Too much Tolkien

I decided to read Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck, as I remember a poster of it being up in my form room back in year 10 and I've always wondered what it was about. It's also the only book my mate Dave's ever finished reading, as he despises books ("Fuck reading, if there's a film I'll watch the film, if there ain't a film it ain't a good story" - David Barley) and I was intrigued to find out what the reason he'd been able to finish this book was. Turns out it's mostly because it's short (I read it in a few hours) but it is a good book.

After reading a book we were tasked with creating a front cover for it. I decided to have a silohuette of a dead rabbit with a reddy orange background. The reason for this is to me the main theme of the book is the dream of freedom. Rabbits are carefree, and they have connotations of dreams. Another reason I chose a dead rabbit is that throughout the book George talks about his and Lennie's fantasy homestead where there'll be lots of rabbits for Lennie to look after. However their dreams fall through when Lennie kills Curley's wife by accident, the same way he kills a mouse at the start of the book. With that action George's dreams are killed off.

Also it's a sad book, I wanted a macarbre cover to set the tone right. I used a font from a 1920s poster about drifters never harvesting anything. I have the white lines going through the picture to represent either the boundarys between fields, or the boundarys stopping all the characters from achieving their desires.








I'm happy with how it came out, I could imagine it as the cover quite easily.

Egg!

We were given a bit of a piss take brief about eggs, and told to make an A2 page in response.

I bought a cadbury's creme egg and a kinder surprise egg. I then cut the Kinder egg in half, took the little yolk case thing for the toy out and opened that up, discarded the toy and then cut the yolk case into a chick shape, I stuck on eyes made out of the bit of plasticy paper that tells you not to eat the toy inside, then I poured the creme egg white into the kinder egg with the chick and glued the other half of the kinder egg back on, giving me a more realistic fake egg.

Then I went outside and threw it at the ground as hard as I could and it smashed open and splattered about. I went back to check on it twice, and the second time someone had kicked it.

Research Musts

I missed this project as I was at the student money protests, which after learning a lot more about seemed to be quite a waste of time. Turns out those Labour scoundrels have built it up into a much bigger deal than it actually was, I'm still annoyed at Nick Clegg for lieing in his manifesto, but I voted Tory anyway. It might benefit me actually, cause it won't cost people anymore to go to uni until they graduate and get a job paying £21000, but then they will have more debt to pay off, so maybe that'll result in a pay increase for uni graduates which I'll get, but I'll still have the smaller amount to pay off. The only thing I'm opposed to is reducing the teaching budget, but it seems that a lot of what being at university's about is doing work off your own back, so maybe that won't affect me too much.

Anyway, I did this project after everyone else, which worked out pretty well I'd say, as the library's selection of books on art seems to be mostly stuff about really old artists (like 1250-1400s) and not really any good for finding contemporary stuff, so if I'd had to share these resources with the rest of my class I've no idea how I would've managed. As it was though I had the run of the art section in the library.

The main thing I learnt is that people in the art profession seem to pidgeon-hole themselves a lot more these days, whereas artists/designers in the past seemed to be involved with as many different disciplines as possible and still be good. I'd much rather be one of the do lots of different things type artists (like Bruno Munani) than the just does one type of thing artists.

We had to make a visual list, so I photocopied artwork belonging to 5 Artists, 5 Designers, 5 Illustrators and 5 Photographers and then cut their names into it with a scalpel.








Not only did I learn about 20 new people within the art world, I'm also quite good at cutting out backwards letters with a scalpel now.

The 100 Club

We were tasked with photographing 100 versions of the same thing and then laying it all out in In Design.

My chosen subjects were economics books, which have more interesting titles and front covers than I thought when I set out to photograph them.








This was a pretty straight forward project, after getting to grips with the program this was easy.

Tokyo Wolf

For this project we each had to get in contact with a first year graphic design student in tokyo and then swap a music CD of our 3 favourite songs, a small toy, a chocolate bar, 3 printed examples of our work, a drawing, a collage, a letter saying why we study graphic design and then a photocopy of our favourite font, and a leaf.

