Extended Practice: Penguin Design Award / book jackets

• Why? Simple: Interest in publishing / making book covers

I was thinking about making one of my self-initiated projects a series of book covers, but that would seem a bit much alongside this competition which is essentially the same thing. Doing Penguin would have the bonus of it being a competition with good prizes but the limitations of whatever books they choose. This is all sort of similar to the Folio Society project too except that's got inside illustrations too. This brief also gives the opportunity to try out three differing genres in a  quick succession that you might not pick up yourself.

Also! From what I gather the Penguin Award is only open to students/ those a year out so ... it's a good opportunity to try and get some work out in that direction in this way whilst I can!

Extended Practice: editorials

As mentioned on my PPP blog I haven't been great at going ahead with the projects I had planned over the summer but! The time is now!

• I want to get my head around editorial work because I think I have some strengths that could play to it, as well as it being a (?)reliable(?) way to work commercially as an illustrator.
• I lost touch with editorial illustration for a while but seeing work by Dadu Shin and Eleanor Davis rekindled my interest in it... seeing that editorial can be subtle and emotional, and not just empty symbols 
• I haven't got my head around how I'd want to tackle this project. Quick paced current events, or  think pieces and less time based stories? Could it be a mix of both? And how frequently would I make these? Editorial is fast!

Dadu Shin

Extended Practice: Folio Society

• I entered the Folio Society competition last year and it opened my eyes to publishing and a new way of working so I figured it would be nice to do it again (maybe with high hopes).
• The book this year is Mansfield Park, and I'm actually quite interested in figuring out how I would tackle an Austen... for me I'm trying to figure out the balance when entering competitions of making your work palatable to their tastes and something exciting for me / my portfolio. I don't really believe in playing to someone's tastes when it's just a competition at the end of the day (not an actual paid brief) but it is also about making workable work.

Extended Practice: The Macmillan Prize

• My desire to do this brief just follows my children's book brief from OUIL505 and what I learnt (about my own practice from it).
• I very much wanted to do children's book project this year and it makes sense to enter a competition at the same time, with the opportunity to gain recognition / publication from it. The entry does not need to be the entire thing drawn out either, which is helpful.
• Even though I said I wanted to rework my last project over the summer I disliked it so much that whilst I enjoyed the idea, I would like to reconstruct it in very much a new way. I would like to take the idea to pieces and re-work it, maybe for The MacMillan Prize, but I don't know if that would please the rules of the degree...

SaveSave

Extended Practice: making a publication?

I still feel sort of uneasy about comic/ zine culture in general as in, I'm not sure how I much I enjoy it personally. But there's exceptions to everything, and I'm nowhere near about to dismiss it all as something not for me. I particularly love what I've read by Disa Wallander, Sophia Foster-Domino, Sam Alden, Jillian Tamaki, Jane Mai... there's a certain balance and nuance to their comics that still reads emotional without being so ... navel-gaze-y as I've seen in some comics. But they're also often funny! Which is good!

Sophia Foster-Dimino

Which brings me to making a publication myself! I have no idea where to start, but know I would like to make one for Thoughtbubble as I was offered a spot on a table! I haven't worked on narrative since Visual Narrative, and I need to do some thinking on that. This Extended Practice brief is maybe much more about it being an opportunity/ challenge that has been given to me than it being something I would usually consider as part of my practice.

Here (1989) by Richard mcguire (raw magazine)

ALSO: THOUGHT BUBBLE IS IN SIX WEEKS!!

live brief ideas

I uploaded this to my PPP blog but it might be better suited here as it's part of Extended Practice!

LIVE BRIEFS I AM INTERESTED IN:

• Folio Society
• I enjoyed doing this competition last year 
• The Macmillan Prize
• A way to continue my interest in children's publishing whilst also entering it as part of a live brief 
• Penguin Design Award
• I ended up forfeiting my time entering this in 2016 for another live brief but do regret not taking it on. I could do all three books to make it a more hefty brief.

These are all publishing based which shows my interests (more than I realised) but also makes them all quite similar. It is also hard to anticipate what live briefs will show up in the coming future, but these are three competitions that tend to run consistently year to year that hold my interest.

SELF INITIATED BRIEF IDEAS:

• editorial a week 
• could be current events and less time based stories
• book covers 
• should I do this as well as the Penguin Design Award? good for portfolio though
• children's book?
• seems a little pointless do one separately to Pan Macmillan
• self-published zine/ publication
•  working with sequential narrative (?)
• non-fiction / educational piece
• for children?
• a series of prints
• I would not wish to print these in a traditional method, and I also do not think that is necessary. Like the self published zine it could explore parts of my practice that are less commercially done and more self initiated.
• packaging / product
• children's toy designs?
• enamel pins (are they surviving?) / designed merch

QUESTION: Can I get a print or a painting into a gallery? Is that what I want?

EDIT: Marianna Madriz and Wai Wai Pang very kindly offered me a spot on their Thoughtbubble table to place a zine/ publication if I so wish! (I sold Newt Musical Express there too last year). They are also sharing the table with Jonny Clapham and possibly Disa Wallander and some of Jazz Dad Publications... the pressure is on to make something good ! All under the umbrella of GRID KIDS 

AOI Prize for Illustration 2017 entry

• I insisted that this would be a short brief for me to tackle. I hadn't been working solidly from the point that I began it to til the end (today) but it definitely took a lot more hours than I had expected
• I decided to go with a lot of spot illustrations that could be fitted together to make a big image, a way of being able to communicate a lot of ideas at once. I thought this would be quicker but actually took a long time- lots of images AND I hadn't planned how to fit them all together so that took some thinking afterwards.
• I didn't want to just be obvious with this brief, but I wasn't about to lay something metaphorical on a poster about transport. I tried to make something fun with the characters but also their figures and proportions, as that's something I've been interested in drawing this summer.
• For once the text (shape/letter wise) went quite well and was fun and I think I managed to create text in a way that was digital but not distractingly so compared to the rest of the image. HOWEVER! I had a lot of pain trying to balance this composition, and I don't think I quite got It even in the final design, but had to cut my losses at a point as it was interfering with other projects. Overall, I really need to learn to plan better, which I'm struggling with when making pieces in a  combination of traditional and digital media.

sketchbooks/ personal work

 

This summer I've been fairly regular about posting to social media and whilst self-initiated thought-driven projects didn't really go ahead so much as planned, I have been archiving some of my sketchbook work online. It's intuitive and more of a relaxer than anything so there's a lot of repeating motifs and themes, it's not especially thoughtful or innovative.

 It's been a good way of developing technique though. I've favoured using gouache in a loose almost drawing like sense, and working in pencil and then adding colours under it in Photoshop.  Mostly I'm just really enjoying being loose with shapes and figures and I want to continue that because it's fun and different!

FL Live

  

  

 

very rough sketches

I don't have much to say about this one, except it served as a reminder that sometimes the designs that you like aren't necessarily the ones that are chosen! Which is ok, I think a good skill to have is to swallow your own pride and remain detached to the design decisions- which I felt throughout this process anyway, but it's something I've developed more so over the last couple of years of starting to design things for other people. Sometimes the client will have something very particular in their head, and if a design gets rejected, well, you can use it for something else some time!

Recently I've been asked to draw portraits which isn't a strong point and whilst I don't want to shy away from concepts because I'm bad at it I also don't want to make a bad job! So I've had a few *inventive* turns of using limited features to portray a person... it's not a method I'm wholly pleased with though.