London Trip

Yesterday I got the coach to London to visit Pick Me Up at Somerset House.

When we first got to London, me and Selina headed towards Leicester Square to get our portfolios in Cass Arts. They didn't have the ones we wanted so we headed a little further to Soho to another of their stores.

I went for an A4 book style portfolio (with plenty of sleeves included) as I think that size best suits my work and I'm not keen on the styles with handles as they don't always open out properly.

Over the next 2 weeks I'll be putting the final touches to what I want to include in my portfolio and then getting it printed over at Photography.

After that we headed back to Somerset house to have a look around Pick Me Up. It was a little smaller than I had expected but still very interesting and full of some great illustration work.

These are a few of my favourite things from the show:

(Left to right, top to bottom)

- Framed illustrations by Julia Pott

- Isabel Greenberg's display

- Hand painted nesting dolls by Isabel Greenberg, based on characters from her graphic novel.

- Etchings by Jessica Das

- Hand painted books by Catherine McGinnis

- Illustrations by Damon Smith

Once we were finished looking around Pick Me Up, we still had quite a bit of time to spare, and we were both in need of some supplies for binding our books. So we took a long walk towards Victoria to Shepherd's London, a lovely shop specialising in book binding supplies (I had been looking on their website to buy what I needed but their postage is quite high so buying it in person was preferable), where I bought a metre of book cloth in a sand colour for covering my book.

Here are a few snaps I took of the shop whilst Selina was paying for her supplies:

Page 12

Yesterday I finished colouring page 12 of the book.

I started off with the characters, referring back to page 1 to ensure I kept the colours of the costumes consistent. For both pages so far I've immediately preferred them once some colour is added and the characters start to stand out:

 Next I coloured in the rest of the image; the scenery, the palace etc. I picked out 5 colours form my palette (I'm using 20 in total across all of the image) to use for the palace, making sure they contrasted with the foliage in the background.

Finally, as with page 1, I made the lines brown instead of black and added some textures in some of the trees:

This page was the most enjoyable to draw the elements for as I really like all of the characters dancing, and these two little snippets of this image are some of my favourites: 

 I also completed the slightly different version of this illustration to use as my contribution to the catalog:

Work in Progress Meeting

 This morning we has a quick Work in Progress meeting to check we were all on track after the break. As always its nice to see what everyone else is doing and to get feedback from tutors. Louise seemed pleased with how my work is looking, and said it was all coming together well (this was the first time she had seen anything put together or coloured). She agreed with the choice of a dark coloured line, but said that the use of textures isn't necessarily needed, although it was difficult to show her that part as I was using my laptop with a small screen. The textures are quite a quick addition to the images, so I will continue to add them for now and then decide later whether or not to keep them.

So this is now the finalised style and palette that I will be using to colour my images (although the foliage will vary throughout the book as the seasons change):

I've also now finished putting together page 12 of the book, where all the characters come together at a ball in the palace:

All of the "good" characters can be seen on this final page (including the birds and butterflies), all in their couples apart from the seven dwarves who are spread across the image. The only new character in this image is the Prince of the Palace who is standing at the bottom of the stairs greeting Cinderella (this is the first time they meet). The characters will all be coloured in the same way that they appear on page 1 (except for Cinderella who has changed her dress), but the foliage will now be bright greens and yellows.

And this is an adjusted version of the image which I'll be colouring slightly differently to the above images and using as my contribution to the Hullabaloo Degree Show Catalog:

I've made a start on colouring these 2 images in and will be continuing with that this afternoon before I start on the other pages tomorrow and for the rest of the week.

The completed page 1

Yesterday I finished colouring in and adding texture to page one of the book (although I'm still deciding between two options with the textures).

This is the image after I had coloured in all of the buildings, trees and characters:

I then added a pale yellow to the grass to make it different to the sky, and edited the line so that its a dark brown rather than solid black:

I much prefer it with the brown line as I think it brightens the whole image up a bit, the black is little too overbearing on the rest of the image.

I then added some texture to a few areas of the image, particularly in the trees and parts of the building (its not very clear in this low-res version of the image, but when the image is at full size the textures are much more visible):

I've also tried adding texture to the entire image including the lines to see how that looked:

The comparison between these two is a little clearer in the close-up below:

(Partial texture on the left, full texture on the right. Again they are more visible in the full res versions)

I'm not sure at the moment which of these styles I prefer, so I'll be trying them both out on some of the other pages and also getting some advice on this at my Work in Progress meeting this morning.

Next I'll be starting to work on the final page of the book, as that image will be the one I use for the course catalog ("Hulabaloo") so I need to get it done more urgently than the other pages.

Screenshots

I'm now back to working after a week off for Easter, and I'm getting straight on with creating the final coloured version of page one, before I move on to the other 11 pages.

Following my tutorial with Jonny I have decided to stick to the one coloured line, which will be dark brown, blue etc. depending on the season on each page. I'll also be adding textures into the image once it is coloured, applying the paint and ink textures that I created a couple of weeks ago to some of the emptier areas of the image.

These are a couple of screenshots of the progress I have made so far:

The line is currently solid black, but I will be adjusting that once the image is completely coloured, and I may also adjust the colours slightly once I see how it all looks together. Its Aumtumn in fairytale land on page one so the colours in the foliage are predominantly orange and yellow.

I'll be spending the rest of today getting this image finalised and deciding on the exact colours I will be using, and then starting to put together the other pages.

Week 14 (in brief)

- Colouring page 1

- The completed page 1

- Work in Progress Meeting

- Page 12 and Hullabaloo
- London Trip
- Piecing together pages 2-5

CV Writing

Something I have needed to do for a few weeks now is work on my Creative CV (as well as being something I'll need after uni, its also a part of the course and needs to be handed in along with this presentation document).

I started off by having a browse around Pinterest looking at some examples of creative CV designs.

The 4 examples below are some of the ones I liked the look of, all of which have quite clean and simple designs and limited colour. They also all use small illustrations or logos to describe the person's interests, contact details etc.

After looking at these examples I made a few sketches of some possible layouts and started drawing out some logos/motifs to use in my design.

This is what I have so far, but I still need to add in some of the little motifs (for the contact details and as bullet points for Work Experience/ Education) and move a few things round a little bit:

I went with a design that is reasonably similar to the layout of my website, with boxes with rounded corners and a very limited colour palette of white and pale brown. I may add in a pop of turquoise with the logos but I'll see how it looks in the brown too as I quite like the simplicity of this.

I also used the same font as on my website (Quicksand) however I'm not keen on the bold version of the font, so I may make some changes there too.

I'm now taking a week off to visit family for Easter and also sell some of my work at a Craft Fair over the weekend, so I'll be posting again in just over a week's time once I've done a bit more work.