I tried to get in contact with a couple of graphic design tutors in tokyo, but none of them sent me a reply. Personally I think it's pretty unrealistic expecting us to be able to contact a japanese person and persuade them to do anything, I mean whenever I get an email in foreign from half way round the world asking me for something I delete it. And so does everyone else I know, so I don't know why a japanese graphic design tutor would think any different.

Turned out one guy managed to do it, but it all seems a bit dubious to me.

For completeness sake I completed my pack:





On my CD I had Sober by Tool, The Suffering by Coheed and Cambria, and Fade to Black by Metallica, which I think is a nice mix of music that has electric guitars, drums and blokes who have/had eccentric haircuts. I included a postcard with the union jack on it; a toffee crisp; a water pistol; a newspaper page that has a picture of 2 topless girls in a nude show from some exclusive club in soho because I figured that photograph was probably the closest whoever I sent it to would ever get too; a photocopy of my favourite font (Arial - because it's functional) and then a drawing:



A variation of something I'd done in my sketchbook a while ago


and a collage:



I haven't made a collage in a while, I tried to do something that would look sort of funny and that related to me. I like cats (especially ones that play instruments) I like dragons (to a point, I don't have any t-shirts with dragons on them, but if you like medieval fantasy stuff then you automatically like dragons, they're like the nukes of the fantasy world), I like tube trains. The peacock and the "note to self: must change my life" are relevant, as I recently did change my whole appearance to look more attractive. I like milk (and cows make milk). I've got really bad back pain at the moment, I like going out on saturdays, I shop in tesco with Grace (a girl with red hair that cooks my dinners) I like raving, getting stuck in and keeping a calm head and thinking "it'll be all right". At the bottom is a little bit of the east london docks too.

also my letter about why I study graphic design:





here's how it looked inside the envelope:





and here's how it all looks in my portfolio:








It's a shame no-one ever got back to me, I wish I could've won this prize too.

Think Crime

The brief here was to artwork up the perfect crime.

I asked some of my friends what the perfect crime was in their eyes and got the following answers:

-Shoplifting when you're invisible
-Having super powers and robbing Fort Knox
-Power to do things with no repercussions
-Murder with a household object that can be easily discarded and then leave the country

From this poll it was clear to see that atleast 3 of my friends were delusional and one was pyschotic, but it inspired me to come up with the perfect crime of my own.

If you wanted someone dead then go back in time, kill their parents and then come back to the present, erasing them from history. There's no-way you could be a murder suspect if the crime is committed before you're born, and the person you wanted dead never existed. Thinking about it,Voldemort could have quite easily defeated Harry Potter using this method, (and he'd have access to time turners as well, making this even more possible) I've no idea why he didn't invest more time into this idea and less time trying to infiltrate a boarding school.)

Anyway:








This plan isn't for taking out major people in history, just petty rivals.

Snow Joke

As just a bit of fun brief we were told to make a snowman.

Jade and I went out to do this together, and were halfway through making our snow turtle (we'd tried to make a snowman but the snow wasn't right, short fat things are the only thing you could make) when the rest of the group came out, told us we had to have one each and then had a snowball fight all around our snow turtle. Jade joined in with the fight but I stuck it out and finished the turtle.





I only got hit by one snowball, which was pretty decent going considering that I was right in the middle of no-mans-land, and on either side of me people were throwing snowballs over me. Once the battle was over Jade returned to help me build a snow spider.





As a gentleman I asked Jade which one she'd rather have, and, obviously, she claimed the turtle, as it looks the best. Teaching me that if you work on your own then you always get the credit for the best work.

