Alice Uggles

Alice Uggles . 22 . Illustration Student +++ Professional Practise Blog +++ +++UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON +++ Follow the links to the right for my social media pages and online portfolio.

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Grimes - Kill V. Maim

From the new album ‘Art Angels’ out now and available for download here: http://smarturl.it/artangels?IQid=YTFWB http://www.grimesmusic.com https://twitter.c...

Artists I Admire

To conclude this professional practise blog I will write a short piece on artists who inspire me.

One of my main influences is the artist/musician Grimes. She characters complex narratives and changes herself into various personas throughout her videos. For example, the song Kill V. Maim is in her words “is written from the perspective of Al Pacino in The Godfather Pt 2., except he’s a vampire who can switch gender and travel through space.”. The video is a cyberpunk saga with animated droplets of her doodles. She incorporates insane aesthetics into her fashion and has a unique sound. She is also an illustrator and I am deeply in love with her work. 

Her work also reminds me of another of my favourite artists Hattie Stewart. I love how playful and eccentric her work it. Doodling over fashion magazines to create something so fun and eye-catching. I just love how busy both artists are in their work. 

I really want to be more free and ridiculous with my work and just create some weird stuff. Both these artists started with no real end game in mind and just created things that they found fun and exciting and I really respect that and hope to learn from that and not be so precious in my own work. I also love with Grimes, especially how she can cross platforms so easily and isn’t afraid to try new things in her practice. 

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Curriculum Vitae

I attended a couple of lectures this year and last year on how to build a good CV and in light of that I’ve created two. One that leans towards my bartending experience if I were to go after another job like that next year for financial stability and one for my creative practice. 

This one I am proud of because I managed to keep to one page. 

My second one ended up being two because I wanted to talk about various creative practices I’ve done. However, I think when I actually send it off to people I will narrow it down to only the first page and not have it talk about my bar work at all. I’ll talk about all my volunteering in company-specific cover letters and let my work prove itself in my online portfolio. I will also remove both those pictures and draw a completely new self-portrait that's more professional looking and shows off my style and skill. I just put those there as testers. 

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My Final Website

I’ve finally gotten to a place where I like the aesthetic of my website and I’m really starting to have all the aspects of it pulled together. It still needs a lot of work but I think it will be fully operational by the time of my final year show. I’ve given the address of this site to the people in charge of making the brochures for the show. My website has a shop and links to my social media. It also has a portfolio showing my best work to date. It’s got a lot of bugs some links don’t go anywhere so I still need to do a lot of work on it. But since I now have the pressure of it being printed and shown to the public in the show it will definitely get done.

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Networking

I have a contact list with everyone whom I’m in contact with in various creative industries. I haven’t put it here since this is a public blog but I have their names, email addresses, some of their phone numbers and social media pages. If I ever want to work with them in the future or need to contact them for advice I can. In fact, some of the people on this list are interested in creating a collective of artists and as I’ve mentioned before are interested in opening a gallery together which I am very much welcome and interested in being a part of. At the moment we are calling the collective Ink Arcade. It’s been a dream of ours since foundation and a couple of people are really working to make it a reality. 

I’ve already set up a few social media pages for them and once I’m back in London full time we will be in discussions for future projects. 

The first Ink project will be a fashion photography shoot set up by Pm. They have already begun setting up for it and I’m set to help film it on the 12th of May. 

Here’s a photo of the development of the shoot. 

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Gallery Visits

I wasn’t able to go to on the university trip to Berlin this year due to lack of fund but instead, I went with Jim, another tutor and some second years on a wild trip around galleries in London. We went to the White Cube to see Eddie Peake’s new solo exhibition Concrete Pitch and then various private galleries around Mayfair. I didn’t even know you were allowed into those galleries but I got to see two of my favourite artists Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami. I also went to the Photographers gallery to see Under Cover: A Secret History Of Cross – Dressers which was fascinating. It was a really cool trip and I got to speak to Jim at length about what it means to be a practising illustrator and what my possible plans would be for after university. 

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My friend striking a pose at the Tate

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The Infinity Mirror

Also helping create an infinity mirror for another student film. I’m not entirely sure what this one is about though. Sometimes you just get roped into staying up till the crack of dawn making crazy props at the whim of those closest to you. It was a piece of mirror and a piece of clear plastic with a special double sided mirror film gently stuck onto it. We then built the black frame and placed the multicoloured LED lights. When you slot both mirrors into the frame and turn on the lights it created the trippy infinity effect. 

