my love for making Art journals

I just woke up then and remembered to put this on my blog as was meaning to do so the other day! Ever since i was studying Art at Urmston Grammar school, i really enjoy jam-packing a sketch book full of research and displaying my pages in exciting ways. I like making my pages look crammed, layering text on top of water coloured backgrounds, ink-pen over newspaper, buttons, writing here, there and everywhere and also including old black and white pictures between colours. I admit i haven't created one of these this year but my aim next year is to try and atleast make one for a brief that runs over 2 weeks, even if it's a small one. Here are a few examples of ones i found online...

Work outside college...

Here is a pdf of the activity sheet for you to see how we used them and it's really good because now we have the go a head to do the whole series! :)















At the moment, outside of college, i'm working alongside a Graphic Designer called Gill Mullarkey and i'm very lucky to have this opportunity. She specialises in leaflet/brochure design and has worked for companies including the NSPCC, hospitals and many more. She is my friends' Mum and when she found out I was studying Illustration, she contacted me and asked if i'd be interested in helping her with a current project by doing the illustrations for her. Obviously, I jumped at the chance and agreed :) I can't remember the name of the company she's working with exactly but she's currently producing activity booklets for children with learning disabilities and their parents so they can work through it together but have bright, fun illustrations to go alongside the text in order to hold the child's full interest. Here are a few examples of the things i've done...she said they should be very simple, quirky and cartoon-like so they portray exactly what is stated in the text...^

Molly Crabapple

I stumbled across this illustrator Molly Crabapple and was immediately drawn to her colourful detailed drawings. They're so funky and cartoon-like. She is known to appeal to all freaks, weirdos, the oversexed, underpaid, super-sexy dogs and dames! ha..(apparently.)

James fryer

I have to say that i'm not the biggest fan of Critical Studies just because i prefer the creative side of the course. For a Semiotics presentation, we had to pick an image and break it down into sign, signifier, signified, connotation, denotation....and i chose to look at 'Dementia' by James fryer because i liked all of the possible underlying meanings it contains. This is how i look at it:

1. branches and trunk - nature, long life, knowledge, age
2. Clouds - time passing slowly by
3. wooden structure of the tree - structure of the brain, mind, veins
4. leaves - green= sickness, loss of memory/hair/mind
5. face - old person's face with wrinkles merged with nature

Art and paper

God knows how someone had the patience to cut these out but i take my hat off to them coz they look beautiful. They are very intricate and inspiring.



It looks as if each element is a different layer which gives a lot of depth to the image and i like the little simple dog



Since working with Gemma on the 7 x 7 brief, her love for paper art and silhouettes has inspired to look more into this sort of style. Its really made me want to work more in this way and i've already loved making little collage creatures so spotted a few bits and bobs i like...

7 x 7: After the shoot... collapsed lady

These photographs of the woman collapsed were an idea for the second smaller illustration. We have experimented with different light, back drop material, colour and different elements such as the 'magic lantern', charm bracelet and candles etc.

Because the story has a lot of religious undertones and the main place in the story is based around the church, Gemma and I wanted to produce a stain glass window effect. The story seems to cover a lot of imagery about the light, so Gem cut out some sharp edged shapes out of card and placed this in front of the projector light. Which is why you can see the sharp, shattered looking window effect projected onto our models.

We were really impressed with one of our photo's where it seems as if we've created 'God'. The white line which reaches across the image from the lamp looks as if he is watching over her and protecting her. This was one of our favourites. The only problem we found with some of the images, was we struggled to capture the detail on some of the characters faces and this is something we could later improve on. Also, i think after summer we'll try some more shots but have the camera pointing upwards to get a view looking up to the village.

7 x 7: After the shoot...the village

Here are a few examples of mine and Gemma's set designs for the first illustration for the 7 x 7 book. We were so chuffed with how everything worked out because we were worried about how we were going to stand the paper characters up without them wilting over but nothing that a bit of blu-tac couldn't help us with. I don't think we actually expected it to turn out this well but it really seemed like our hard work paid off :) I always look forward to seeing what the final results are going to be like and i was exited to see what they'd look like printed out onto nice paper. We enjoyed messing about with the different colours as each one created a different atmosphere. We also cut out some shapes on card- a bit like how we made the trees s we could place it infront of the projector to create a stain glass window in the background.