The final project of the Illustrators Toolkit module is to create a final illustration based on text we have been allocated. My text was, M. R. JAMES' "OH, WHISTLE, AND I'LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD". I am familiar with James' work, and I have one of his books somewhere hidden among the many books that I own. However, I was not familiar with this piece.

The given art direction for this piece was as following: supernatural, unease, a discovery followed by the realisation that it will soon be dark. A low, windswept English coastline, the sense of being followed and/or watched. 
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I then began to research the text, and I happened to come across a short film adaptation on Youtube, this helped with giving me a feel for the text and with different possible ideas to explore: 

Here are some stills that stood out for me in particular, and are something I can refer to when it comes to creating my piece. 

And a few from the 2010 version with Sir John Hurt 

​"What should I do now," he thought, "if I looked back and caught sight of a black figure sharply defined against the yellow sky, and saw that it had horns and wings?"

Re-reading the text, I thought that the above was just a tiny part of it and did not convey the text as a whole. Therefore I opted to draw an eerie night sky, with the moon shining on the sea. I used acrylic paints for this one:

Click HERE to be taken to my inspiration page for both modules. 

I really struggled with these two tasks, I found it hard to find the motivation to start them and struggled with ideas. I also found that my focus and concentration wouldn't last very long when I was working on these and it was just a difficult period for me to create work altogether. 

I feel like what I managed to produce is OK, however I could have done a lot better and produced a lot more thumbnails with ideas for the 'final' version. Time management is something I need to work on, big time! I ran out of time with these so here is what I managed to make for both tasks: 

I've accumulated many badges over the years after visits to HMV and Afflecks in Manchester (if I see a 4 badges for a £1 sign, you've got my money!) I've always loved badges and pins, and I thought I was pretty cool with my The Smiths badges on my pencil case in secondary school. So it'll come as no surprise that I was looking forward to this brief as I've always wanted to design my own pins...However I was not too thrilled at the prospect of using Illustrator properly for the first time.

Here's a little board of things I looked at before starting the project: 

One day I put Aggretsuko on Netfllix as something to have on in the background, a few days later I'd binged the entire 3 seasons of it...so I thought I'd make the cute little characters into enamel badges. 

The series follows the life of Retsuko, a 25-year old and single anthropomorphic red panda, working in the accounting department of a Japanese trading firm, trying her best to navigate through the typical problems encountered by young adults in 21st century Japan. Facing constant frustration every day from pushy superiors and co-workers, Retsuko lets out her emotions by going to a karaoke bar every night and singing death metal... relatable stuff let me tell you.

I decided to make, Retsuko, Fenneko and Gori.  ​

I wanted to keep the design fairly simple, as the design of the characters in the show are not overly complicated. I decided to go with making just the heads instead of the whole body as to avoid over complicating things. 

Getting used to all the different tools was very frustrating!! I found that sometimes something that had worked previously, wouldn't work again or it'd do something different and I'd get close to giving up, but I stuck through and watched plenty of quick and simple tutorials to get me started and the more I played about with everything the easier it got *I use the term easier, lightly*.

Below is my first character, Fenneko. This was the easiest out of the three as this was the simplest design to create. I'm happy with how it turned out: 

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For the packaging (or the backing card) I wanted to have a sunbeam effect... However I had no idea how to do this...but with a super quick Google, I found a super easy tutorial and was able to create my desired effect seen below. 

Here's the tutorial for future reference: 

After designing the 'card' I copied the enamel badge design and placed it on the card, I added a simple drop shadow and a white border in order to make it seem as if an object had been placed on it. Furthermore, I downloaded a font (Road Rage) similar to the one they use in the show in order to write the character's names.

Here are my three finished badges. Overall I am happy with how they turned out! Using Adobe Illustrator was a big challenge and frustrating at times, but I now feel confident that I could use the program again in order to create more work similar to this.

This weeks brief made me very excited. Since I'm very into my music, I was excited to find out that we'd be designing our own gig posters. The band names were given to us by choosing a random number, mine happened to be Bogus Beggars. At first I was unsure whether I liked it or not, but after some thought, plenty of ideas came to me! 

As with any task, I went over to Pinterest to look for some inspiration as well as looking at different presentations of posters and techniques used. 

I quite like the idea of drawing on top of photographs, or defacing them with splashes of paint or scribbles etc. This is something I plan to look at and consider for my band poster. 

I also went through my Spotify playlist, looking at different album covers for any inspiration 

With 'Bogus Beggars' I instantly thought of Eton Boys. I felt like members of this band would be from a humble upbringing and would think it was funny to dress up as Eton lads...taking the piss basically.  When I hear the word 'bogus' I instantly think of politicians, thus taking my mind to the 'Eton boy' aesthetic.

I remembered the photo of David Cameron and Boris Johnson when they were back at Eton, here they are, the absolute lads: 

Doesn't that make you feel sick...

As much as I dislike them, I think the poses here are great, it looks as if they're posing for an album cover. So I can definitely imagine the band members of 'Bogus Beggars' parodying this. 

So initially I went with this idea, I liked the yellow, but I changed it to grey because I thought it went better with the image I was using. I wanted the background to look as if it had been ripped, kind of like tearing the mask of deception away and revealing what's underneath. 

I struggled with finding a suitable text,  but I quite liked this bold text below with an added 'glitch' effect, I think it makes the text look a little more interesting as it jumps out at you more, something you need for a gig poster. 