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I did these pieces of concept art for a student film that’s coming out later this year. It’s a period sci-fi drama about a baby alien landing on earth in ye olde days in a meteorite. I also helped eventually make the meteor and the alien tail for the film. 

Film poster (not by me)

The Alien Baby

In the end, we didn’t make the full baby just the tail and swaddle it in cloth to look like a baby. The tail was made out of a shower pipe I painted with pink and purple veins and then we wrapped fairy lights around it and built the shape using transparent silicone. 

A doting mother.

The Meteor

Sadly we didn’t go with my idea of making the meteor rainbow so they settled for painting it black and rubbing metallic silver spray paint around the grooves. The meteor was made of chicken wire and mod-rock. 

Photos and this gig courtesy of Lizzie Matthews.

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Last year we created a group for our course called Club Creative. Since we are the first year to ever do the UoB Illustration for Screen Arts / Graphic Design for Digital Media course we wanted to create something for future years. Especially with our campus shutting down, we want to leave our legacy almost. So we created a collective. Rowan named it Club Creative and the point of it, it’s a creative group for everyone involved in the class. We will run social media and organise events under this name. For the past two years, we’ve used this name to promote and organise our shows. I was closely involved with both our previous shows ‘Mish Mash’ and ‘Cellar Door’. For our final year show, however, we wanted to do something bigger. 

Very kindly we managed to do our first shows in spaces given to us for free. This year, however, we were going to have to find money to hire a space. It was important to us to do our show in Hastings. With that in mind, Rowan and Charlie found a gallery in Hastings willing to give us a space for a week at the price of £250. This was insanely cheap considering some courses spend thousands on spaces in London and Brighton. I took it open myself to organise Club Creative into a proper society. I filled out all the paperwork and I and Jamie went to special training meetings to ratify our society. 

As part of a society in Brighton, you can apply for funding if you want to hold an event. So I applied to get the £250 and maybe some more for the space and some money to print posters. I was president of the society and Jamie was the treasurer. I created this PDF to make the plea. 

Eventually, they got back to Jamie the treasurer and offered £125 of the claim which is a huge help for the final show. 

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My prints at Hifest!

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Work Experience

I sold my work at Hifest last year. It was a great opportunity to be promoting my work in a room full of professional artists. It was really satisfying to see my work being treated as equal to everyone else at the festival and it was loads of fun. I sold about 4 of my prints which isn't much but considering I didn’t have a lot of time or money to print them I was pleased with the result. 

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PRACTISING ILLUSTRATORS

Gino Marks 

Gino “Genie” Marks is a fellow Ravensbourne graduate as is now a practising illustrator and graphic designer. He does little-illustrated comics and has done editorial posters and double-page spreads for magazines. We’ve worked together a number of times on friend’s projects and he is a close friend of mine. That being said he is incredibly successful and I fully plan to ride on his coattails when he opens up his own studio next year.

Genie has promised me time and time again he will teach me the secrets of Adobe Illustrator and has already shown me countless helpful tricks on Photoshop that has influenced my work. Me and Genie have spoken at great lengths about our work and what illustration and graphics mean to us, he is one of the main reasons I chose to do this at undergrad. His use of colour is one of the most beautiful features of his work and the use of expression in his cartoons really brings his work to life for me. Gino is someone I hope to work with closely next year and I know he will help me improve my work and I going to try to help him as much as I can with the opening of his studio next year.

Gino has also used a 3D printer for his work before and said he will show me how. His work has been featured in a student film we both worked on last year. He created a whole children's book about space for the film “Amishtranaut”. You know your friends with Gino when he makes you a pixel drawing of something you like. For my 20th birthday, he drew me Baymax from Big Hero 6. For his birthday I returned the favour with a drawing of him as his favourite anime character.

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Photos from the Big Screen at Latitude!

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Volunteering and Work Experience

For the last two summers, I helped two of my tutors run the social media accounts for an event they run at Latitude Festival. The Big Screen and Film Gallery is a large screen they’ve set up in the forest section of Latitude. As part of setting up the social media for them, they also let me and my girlfriend go to the festival to live blog the whole thing. We made a short film to document the experience. The festival was amazing and it was a really cool event to be part of. Even when all the other stages had closed the Big Screen was still going and Saturday and Sunday it got really popular. The first year the overall theme this year was Punk, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the movement. 

