Backwards Burd, Anthology 2

One of the best things I've done this year is record everything I'm told, as it allows me to learn so much better. The problem with Anthology 1 was it felt cheap, this is how people perceived it, even us. It was a good achievement, but people didn't rate us for it. It was printed on copier paper with black ink, and the lay out was bad. We were told that a risograph printer was coming to uni and that we could use that, which excited us. We waited around for it to turn up but it didn't, and with 2 online issues already out we needed to get the printed book out before the end of term!

A few sets of useful people came and talked to us, 2 guys from the guild of Illustrators talked to us about licensing and promoting yourself.

Valerie Perezvon set us up with a little interview with 2 creative agents from Let's Be Brief and we showed them our magazine and our website, and they were like "yeah it's cool you're doing this, but the market's so cut throat, you need to really up your presentation" and explained that their philosophy was doing art and design but cleverly, which I like.

Earlier in the term 2 representatives from GF smith had come in and talked to us about paper, and we also heard a lot about different papers for different printing mediums.

Dan Duran had told us that a risograph printer would be turning up soon and we could use that, we learnt about it and how we'd need to set our files up and waited for it to arrive, but it didn't, and then the week before the end of term we found out that it wouldn't be in until after the Easter holiday, and we need to put a magazine out each term. Because we'd looked into it so heavily we decided to get it risographed anyway, even if we had to get it printed outside. With that in mind me and Dan went off to dittopress, choosing brown for the ink colour and an offwhite paper to print on.

After that we went home and got everything prepared. Sajan was in charge of the cover and the sleeve, we decided a topical joke would be cool, and the new pope had just been elected, so we did a joke about Maradonna's hand of God and the pope being argentinian. Anastasia helped me create the magazine, as I had learnt indesign (making all of our stuff line up so much better) but still not photoshop, and it's good to have a second opinion when deciding what artwork to include. In addition Anastasia took over the branding, drawing out the logos we would use in different areas.

Because we'd heard so much about promoting yourself we decided to include a postcard of peoples names in the magazine, something that would look cool that people could stick up on the wall. Dan was in charge of this. With the indesign document all done we sent it over to Dittopress in the morning and they sent us a quote back. With that sorted Dan and Sajan went to GF Smith's to source paper, choosing a chocolatey Gmund bier to use for sleeves and postcards.

Over the weekend we sorted it all out financially, using our saved funds plus Dan's negotiating with the Student Union we were able to sort it all out.

On monday we prepared the screens to screen print, in addition Anastasia had sorted out a revised flier and logo. We'd said to her before that her work was too designed and not illustratey enough to show us how we wanted to be perceived  and what she came back with was fantastic. A really cool ink splodge bird which was simultaneously messy but delicate, which seemed to describe us better than just text.

Because the text on the postcards was so fine we had to really give the screens a good clean, the first time they were just too dirty and the prints came out bad.

But it all came out great in the end!

To keep things affordable we bound the magazine ourselves, which halved the cost and was a really good learning experience. We saddle stitched them, it was a good step to learning to do the whole process ourselves. Here's a video that the Infinity Collective (a group of 2nd year Graphic Design students) made about us:

In that video you can see how we worked making the books and then chatting about why it is we wanted to do Backwards Burd in the first place.

Battle of the Gods, Character Research

I have recently been going to all the museums I can to influence my character designs.

This follows on really nicely from my Natural History Museum drawings, which I really enjoyed doing. So I stuck with the same method of working that I took away from that, which is drawing quickly with graphite, if it doesn't look good draw something else, you can always go back there and draw it later.

The natural history museum was where I picked back up the 1000 drawings quest, as it's my favourite place in London to go to (I've taken a few people here like: "check this place out it's the coolest" and I asked a girl out by saying do you want to go here and draw with me (she said no, but it's ok, I walk around pretty fast when I'm alone so I get more done) and that's because the building's so amazing to look at whilst your inside, all this fantastic architecture housing what's left of monsters from a bygone era, well it just really awes me.

All of the animal based stuff I tried to draw from the Natural History museum, but then I tried a few others out at the suggestion of my friends. The Horniman was a good one for animals and peculiar looking things that live in the sea (good reference for alien based characters), and the Huntarian was good for a few animals but mostly aliens. I called in at Pollock's Toy museum to get some reference for the Bard & co characters. I went to the British museum to get an idea of ancient cultures that would influence my "Ancient Aliens" themed teams and also old school weapons, but then to get a clearer grasp on armours and weapons I went to the Wallace Collection.

I'm so glad I study in London, drawing from photographs just isn't the same as being able to see all these amazing treasures before your eyes. I looked at some stuff on the internet as well, but it was only ever to check odd obscure things rather than what my actual creatures really looked like.

The other good thing about drawing in museums is meeting people, especially being in London, I've chatted to loads of people from outside the country, who tell me about how things are where they're from, which is especially interesting if they are an art student themselves because it's always interesting to compare how learning is handled, sometimes I've been able to try doing stuff that they've been told to do back home and it's been a good technique to know.