sloth appreciation

just popping by to share with you a sloth inspired little illustration i was working on the other night.
i've found myself quite inspired by sloths as of late (god bless their vacant little faces) and have a couple of ideas i plan to work on regarding them!

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first year is over!

work by kerry neesam

work by craig ainsley

 

work by liam dobbin

 

work by mitchell collinson 

work by joy-louise waterman

 work by maiken garen

some first year book work on display

it was really nice to see a couple of my own projects on display!

 some work by my fabulous friend josh!

 and finally, a cake a classmate made to celebrate the end of the year

when our tutor told us that first year would fly by, he really wasn't kidding! while it doesn't feel like i've been at university for the whole nine months that i have, i definitely feel that i've improved masses since the day i started there! i've had a bit of an up and down journey this year regarding my feelings towards the course, but i can happily say now, at the end of the year, that i think making the decision to come to university was definitely the right decision. i feel that it's helped to push me and given me the motivation i'd otherwise struggled to acquire, helped me meet a wide range of talented individuals, given me the insight of my tutors and will (hopefully) give me the opportunities to make valuable connections with people within industry (fingers crossed!)

this week i attended the third year exhibition and was blown away by the quality of the whole exhibition, from the quality of the work to how the studios were set up. the quality of the work displayed has helped to give me an idea of the level that i'll need to have brought myself up to by the end of year three, and in other places has inspired me to push and better myself as an illustrator; it's nice to know that when i graduate, if i want to, i can refer to myself solely as an illustrator. throughout this year i've realised that graphic design, as a general term, isn't particularly where my interests lie, so having the knowledge that i can make my course what i'd like it to be is comforting.

naturally i was drawn to the illustrative exhibited pieces, but i tried my best to capture some other elements of graphic design to share with you in this blog post. i've credited relevant designers/illustrators under their work so please check out their twitters/websites if you like what you see!

all in all, a good first year. i've worked hard and i've achieved grades that reflect that fact, so hopefully in two years time i should be able to graduate with a good degree. here's to two more years of hard work!

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a designed reflective report

firstly, please excuse the poor photos! i left my camera in my uni room while i've come home for the weekend so i was left with no choice but to use my iphone!

our final task for first year was to write a 1,000 word reflective report regarding first year, then design it and make it into a book. at first i was horrified; a project that was entirely type! i've never gotten along with fonts, i feel that alongside images they look naff, and due to me considering myself an illustrator, i was going to have to include illustrations somewhere within my report, which left me with no other choice (in my own mind) than to make my report completely hand generated, type and all.

i found within this project that i can use type, i just have to keep it simple; so that's what i did, i kept it as simple as possible. i also wanted my report to reflect me as a designer, so naturally, i had to include all the lovely little critters that i find myself constantly inspired by. i think the overall simplicity and light-hearted nature of the illustrations in my report meant it represented me effectively, so i'd consider it a job well done. i understand that it's not neat or perfect, but i didn't want to just hand in a clean, simple report typed up in helvetica 12pt like other students might, because that's just not me! i wanted to inject some fun into this otherwise boring project, and, most importantly, i wanted viewers to smile when viewing my report (good job, little bunny guy!)

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family fun day events poster

here's a poster that i created for a charity event, family fun day events, that is being managed by shannon. all proceeds from the event go to several charities, so check out the blog page to see if the event's being hosted near you/how you can help!

once again, please forgive the terrible quality image courtesy of blogger.
for a better quality image, please view on flickr!

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final first year project

so after four hectic weeks of (pretty much) constant working, my final piece has finally been made and presented! i'm really, really pleased with how it turned out and definitely feel it's easily my strongest piece of work from first year.

the project brief was to create a narrative from a source material and create a publication from your newly formed narrative. i chose some poems i wrote as a ten year old about rainforest creatures as my source material, and after piecing together some humorous, nonsensical new narratives i jumped straight into creating an illustrative piece that encapsulated the light-heartedness and innocence that was present within my source material.

my two main themes were day/night and camouflage, with a hidden celebration of all the weird and wonderful creepy crawlies that inhabit the rainforest alongside your typical sloths, snakes and monkeys.

i have another hand-in today and then my final hand-in in two weeks time before attending the end of year exhibition, but then after that i'm free until october! over the summer i plan to get stuck into some new projects that have been floating around in my head recently, so hopefully over the coming months i should have some interesting things to share with you all! thank you to everyone who does follow me, i really appreciate all the lovely comments and tweets i receive!

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zine magazine launch party

a couple of months ago i was followed by zine magazine and decided to check out what they were up to. it turned out they were a couple of ex illustration students who were starting a zine to be distributed around the north east that featured the work of illustrators from all around the country, and after following them and reading that they were looking for submissions to be featured in their first issue, i thought why the hell not and sent off an illustration of my own to them.

the creators of zine had arranged a launch party for the first issue, and after reading that they were holding it in sunderland i took it upon me to gather together a couple of my friends from my course and head a little more up north to see what was happening. while i was there i was over the moon to discover that my illustration had indeed been featured in the first issue! i had a really great time at the launch party, the creators, bex and tom, were so friendly and down to earth and i spoke to them for a good while about the zine, their experiences at uni and what they had planned for the future of zine magazine. it was also nice to speak to other people interested in illustration, i'm surrounded by typographers (shudder) at uni so it was nice to share my excitement for image with other people for once!

this was just a quick post to let you know what's been going on in my life these last couple of weeks as well as just stacks and stacks of university work. i have two deadlines this week and spent today (guiltily) sat in the sun making the most of the nice weather; i'm trying to erase any feelings of guilt though seeing as boro rarely sees nice weather...

hopefully i should be able to start blogging a little more regularly after this week, and once i've finished uni for good this year (yippee!) i have a few ideas for new projects i want to start so will at some point have some new work to share with you all! until then i'll be crying while finishing off my final three modules.

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