72.8% Water

A bit of fun at home that my housemates Gen and Eloise (also both Graphic Design students) and I did a little while back. Was very, very cold (and the postman thought we were mad) but a lot of fun. Click on the image for full size.

Best Birthday Cake EVER?

After hours of hard work, it had to be blogged. The cake-alternative, made by my housemates and I for Eloise's birthday. It tastes exactly like the real thing..and most importantly goes down very well with a cuppa!

The two layers..(two big baking trays full of biscuit dough!)

The final biscuit shown to scale against the real thing

Happy Birthday!

Surviving in a Heating-free Home

After a lot of trial and error - here is my final attempt at the Illustrator 'How to' brief. I'm pretty pleased with my final outcome, and I have learned an awful lot using Illustrator for the first time. Click on the image for a full-size version!

Illustrator Brief

Newest brief is to use Adobe Illustrator to create a a set of information graphics that will 'clearly communicate a range of activities that will enable people to survive and thrive in times of austerity. '

Our tutor Pete showed us a great selection of old information graphics, such as the 'Protect and Survive' series of the 1970's, issued to inform people of how to survive a nuclear attack. Below are stills from the brilliantly awful credits at the end of each warning film.. worth a watch on youtube for the hilarious music.

My group is to base our instructions on thriving 'at home', and I have decided to create instructions on how to survive as a student without central heating. I want to give it a slightly amusing tone, so will add a few more extreme steps for survival, e.g. 'grow a beard'..hmm.

Here's a few of my own experiments using Illustrator..I have never used the software before so it took me a while! I haven't decided exactly how I want it to look yet, I feel that the more simplified image is slightly more relevant for a set of instructions, yet I really like the look of the more detailed image. We'll see. 

Remain wrapped up at all times!

Thinking is Drawing in your Head

After enjoying the stop-frame project, my housemates and I decided to have another go at it ourselves. This short film uses a quote from Alan Fletcher's book 'The Art Of Looking Sideways'.

Mail Art

New brief is all about 'Mail Art'. 
The brief is quite open ended which is exciting, and we have been able to choose who we work with. As a starting point for the project, we spent a day in a 'Mail Art Workshop', which involved various skills associated with the art form, such as rubber stamps, wrapping, arranging, collage, etc..there was even a table for very important cups of tea to keep everyone going. A really good day...and lots of ideas to come over the next week.

Stopframe.

So first project of the term was to create a stop frame animation using only Zapf Dingbats, a common dingbat typeface:

I have never created a stopframe animation before so had a lot to learn! We spent the first day of the project getting our heads around the history of it all, this short film called 'Neighbours' by Norman McClaren was one of my favourite examples shown.

We were put into groups of three, each group coming up with a different narrative that would become a 10-20 second clip using only the dingbats. My group and I decided a fireworks display would be a way to incorporate some of the symbols provided..and began to work on a storyboard. We had not planned any colours at this point:

Although we were limited to 10-20 seconds, producing the film took hours. Once printed, each small symbol had to be cut perfectly, and after quite some time (and a bit of pain), were were we ready to start shooting. As we had a storyboard to follow, the making of the film was fairly straightforward but still very time consuming, as every slight move had to be accurate. We used 'iStop Motion' software, linked up to a camera as seen below:

Learned a lot from this project, and although a lot of patience was required throughout, the outcome looks awesome. Will have the final clip itself up shortly!