Clay Heads

These are the two clay heads that I created in response to some of my earlier paintings. I'm happy with how they came out although it is almost a bit too obvious what they are trying to be - they are somewhere between being messy lumps of clay and busts. I found it difficult to make them not too much of either; any details of shape I added such as eye sockets, cheekbones or noses made them look slightly comical, but by removing those details they have become somewhat shapeless. They should make sense when seen in context with the rest of the work however.

I painted them black to begin with and then lightly went over this with a metallic gold paint to create the illusion of them being being cast in metal. Although there is not much reason for me to have done this I think they would look good for the degree show is they actually were cast in metal or painted in the way to emulate a metal finish. This finish is what I always imagined them looking like and I don't think painting either a flat colour or painting details on would be suitable, they just need something to emphasise the shape and texture which the gold paint does well.

Concertina book

I was originally planning on binding the concertina to make a book with French folds, but due to a few reasons will leave it as a concertina. One reason was that is was fairly expensive to have the book printed and I'm really happy with how hat backs of the pages look - the colour is really bright and crisp, so I don't want to hide the texture between the pages. Another reason is that if it were stitched it would only be so you could tear it open anyway, which I don't think anyone would do during the assessment of the work or at the degree show. Lastly where I have folded and glued the concertina together there are small discrepancies in the page size which would be very obvious down the spine were is bound, but less so when it is stretched out as a long book.

Alberto Giacometti

Some of the outcomes of my previous painting experiments have been almost sculptural and so I want to take my work into three dimensional models. I immediately thought of the textures used in Giacometti's sculptures and how I could find a way of working this into my own work. The proportions have been exaggerated and pushed to their limits in some cases, but because of the way we project our image onto everything looking for the face or form in a shape they are still recognisable.

I plan on making a few clay heads using my own paintings as a starting point or reference but really trying to work with the material and letting the way it cracks and behaves to influence the outcome. This is in part because I think it is a natural progression for my work but also referencing the severed heads on sticks Marlow sees at Kurtz's camp. 

Anthony Cudahy

Anthony Cudahy paints scenes from films, videos and photographs. When painting from a moving image he embraces the artifacting and distortion of a VHS or digital recording. This 'levelling' of certain areas of light, colour or shade is something that I really like, and the subtle use of texture to define features. The way paint has been layered gives the characters a translucent and ghostly quality. His choice of colour is often far from reality and working in oil a single brushstroke can combine multiple areas of different colour blurring the image and the lines between the reality of the photographic reference and some dreamlike place the paintings inhabit. 

Francis Bacon

Bacon is an obvious point of reference when trying to depict a face or portrait in an unsettling and distorted way. These portraits have a somewhat cubist element to them using geometric lines to divide areas of colour and the shifting and relocation of features on the face. There is a feeling of movement in all three of these paintings due in part to the brush stokes but also because of the way the features seem to 'swim' about following curves that look like ripples in water.

Erik Svetoft

Some of the portraits painted on acetate reminded me of Erik Svetoft's gruesome drawings where the human head or body are somewhere between biological diagrams and haunting creatures. This play on form is very interesting to me as the image below is still recognisable as a bust, yet has no human characteristics. It might be good to see how far away from the human form I can get in terms of shape or lack of detail for the image to still be read as a face.

Sign painting

Having seen this trailer for a documentary about sign painting I have been interested in the process:

I have hand lettered some type on the front of my sketchbooks but recently have decided to put some more effort into learning the correct techniques and to practice my strokes rather than just copying a font found on a computer.

Acetate Portraits

As a continuation of the experiments with portraits I laid a sheet of acetate over one of the portraits and roughly marked out the dark areas using PVA (knowing it would react with the acrylic) and then painted the light areas as before. I then pressed these onto black paper mixing the paint and creating texture as the two were peeled apart. When scanned with the lid open the acetate came out really well and at a high resolution the movement of the paint and texture of the brush strokes is really interesting.

Below is a crop of one of the faces, but the smoky texture down the left, the bubbling in the middle and areas where it looks to have been rubbed off like in the top right are completely uncontrollable and beautiful. 

The downside to this technique is that at A5 size the details are too small to be seen properly and therefore wouldn't look nearly as good in the book format.

Publication

Rory and I have volunteered to design the Publication for our degree show to display the work of the whole course. In keeping with the DIY and Pick 'n' Mix theme of the workshop and shop we decided that it would be interesting to have a 'make your own' publication so everyone is able to customise the document they take away. This makes the Publication less of a catalogue and something people will be more inclined to treasure and keep hold of for a long time.

We started by gathering lots of visual research on open binding techniques and also magazines and catalogues that have a similar aesthetic to what we want the Publication to have.

Much more research can be found at http://nuapublication.tumblr.com

We settled on having a 'core' booklet that has everyone's details and information about the course so no-one will be under-represented in the Publication. Into this you will be able to supplement it with sheets that are specific to each member of the course with their artwork on, more information on them and excerpts of interviews too. The design was a challenge because it needs to function well and allow people to easily add more pages as they choose. It also has to work with one page or a possible 72 pages.