Here's how the snow spider looks in my portfolio:

I Like Psych

We were told to write an essay about ourselves. Rather than focus on the fact that my girlfriend had decided to dump me the night before because some scum bag was flirting with her and I couldn't afford to go see her anymore because I'd already spent all my money on trying to make her feel special, I instead wrote about everything I could that didn't include her. That might've messed up my essay a little, as for the past 2 years she had been a pretty big part of my life, but I wrote about my parents, why I left home, going for walks in the morning, my cat, my old flatmate, a lack of heating, warhammer, being skinny and smoking.

At the end of the day (I'd finished writing my essay pretty early and spent most of the afternoon contemplating my new singleness and short hair (which was a result of getting drunk to cheer myself up)) we were told we had to artwork our essays.

To me, this meant just reading through the essay and visually represnting everything I could. I tried to make the pictures flow along like the essay had, I think I did that quite well.








At the end of it I came to the conclusion that I like being on my own and like spending time with other people in around about equal amounts. That,and the watercolour pencils in the red tin don't work.

Visual Response to Woman Holding Her Belly

We were given this image:





and just told to create a visual response to it. As soon as the class was given the picture people started saying things like "she's pregnant" "she's hada miscarriage" "she thinks she's fat" "she's just had her period" basically, all woman type things.

To me the picture has a very feminine feel to it, but I also get a fear vibe. To me she looks worried. To me it looked like a young woman who's just found out she's pregnant and she's worried about it.

For me the best representation of fear are daemons, so then I had this idea of a daemon being inside her womb. Not in the sense that she actually has a little evil supernatural hellbeast inside her, but just as a way to represent her fear about being pregnant.

To represent this I drew a picture of an ultrasound where you can see a tiny daemon instead of a cherub like baby.








I'd like to redo it on white paper, draw in the soundwaves with black instead of use chalk on black paper, and print out the text instead of handwrite it. However,I think it's alright, to my mind there were far too many people who just drew the woman out onto A2 with something a bit changed about her.

I've since done what I wanted to fix this piece, and it now looks like this:



I had to make it portrait, so it's half the size of the original version, but because of the printed type and borders it looks alot more official. It also helps that the image quality decreased with each step it took to print it out, meaning it looks just as faded as a real one. I also think it looks a lot better with the soundwaves drawn in than the un-soundwave-bits coloured in in white.

Wing of a Bee

For this project we had to design a butterfly wing, draw it out onto A2 and then do a mirror image version of it in Illustrator and print it out.

It was more the shape of a butterfly wing that was important, we could do any design we liked inside. As surveillance and the whole engine of fear is a hobby horse of mine I decided to make my wing a lopsided heart shape with eyes, security cameras, cogs and pistons, explosions, spikey shapes, a FE:AR clock and of course, the stamping boot inside it ("If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever." - Nineteen Eighty-Four).








On the right is my hand drawn version, and on the left the printed version. The printed one came out a little differently to the analogue version, but I know how to fix that problem now, and the only difference (other than colours, which is probably down to my camera being quite old and shitn now and it being tricky to gauge exactly what colour something on the screen will be when it's printed)is the size, and the printed one's only a little bit bigger.

On the upside, due to my cock up with printing it I got a free square copy of it (I had my first experiance of argueing with the printers, it was all my fault, but I guess the guys at fab-pad are pretty reasonable, and it was my first time using the service so they let me off) so I now have a square poster of my digital butterfly wing on the wall, which is pretty cool.

Excuses

To celebrate having all my projects finished I'm going to update my blog.

For this project we had to think up an excuse and artwork it so that the letter forms were based off of the excuse. One of the examples was "I went to gym" written with gym equipment.

At first my idea was to create an excuse generator, but it turns out excuses can be quite varied and it was too complex to do, plus I'm not sure if it would've actually been to the brief then.

So my excuse was "I was baked", because "cause I got high" is a pretty good reason not to do anything according to Afroman.








I'm pretty happy with how it came out. Edd argued that he'd never seen smoke come out the roach end of a joint, but I have, it's just a smaller trickle than what comes off the head.

I had to redo this so that it was portrait, I just cut the letters out on the computer. I think it looked a lot better before, but everything has to be portrait so: