17/03/17

so it's a week before the deadline, and i've only just gotten all the drawings and images that i need to colour in. i feel like this is so late and i have to make up all the time that we've lost. i have to do the colouring, all the typography, backgrounds and i feel like i would've liked more time to get everything done by. i will be able to get it done, but it does mean having a few late nights and just working a lot. 

i can't say that i'm not at fault either, and should've encouraged my team to keep more time management. i think it's something that i have learned if i work with a team in the future, especially if i am the last step to make sure my team and i work together in keeping good time management and making sure the project is running smoothly!

responsive: illustration friday - punk

i decided to have a bit of a relax this week and draw something more easy and fun. In the end i really like how it turned out, i think the contrast of the black lines and the red text makes the message of 'punk' really stand out. it was nice to try and play with my normal 'style', which is what people call 'cutesy'. i like the mix of cute and punk that i have tried, i think i'll play around with style again in the future! this mini project is really helping me to find new things that i want to try, because each week the brief is small but challenges me to make something different each time.

responsive: finally submitted!

I finally got my entries submitted for the Penguin Book project! I'm so happy!! It took a while to get the website to work, I suppose it's the rush of all those people trying to submit their designs. I know it's a bit last minute, but I kept forgetting to submit it and didn't have Adobe Acrobat at home so I couldn't combine and reduce the file sizes myself. I'm proud of myself for actually submitting to a real competition and hopefully something good will come out of it! But if not, then at least i've had this experience, which has been really fun and I've found that I really enjoy making book covers, so there's that.

responsive: illustration friday - heroic

so i got some new brushes for photoshop recently and i wanted to try them out for this weeks theme 'heroic'. the watercolour blends so nicely, i think it came out really fluid and fits the piece, the fluidity of the ninja's movements blend well with the flow of the watercolour. as always for these pieces i want to spend more time on them, but need to better manage my time as these are just a quick weekly piece.

responsive: collaboration meeting

we were talking about which ones to do for the 5 or 6 cards we are looking to create. This is what we came up with at first but after some deliberation and doing a survey of some students as to what they were afraid of when they were a child we have decided to do;

• heights
• spiders
• clowns
• the dark
• fire

I think these fears are much more common within children and will be fun to draw and colour.

here is a picture of the survey that we did. there were some funny ones which i think people were taking it a bit out there with, but some of them seemed very genuine and even had backstories to come with them, which was really interesting to hear. For example;

• vampires - used to hold duvet up to neck so they couldnt get it and slept with his arms crossed against his chest so they might believe he is a vampire too
• mannequin - went to a wax museum but they were old and melting so it looked like eyes were coming out of their sockets etc

responsive: Adrian Mole reworked

I looked back at the work I had done for Adrian Mole and decided that I wasn't satisfied with the cover that I had made. I felt like there was a more interesting motif that I could work with and I decided to go with the red socks from the book. It's an important part in the process of Adrian's outbreak and life. Sometimes when designing it's best to try out a few ideas if you're unsure and then you'll know if you're unhappy with it, which is exactly what happened for me. I liked two of my ideas and I couldn't decide so better to try out both and find out with one you like more.

responsive: Adrian Mole Screenshots

responsive: ICB Screenshots & Final

Here are the final screenshots and progress for my In Cold Blood book cover. I'm really pleased with how it turned out in the end even though it's not what I had originally planned. The route that I started with was doing the bloody footprint as I thought it was quite a crucial part of the book, and what led them into finding the murderers. Although I liked this idea, I just couldn't get it to look how I wanted to. It looked too cartoony and not serious enough for what the book is about.

That's when I just started to play around with some brushes that I had acquired and found the perfect one that looked like blood. I couldn't believe how much it looked like it and loved how it looked. So I played around with that for a bit, using different brushes to add small splatters and texture, and I really like how the final thing came out as a background for a book. I think it looks more professional than the footprint. 

I did try and incorporate one of my other ideas of the pyjama shirt, but I still felt that it wasn't looking how I wanted it to look. Researching adult non-fiction books found me thinking that the cover should be really simple and not too cartoon-y looking, which is what led me to my next idea of just using the background I had created with text over the top.

I did try out some hand-written fonts to see if I could make it work with them but I just wasn't feeling that either and I think the Courier New font that I ended up going with felt much better and lent idea to hospital vibes and I think it really works.

I'm really pleased with how the final thing turned out. It's simple and yet effective, drawing you in but not giving too much away, just that it's about murder.

responsive: illustration friday - up

this weeks theme was 'up'. I decided to go with something simple, a little boy being lifted up by a balloon. i decided to test out a different style, and see how it went. i quite like how it turned out. i didn't want to spend too much time on it, as it's just a small brief, so i just left a simple background, however if i was to do it again with more time i would've spent longer making a proper background with a cityscape or something similar.

responsive: bear collab presentation