The final concept we are going forward with is this:

The Publication will be A5 with a card or thicker paper stock for the cover.

Visitors to the degree show can pick which information they want to keep and store it in the cover which acts like a folder. Information on the course will be printed on the inside front and back pages of this cover so even if they choose not to take anything they will still have basic information on the Uni and the course.

The cover is actually and A3 sheet folded in 4 and attached in such a way it can be unfolded even when the book is bound.

Contact information and thumbnails of everyone's work will be on the reverse of this fold out cover and can be unfolded somewhat like a map or detached like a poster and displayed on a wall.

The binding method will be a two piece metal filing clip. This can be undone and re-fastened at any time. It also fits through hole punched sheets and so doesn't require any special die cutting or finishing. 

Painted portraits

At the very end of the story, Marlow considers what he knows about Kurtz, and realises that he has no profession. He thought that Kurtz may have been a painter who writes, or a writer that paints. This made me think of the ways I could capture the same atmosphere as my previous images but using painting as the primary technique.

The image below was a very quick response to a portrait (about 15 seconds). I like how abstract the image is whilst still having some sense of a portrait. Another element that I like is the streaky and obvious brush strokes. This gives it some sense of unrest and disintegration, like the portrait itself is shifting and breaking down.

So I could continue to work quickly with this technique but with more refinement I also tried painting over photos. This technique also had it's benefits. I could use the paint to blend certain areas together, leveling out and eliminating certain areas of detail leaving only the light and shade. This creates a ghostly suggestion of figure and features.

Heart of Darkness continued

I have come back to this project after a long break (January was the last time I really thought about it) and am trying to pick up where I left off. I had already created quite a bit of imagery and am now thinking about how to tie it all together in some book work. One idea I have had comes from a couple of ideas I've wanted to do for a while, one being some sort of concertina book, and the other a book that you have to tear to read. Whilst doing some research for another project I found the French Fold method of binding a book.

This method is perfect because each page is folded back on itself it can be made by making a concertina and then stitching along one side. This gives 'front' and 'back' pages, so you can see there is something printed on the back of each page, but are unable to open the page to see it properly (unless you are willing to tear it open down the spine). In this was you are violently and permanently changing the book to see the bigger picture, and this life changing experience is exactly what Marlow the narrator of the story undergoes.

I created an abstract pattern for the backs of the pages by combining white acrylic paint and PVA glue and pressing them between two sheets of black paper. The PVA and acrylic have some sort of reation as they dry and the acrylic cracks and disperses. This has some feeling of decay which I really like and also the overall outcome looks somewhat like an aerial view of some landscape. This works well with the idea of a journey but one that is quite dream like.

Below is a mock up of how the pages would look with the red and black texture on the inside and white pages at the front. I would add my already existing images to the front of the pages by using either photo corners or by inserting the corners into pre cut slits. The book would read like a surreal and warped photo album.

Puffin Design Award

The brief for this year's Puffin Design Award was to create a book jacket for The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. After reading the book it was clear that there was more to the story than just the gangs, greasers and fighting. There were a surprising amount of deeper themes which I thought were key to the success of the novel. One of these was the vigilante justice that is carried out by the Greasers and the Soc's, and the immense power having a weapon gives the carrier. There is a huge turning point in the story that all pivots around the knife. I tried to combine these elements in my initial ideas.

Another recurring moral of the story is that regardless of which 'gang' you belong to, everyone is the same deep down. I wanted to Illustrate this by having a dust jacket like below with a bloodstain on, which when removed shows a jumper belonging to one of the Soc's with the blood seeping through. The blood is universal and everyone in the story is affected in the same way by the violence. Death is always death.

I also thought about the way the whole jacket could be used to portray a scene.  The sunset is often used as the unifying symbol between the two groups, that they both watch the same sunset. The front cover shows the silhouette of Ponyboy with a fight going on behind, the back cover is Cherry watching the same fight under the same sunset, so the reader can see there are two sides to the story, but common themes.

This was also interesting to try because there is quite a lot of information that you have to use on the cover such as copy on the front and back as well as the logos and barcode to work around or include in the design.

My final outcome is shown above. It combines some of the concepts I thought about in my other ideas. One of the most important things for me when I was designing the cover was that it had to have impact and also make the reader think in some way. I wanted to cover some of the issues addressed in the book on the cover rather than just create good looking surface imagery. The way I went about doing this was through using two double meanings in the front and back, the leather jacket and the knife, and the jumper and a broken chain-link fence.

Bicycle Shop poster

A few people from the Illustration course have had their work chosen to be displayed at the Bicycle Shop in Norwich, here is a quick poster I created for the Private View.

And a matching price list as we couldn't have labels under the work.

Noma Bar

Noma Bar uses bold shapes and colours to create powerful images. Bar also is incredibly inventive with his use of negative space to convey double meanings.

This approach would work perfectly for a book cover because it is so striking, but also can tell a story on multiple levels with a single image.