The second year, this last summer, was slightly daunting as the tutors running ti wouldn’t be there and I was largely left to my own devices. The screen was also lumped together with another stage so it was harder to film. I still put out lots of tweets and Instagram photos but this time I acted like more of a timetable social media page, alerting people to when new events were starting. I managed to use hashtags to get my tweets onto the main message boards of the obelisk stage which hopefully drew a crowd toward the Big Screen.

I’ve run the social media for things before, but this was my first time doing it for an event, it was really fun to do actually and I’m so proud of the documentation of the event I managed to do. 

Facebook Page

Instagram

Twitter

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Vietnam!

Photos from my trip to Vietnam, went out there to film a promo for See You at Lily’s. It’s an amazing hostel and an amazing country I definitely recommend visiting. 

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See you at Lily's

See You At Lily’s hostel is a bohemian budget travelers hostel located in the very heart of the charming historic Hanoi Old Quarter. From the City of Hanoi…

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Professional Contacts

I’ve worked on may film sets with my friends from my foundation year. Because of that a while ago I was given the oppurtunity to go to Vietnam with them and film a promotional video for a travel company called See You at Lilys. Free accommodation and I got to go on all the tours the hostel had to offer. It was one of the craziest two weeks of my life and I loved it. I got to explore Hanoi, climb part of a mountain and stay with some locals, also party on a boat. It was brilliant and it was also really cool to be filming out there. This was filmed a couple of years ago but it's still being used as the official advertisement for See You at Lilys Travel Agency and I’m still in contact with the director who wants to do more overseas projects. I’m very prepared to be apart of whatever crazy adventure he has planned next.

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Whilst The Rest Were Sleeping [OFFICIAL TRAILER #1]

COMING SOON from CiRCA69 : Whilst The Rest Were Sleeping is a 4 hour event combining 17 virtual reality experiences, an augmented reality smartphone app & trail,…

Work Experience

When I met with the careers counseller Boo, she showed me a volunteering opportunity in Brighton. I told her I was somewhat interested in maybe pursuing a career in theatre after university and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. It was a theatre event that used VR technology and animation to create a narrative. I emailed the person involved and soon got a response. I was told there would be a training day in the coming week. However after that I didn’t hear back. I decided to ring them and see if the oppurtunity was still avaliable. Thankfully they were still very much happy for me to join the experience I was just accidentally missed of the mailing list. It was a good thing I called. 

It turned out to be an incredibly odd but fascinating event. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take any photographs as it was a travelling show and any photography was strictly prohibited. The show was about a strange case that happened in America many years ago that centred around the disappearances of a group of school children and a murdered authour. There were several VR experiences as well as a group of actors that guided people through the Old Market in Brighton explaining to them parts of the story. Each VR experience gave clues to the puzzle and it was up to the audience using an app on their phone to use augmented reality with objects around the room to piece together the evidence. 

As a volunteer, I had several duties. One of them was to control the music in the bar at the end of the experience which I did on the first night. Next was I had to direct people to the use of the VR in the experience located in the main hall. This experience was titled “Slave to Mortal Rage”. I got an opportunity to try this VR and it was one using the hand controls that we got to try in class earlier this year. You were placed in the apartment of a murdered author's home at the scene of the crime. You had to walk around the space and using the controls you could look at all the notes and books scattered on the floor. 

One of the coolest bits of this piece was whilst in the experience you could walk up to a smashed window and you could feel a breeze coming through it. Because in reality I had helped set up small fans within the space that corresponded to the location of the window. Most of my duties here were making sure audience members didn’t walk into said fan. 

My final duty was the most fun. I was working on another VR experience called ‘The Cube’. This one I would wait for one of the actors to direct audience members toward me and take them into a small room. There I would sit them down and place the VR headset on them. Then I would run the programme. I had a list of instructions in front of me and as the animation played I had to press certain keys to make things happen. This one prompted audience participation so for example at one point a voice in the animation says “he held out a bottle towards me” and I would hold out an actual bottle in front of the participant. I would wait until the person grabbed the bottle and pressed a key to continue to experience moving forward. This was fun but also quite stressful as sometimes there were bugs in the system which meant I would have to improvise what happened next, as in jump to another step or repeat the experience all over. 

When I signed up for this I really expected to just be an usher but I was very much part of the show actually happening. It was a great opportunity and I felt I learnt a lot about VR and the way theatre shows are run. I spoke at length to a person in the lighting department who told me a lot about how to get into the industry which was valuable knowledge. I also now have an open invitation to come back and help out on future Circa69 projects.