For the final week of this project the task was to create an eight-page ISSUU book as a response to the lyrics from a song - I chose "Where's the playground Susie?" by Glen Campbell. I started by listening to the song on repeat for a while, and just putting ideas down on paper. 

I began to form a narrative inspired by ideas surrounding the theme of the song - feeling stuck in a situation/relationship, and being unable to see an easy way out. I've been watching a lot of zombie movies recently which meant that that imagery and atmosphere began to stew in my brain while listening to the song and I decided I wanted to create a darker interpretation of the song and play with the tone of sadness and despair I could feel in the singer's voice. I could imagine someone singing the song to comfort themselves or a loved one. This led me to develop a story in which two girls have been surviving the zombie apocalypse, with one of them - Susie - having been recently bitten by a zombie and the first girl has to then make the difficult decision to leave her friend to become a zombie or to kill her before that can happen.

The use of the carousel in the song implies that the singer and the one they're talking to were always eventually going to end up in this situation, no matter how hard they tried to prevent the outcome. This made me think about the bleak inevitability of an apocalypse situation with the only options being death or infection. I also began to think about the line "Where's the playground Susie?" as the singer asking a rhetorical question to their partner - where has their childhood and innocence gone? What are they going to do now? They desperately want someone else to have an answer for them.

I then created  an A5 mock-up of the final book on paper. This allowed me to realise that I wanted the back cover to be more impactful rather than repeating the map with blood. It also allowed me to experiment with the layout of each page and check that it would flow well. In addition, I chose to complete the final drawings with dip pen and ink because I felt it would allow me to create dynamic lines as well as splatters and thick lines to create different effects for a gritty, messy atmosphere.

This week I looked at three different artists' work and attempted to recreate their style of working with three different book covers from three different genres - sci-fi, psychological horror and a children's book.

Brad Holland

Anne Yvonne Gilbert

​Charles Keeping

Using only letterforms I had to create six final digital typographic designs exploring different "problems" of themes to solve. I tried to explore contrast through scale, colour, detachment, touching, overlapping, penetration, cropping, repetition and  illusionary space.​

The first task this week was to create a colour wheel and also a tonal gradient to practice using colours and experiment with colour combinations to create contrast or harmony.

The next task was a recreation of the Bauhaus colour and personality exercise and explore how colours can communicate. Using a palette of the three primary colours plus black and white, I mixed colours that I found visually appealing. Each square needed to contain a different hue, saturation or value.

Today I had an introduction to the textiles facilities at the uni. I experimented with the sewing machines using different stitch settings with the straight-stitch foot and the darning foot. I have previous experience using a sewing machine from college so I was happy to find those skills hadn't left me and I could thread the machine and get started without issue.

I like the effect the sewing machine can create - a lot of texture can be created both with just the materials you choose and also by layering stitches and changing the type of stitch. It was useful to refresh my memory with this technique, because I could potentially use the sewing machine to draw with to create an illustration in the future.

This week my task was to generate thumbnail ideas for a portrait format theatre poster. The thumbnails needed to be approximately 60mm and explore different ideas for a poster for the play "The Importance of Being Earnest".

Towards the end of the week, I narrowed down the thumbnails I had tried out and refined them into 120mm thumbnails that could be presented to a client.

Working on these thumbnails helped me develop my skills with visual communication - putting my ideas down onto paper to be able to show to other people.

This week I continued to practice one-point, two-point and three-point perspective. I experimented with some of the exercises in these books:

• Perspective Drawing by Ernest Norling
• Pictorial Perspective by Gwen White

This week we began learning one-point perspective and two-point perspective. As an illustrator, this is vitally important to understand and forms a solid foundation for all future work and concepts. Being able to understand and utilise perspective will allow me to make my work more believable, or allow me to break the rules of perspective in clever and engaging ways. 

Here I am practicing perspective using the horizon line and lots of guidelines. This is helping me visualise how perspective works and eventually be able to draw these objects without having to implement the extensive guidelines first.

I had an introduction to the printmaking facilities at the uni. I experimented with lino-cut printing and etching.

I first began by creating a linocut from a piece of lino, using tools to carve out the surface of the print. It was important to bear in mind that any text on the lino had to be backwards to ensure it would be readable when printed.

I then coated the lino in ink using a roller, placed it on top of a piece of paper and put it through the printing press.

​I experimented with different colour combinations, mixing the ink to create a gradient as well as printing once and allowing it to dry before printing over the top with another colour.

This technique creates bold, flat colour prints that can be repeated. It is interesting to experiment with negative and positive prints.

​I then experimented with etching. This method involves scratching into a plate of metal with a sharp tool to create the image which will then have ink scoured into it before being put through the printing press.

I then added an aquawash to the metal plate which allowed me to add tone to the image. I did this by coating the plate in wax, then submerging it in acid for different lengths of time.

 

This was the result of the final print. It changed the image drastically from just the outline to adding tone. This method can create very detailed prints in the way that lino prints can't.

For the third and final week of the project, we were to recreate three different drawings using different media - Pencil, Dip Ink Pen and Scraperboard. We were allowed to trace the image as we were being reviewed on technique with the medium, rather than drawing skill. I began by practicing with each medium until I felt comfortable and confident with it.

The final pieces.

This week of the project I moved onto three-dimensional tasks. This involved making nets for shapes and using the craft knife to precisely cut them out before assembling them. In addition, the final task involved creating a pop-up book. I based mine on the phrase "The early bird catches the worm."

This first week of technical tasks challenged my use of a craft knife and cutting board. Attempting to keep everything precise was very difficult and helped to develop my skills with paper and assembling books. It was important to pay attention to which orientation was specified and the measurements of every shape.

I used this tutorial to help when creating the perfectly bound book for task three:

This was a two week project in a group of 3 to produce an 8 page comic. My group included Anna Gentry and Harvey Brockway and we were given the poem "Remember, Remember". We spent the first week planning the comic and the second week producing it.

I looked at work by Cliff Chiang (Paper Girls), a graphic novel that I am very inspired by to help guide how I would layout the panels of the comic and communicating expressions. In addition, I visited the Lakes Comic Art Festival and saw lots of work there and got to attend a live drawing session with Jul Maroh (Blue is the Warmest Colour) and Boulet (The Bouletcorp) who talked a lot about their own comic-making process as well as personal anecdotes and thoughts that went into their work.

Working on this project helped me to develop my skills working in a team, coordinating with other people and ensuring that all the work would be produced on time as well as creating a coherent narrative that flowed between all of our personal styles and ways of working.

I think the planning and development stages went really well; we had a very clear idea of what we wanted to produce. However, when it came to executing the comic I think the choice of format and text was low quality and should have been thought about more carefully. In addition, we chose to work with watercolour which only one person in our group was confident with using; we should have compromised on a medium that all three of us were equally capable with.