People and Places

Hello, I am a first year student at Birmingham city university studying graphic design and visual communication. This is the first project I have been given and I am working collaboratively with four other artists studying the same course. Thank you for...

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Hope you enjoyed my blog.

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Just a couple of quick snaps to show our first project at Birmingham City University. Just want to say a massive well done to Gina, Darren, Shanade and Ashleigh who were my team mates during this project.

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One of our prints fresh from the printer. DO NOT TOUCH! 

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This is the moment that I walked into lecture and walked straight out. I  was so disappointed with the way the sculpture looked. I just knew that I could produce better work than that. So instead of trashing the previous idea, I decided to build onto it due to not having a large amount of time left. I looked back at images that I had photographed and got inspired by the Custard Factory octopus featured above.  I spoke to my team about my disappointment and frustration and they were happy for me to build until I was satisfied.

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These images are a couple of photo edits that I used photoshop to create. I felt like I just wanted to explore photoshop deeper than I have before. I feel like these images are definitely different to what my team has created and are very abstract.  

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These images were when I decided to bring my mood lights in that were supplied by my accommodation. I think that they give a really eerie feel to my photos and I wish I had done this from the start.  

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When we went down to the photo studio, These are a couple of the better shots that I captured that day. On the camera they looked pretty good, but once I got them onto the computer, I couldn’t stand them. I was really disappointed but luckily, a member of my team had taken some really nice shots using a film noir filter on her iPhone 6 which we have decided that we are going to submit instead of my own.

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Blue Ringed Octopus:

I had a look at the most dangerous octopus on the planet and thought that it would be suitable for my project. The blue ringed octopus is a good choice as its bright blue rings and sandy colour would pop compared to the rest of the sculpture. I was hoping for it to be a more vibrant orange than it actually is to relate back to the custard factory octopus but I kind of like how its different and ii must say that it has grown on me.

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This was a page just for me really. I wanted to know what I had left to do and where I currently stood with about a week and a half to go.

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Construction of the octopus:

I spoke about materials I will use to construct the octopus’s body and tentacles. I want to use a very heavy canvas like material to give it structure and shape. I intend to make the suckers out of a mixture of papermache’ and different sized bottle lids if I have the time.

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This was my first attempt at drawing an octopus but decided it looked more like a squid so didn’t carry on with it. 

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I titled this page ‘How can I create this board into something I am happy to submit’ because I walked in one morning with two weeks to go, looked at the sculpture and just walked out in frustration. Something in my head just decided that I just wasn't anywhere near happy to submit this weird bridge and a couple of bits of cardboard stuck vertically. I knew that this was not going to get me anywhere near the grade that I wanted for this project. I had a think when I was outside and had the idea to use the iconic orange octopus graffiti in the Custard Factory as inspiration for the new idea. An octopus swamping digbeth.. I pitched the idea to my team and tutors and they seemed to like the idea, so I went ahead with it.   

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Two weeks to go:

The image at the top of this post was me looking at different textures that I could apply to the side of the abstract train track that I had decided to make earlier on to relate back to the cobbled stonework on the walls of the archways.

The image below was about looking at different aspects of the board as it currently looked from a birds eye view. From this, I did a personal critique and idea evaluation to see what I could improve on.  

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This was a quick three week review that I did myself looking at names and realising that it would have a maximum of four players at a time. By this point we had started chatting about surveillance as a group so I decided to come up with a couple ideas showing how we could incorporate cctv into our board game.

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These two pages are all about what we could use as counters for our monopoly board. I was looking at pocket watches because I wanted to communicate how I feel about digbeth being stuck back in time every time I go there. I feel as if the street art and vintage have come back into fashion in recent years especially like the pocket watch has. 

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This was a typography workshop we all did as a class to see what pathways we wanted to go into. There were about four different typography workshops that we could've gone into and this was the result of my typography

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This page was an idea I had from the start. I did mention it to the group but we all decided to go with the monopoly board. This idea was all about showing the contrast between the gritty industrial side of digbeth and the more colourful street art side which has submerged the area. The image on the right hand side of the face was inspired by a piece of street art in the photograph below that we found on the Custard Factory walls.