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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one week on

i'm just stopping by to show you all what i've been up to this week as my blog's been terribly quiet! uni work really does entirely take over my life and i'm 100% living for the summer right now; what will i do with all that free time?! (draw, probably.) if you're wanting to keep up to date with what i'm up to, i do post more regularly over on my twitter and instagram accounts!

anyway, my final project is near to completion now and i've experimented with so many styles and it's actually been fairly exciting for me to do, so here's to hoping i'm happy enough with my final piece that i'm willing to put it up on here for you all to see!

p.s. blogger's decided it's not cooperating tonight but i'm too tried to force it to, so please forgive the dodgy composition of this entire post!

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sketchbook work

here's a page spread from one of my current uni module sketchbooks. after this week i have two weeks to get my shit together and create my final artwork, test it and then get it printed and put together. i've (pretty much) disregarded the option of making a pop up book, because although (i think) it'd be brill, it's just way too time consuming for such a short module. compromises, eh. 

i'm working with a rainforest theme which means i get to draw lots of nice animals and use lots of nice colours, but i'm struggling with plants and backgrounds. hopefully another few days drawing, painting, collaging etc. etc. will help to sort that out. we'll see in a couple of weeks!

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s is for sloth (and sadness)

hello followers, just popping in to inform you all that i am still alive and kicking! uni work has once again taken over and today's been a bit of a drag, just one of those days where every time i put pen to paper i'm disappointed with the outcome! so, to combat this disappointment and bad mood, i stepped away from my sketchbook, took out my tablet and proceeded to draw a sloth, because there's no way i can be unhappy when looking at a sloth (just LOOK at those adorable little vacant faces!)

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here's a little something i finished off yesterday. it's not often i draw anything more than individual people, creatures or objects, so i wanted to challenge myself to draw out a whole scene of something. this is just a section of what i did, but it's the only section i really liked, so now i know that i need to work on scenes and colours (always colours.)

i'm back in middlesbrough and start uni again this week so i'll probably not be updating my blog much because this last term and module is gonna really consume my life (sob...) but here's to hoping it won't!

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the wind in the willows: final book cover

here's my final book cover for the wind in the willows, thank you for all the feedback and lovely comments you all left me, i really do appreciate every last one i receive :)

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