laurengeorge

- Liverpool John Moores University - Graphic Design and Illustration - Reflective Blog

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Some more photographs for my portfolio to document my Muji sketchbook.

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Just some more photographs of my new booklet ready to display in my portfolio.

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I've been thinking about redoing my booklet for a while and I took on board what Chris said about it in the critique. I decided to go for two completely different colours to contrast and give me more to work with. I also created a new double page spread design as I didn't like the original one I had previously designed I thought it was too similar. I decided to overlay the biro drawings and add a vanity quote through them to tie in with the title of my book. I much prefer this layout and I'm really happy with how the colours printed in the finished piece! 

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I came across these illustrations today made by an artist called Amanda Dilworth. I really like her approach to combining typography and imagery. This style of work would have fit well with the last brief and the pattern brief! I really like the typography pieces, I like how 'creativity' is made up of different accompanying illustrations. I also really like the made in Britain stitched piece, it's very cleverly designed. The mixed media techniques she uses are very interestingly created by pasting in patterns to specific areas of the illustrations.

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Some more adaptations of my image and typography piece after speaking with Chris today about how I could adjust the type. I've decided to style the typography to look like pleats in he dress as Chris suggested. I also tried experimenting with colour block and background colours but I think it spoils the image. I'm just going to print all my trials out to see which looks best in print form.

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Just some more of Chris Brown's work that really appealed to me. He's designed for Carluccio's, The Guardian, Sunday Times, Tender Clothing and the Folio Society. I really like his lino printing style. My favourite piece out of this selection is the little pig!

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Today we had a staff lecture from Chris Brown. My favourite piece of his was the Alphabet of London book that he illustrated! I love the layout and colour scheme, everything about it was so effortlessly beautiful. He uses lino cuts to create these lovely black and white illustrations for each letter. I love how he doesn't name the illustrations and leaves it up the imagination of the reader as they speak for themselves. I have had experience with lino cutting before and know how tricky and fiddly it is to create delicate cuts which makes me appreciate his attention to detail even more.

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On Tuesday me and Elliot finalised our stop motion animation piece. We decided to use the whiteboard technique and take a Christmas style narrative approach to the brief! During the creation stages we faced several problems. We struggled keeping the penguin drawing the same throughout as he was so detailed but we overcame this by removing his scarf and hat to make the drawing simple. We also struggled with lighting, as the day went on the lighting became poor and we couldn't really avoid this. Due to it being such poor lighting we were unable to give our poor penguin the ending he deserved! Despite all these problems I think we tackled the brief well and produced a good quality animation, synced the music successfully and maintained a high standard of illustration throughout.

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After being inspired by the print workshop today, I decided to research screen printing in more detail to see if I could come up with any ideas on how to go about revisiting and revamping my 'Elements of you' brief. I came across this artist named Rosha Nutt. I really like the pop art element of her screen printing and think it would work really well worked into overlays of my biro drawings. I think I may attempt screen printing these after I've worked them into overlays on Illustrator.

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Today we had a mono printing workshop with an illustrator named Ben Jones. I really enjoyed this workshop and found his techniques cleverly simple. He showed us how to use household objects such as cereal boxes and spoons to create really interesting prints and demonstrated different ways of working with them. I particularly liked the cereal box cut out printing, he demonstrated how to do this with his snake cutout and it creates a really nice effect that's still very graphic design and illustration. I love the hand rendered quality it brings to his pieces that you can't capture on Illustrator. Mono printing was another interesting technique that he showed us how to produce. You just lay the paper over the ink and draw on top! You can also create textures in this style to by rubbing your finger on the paper to smudge the ink underneath. I really want to experiment with this technique after seeing the impressive results and may revisit my 8 page stapleless booklet...

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As I have my final stop motion workshop tomorrow I decided to blog about one of my favourite stop motion pieces. I love this animation, it's very quirky and clever!

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This is a coloured version of my bridezilla! I'm not sure whether this will be my final version I'm just playing around with different ideas to see what works best with the imagery. I like the simple line colouring as I've kept the image simple with basic features of the woman, although I think I will also try block colour to see which looks better. I'm really pleased with the contrast of image and think I've come up with a good concept for the brief!

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Starting to take my idea into Illustrator...

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Sketching ideas for part 2 of my brief...

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On Wednesday we had a staff lecture from my tutor Chris Rodenhurst and I was particularly interested in his work as I favour to illustration. Looking at his sketchbooks was a great help as I'm very precious about mine and he explained that they weren't as problematic as they are made out to be. He showed how basic his sketchbooks were and how he used them to help work through ideas roughly which really helped. The work that stood out to me the most was the Knowsley Hall map. I really liked the way he used dip pen and watercolour to create these animal illustrations and I would like to attempt this technique as it works very effectively. I also really liked the animation side of his work, especially the Barclays Colour Wheel. He had a very limited time to create this set of 40 simple animations and I was really impressed with them!

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Just another version of my final piece after revisiting it. I have changed the 'married someone else' into the Crackvetica font to portray a broken heart.

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After researching different types of heart styled typography I decided to start redesigning an entirely new piece. I really liked the overlapping text style that Cecilia showed us in her examples in the lecture last week. I tried to make the heart two separate parts to show the contrast of the two different parts of the short story. I really like this design and think it has come out better than my first attempt and I have also based the piece completely on type as the brief intended rather than relying on imagery.