I found a very old image of some Eton lads *rah* , and in making the image background transparent I got this interesting effect. As Bob Ross would say, it was a happy little accident. I was going for a solid black silhouette, but I think this tuned out a lot nicer, and is a lot more interesting to look at as you can still see the details of the image without it being too detailed. 

I do quite like this poster, however upon reflection, I do think it might be a bit too simple and I think I could do a lot more than just placing a lightly edited picture onto a simple background. So, with the next design I decided to push myself a little more and begin to do things out of my comfort zone. 

The second poster I did was beginning to shape into something that I don't usually create. I messed around with lots of different textures here, and began to manipulate the background and the image. I added a solid colored shape into the background so that the image didn't get lost in the background. I also decided to add paint strokes over the eyes of the people in the image, taking inspiration from posters I'd seen on Pinterest. I think that this added something more interesting to the poster, however I wasn't entirely happy with this as a finished product so I continued to develop my poster even further.

This is where things got really interesting for me. I decided that being too precious over the poster wasn't going to allow me to have an exciting and almost carefree kind of look to it. Pushing the idea of the paint marks further, I decided to add some scribbles and crosses, and I feel as if it has worked well and it suits the image that I have chosen. The only thing that I struggled with was the layout of the text and how I would present it on the poster. I don't think it's terrible, but I also feel that having the text on a plain white background on top, separates the image and the text  from each other, as opposed to it reading as one coherent piece. So I feel like, I'm nearly there...but not quite!! Something needs to change, but I'm slightly unsure as to what needs to change.

After some serious brainstorming, I decided to scrap the current background and change it to a collage like piece. I feel like this works a lot better with my chosen image and the scribbles and marks I've put on it...I feel as if it fits the aesthetic of the entire poster better. However I feel as if the details of the image and what I've added in get lost in the yellow background.

After messing about with the levels I finally found colours that I thought were right for the overall aesthetic that I was trying to achieve for my poster.

Before I start with this week's tasks, I wanted to include this YouTube channel here for future reference. This is a great channel, it teaches you how to draw like other artists. This will be great for developing new techniques and learning from different styles. 

clicking on the image will take you to YouTube (like magic!) 

For my first Watercolour artist, I decided to look at the work of Peter Blake. I like the simplicity of his portraits, they're not too detailed, some are drawn better than others, he only seems to put great detail in one eye, and then draw the other one in a more simplistic form...It's all part of the charm I'd say. 

I found imitating his style rather difficult. Watercolours have always been a difficult one for me, I enjoy them and they can be relaxing, but when having to create work in the style of another artist, it was slightly challenging. I'm not overly happy with what I've produced so far, I feel like I could do better, but I also feel like I've made a decent start, and I can now continue to work from here in order to improve. I'll admit I've found this week rather difficult, and I've not really managed well with my time management... This is something I need to improve on ASAP!!! 

For my first acrylic artist, I chose Ivon Hitchens. Abstract work isn't always my favourite, however I thought I'd challenge myself and go waaay out of my comfort zone, and try some abstract stuff. As always, here's a Pinterest board with a series of images I too inspiration from in trying to imitate the style as best as I could 

(This video has some pretty dramatic music...)

hpI found it pretty difficult imitating Hitchens' style, I had to stop myself from going into too much detail with the paint as that's what I'm used to doing. I think I've made a good start, however I do think the images produced could be more abstract, I'm closer to this in the second image as opposed to the first one. I'm starting to get the feel for his style though, I just need to be more confident with the paint and. 'go for it' and not be afraid to make mistakes. 

Don't worry, I won't be making a George Michael mask.

This week we were tasked with making masks. During one of our lectures with Dwayne, we were given an hour to make a mask out of any materials we could salvage. I went through the recycling bins, and through my art supplies drawer and created this monstrosity: 

I must say that I do struggle when it comes to creating things like this. Most of the time I find them too fiddly and it never turns out the way I want it to. However, I did have fun making it, and it was a challenge to have to come up with an idea and present it all within an hour. 

During the week I started to create another mask. This time, less fiddly, hopefully a little less clumsy...still a work in progress, but I wanted to try different materials and also have a 3D(ish?) aspect to it. Here it is in its stages throughout the creation process... I'm not quite sure what it is, or why I've made it like this, but this is what my head came up with: 

Upon further research, I would like to create something more ambitious, I just need to accumulate more materials. Here's what I've been looking at, and the stuff that will shape my final mask.

This week we were tasked with making dog and cat sculptures using 'unlikely' or 'unusual' materials. I'll be honest, I wasn't too thrilled when I heard that this is what we'd be doing as I'm really not very good at producing 3D work, I can find it frustrating as things usually don't tend to turn out how I initially envisioned them turning out! However, once I got over that initial dread, I found out it wasn't too bad and I actually had a bit of fun creating the sculptures *gasp* 

Before starting I had a brief look at some examples and possible inspiration for this project. As awful as this sounds, I didn't want to go too in depth with the research for this project as I feel I'd copy too much from whatever I'd have found. I just wanted to start creating without having to think too much about what was going on. 

I absolutely love dogs, I once cried when I saw one on a night out...I like cats too, but dogs more.

My toilet roll cat...looks more like a fox really.

A headless dog... I was going to make the head after I'd cooked dinner, however for some reason, I kinda like it without the head.

And a body-less cat, I could put the cat's head, on the dog's body...but that'd be taking things too far.

I used a lot of foil, masking tape and recycled cardboard for this project. I found that shaping things was much easier with these materials, then covering them in masking tape made sure that everything was held together. 

Very wholesome content 

Oops, I put all my research in the other module...I got confused, but for this week the two are similar so please click HERE to see my ramblings and work.