Penguin Book cover project - cont.

After a tutorial with my tutor about this project, it was pointed out to me that this design ( taken from one f my design sheets ) had a lot more impact then the design i had settled on before, i hesitated to pursue this idea because i thought it might be slightly too vulgar, but visually it is a lot less complex and fussy than the illuminated books inspired design.

This is the image i ended up using for the book cover template, i painted the design onto acrylic paper and drew the lettering by hand, i regretted doing this later because i feel the free hand lettering is messy and unappealing, luckily i worked out a way to edit these parts out and overlay the new text on Photoshop .

 I wanted the back of the book to tie in with the front cover so i used to same paint to create a splash of colour and then simply drew a small orange in the bottom right hand corner, i really wanted this design to be simple and understated, but also bold and eye catching, i feel like i did my best with this concept but in retrospect i could have developed it more, perhaps simply drawing the main illustration on the front cover rather than painting might have given it more impact and a crisper line.

Below are variants of my final book cover design, set to the specified template given by penguin, the one i will go with as my final piece is the very last image, i have chosen this one because the actually illustration is cropped better then the others and i also fixed the bad hand-drawn lettering at the bottom of the page, i am pleased with my final design, considering the amount of difficulty i have had trying to narrow down my ideas for this brief. 

YCN Yorkshire Tea project- cont.

Below are my final designs for a possible packaging for Yorkshire tea, i decided to follow the route that i was previously thinking about; creating a few cute animal characters and placing them in a natural, countryside setting. I have chosen to make my designs as simple as possible, so only flat colours with a fairly limited colour palette. 3 of the 4 sides of the box i have designed have animal characters on them, the backside and the bottom of the box are left largely sparse to allow for product information. The top side of the box is the Yorkshire Tea logo surrounded with leafy motif that is present throughout the design. 

Above is a net of my design layout how i plan to assemble the box as a prototype. 

This design that i have created for a final piece of this project, is perhaps not as detailed or developed as i would have liked, but as i have little time to finish it off this simplistic design is about as far as i can go with this idea.   I feel if i want to put my best efforts into the rest of my project work i need to draw a line under this brief. 

I wanted to make something along these lines to begin with, only more polished and executed better, perhaps the final design would have looked more appealing if it were painted traditionally rather than digitally but as time is not on my side, digital was the most efficient way of creating these images. 

Penguin design award 2015

I decided to chose the title Oranges are not the only fruit out of the three selections Penguin had to offer for the competition, which is a novel by Jeanette Winterson about a lesbian girl raised in an adoptive Pentecostal christian family, who struggles between her sexuality and religion.  

I chose this book because the potential if the imagery is a lot stronger than the others on offer, in my opinion anyway. I like idea of exploring the sexuality of the main character while at the same time keeping some traditional religious themes and imagery.  Also as mot of the covers for this title are quite dated i'm interested in making something contemporary looking. 

This is one of my design sheets, at this point is was torn between wanting to draw something innocent and playful or something that was a little darker or more sexual. I looked at some other artists work for inspiration and i was drawn to Matisse and his cut outs, he has a very playful way of portraying the body, so i looked at ways to simplify the female form, again i started out with lino because i wanted to create some strong lines and bold colours. 

Here are my colour variants of the lino cut i scanned in and coloured on Photoshop, i used a gradient to make the colours in the image look more bohemian and psychedelic. I was quite pleased with these designs but still felt i had a lot of other ideas i wanted to explore.   

For my research i also looked at illumined books and bibles, thinking this would tie in well with the novels religious themes, i like the idea of angels and devils, because of the conflict experienced by the main character, i thought the angel and devil could represent Jess and her lover.

This is the final version of this design without text, i am keen to do hand drawn text for this cover, which might also mean painting this design traditionally so the styles and textures match, also i think painting this traditional would add to the idea of it being a page from an illuminated book.  

YCN Yorkshire tea brief

Out of all of the briefs offered for the YCN student awards i was most drawn to the Yorkshire tea brief, which i felt had the most room for design changes as the original packaging illustration is a landscape painting, so i can hopefully take elements from that and add my own influences in. 

I began thinking mainly traditional, using the countryside as the base theme, i thought this might appeal to the current market for Yorkshire tea, adults aged 35+, i also wanted to at least try and make a design using lino, thinking this would add to the traditional feel. 

The thumbnail sketch i decided to go with as a design i would carry over to lino cut. I thought having a small animal in the image would make it more endearing to the audience, although i feel now that i made the design of the owl a little to flat and could use some character. 

Here is the result of 4 layers of lino cut arranged and coloured in Photoshop, i had some trouble trying to make the colours work and tune the opacity of the layers so they wouldn't drown each other out. I also played with the positioning of the Yorkshire tea logo quite a lot, i found it difficult to make the image and the text work together. After i group tutorial i was even more sure that this design is not going anywhere, i enjoyed working with lino and playing with the layers but i don't feel the image out come works in this case. I have re-evaluated my direction with this project and i feel i need to explore other options.  

I still want to make something that is traditional in keeping with my original idea but also i feel like i want to incorporate an element of charm and youthfulness, one of the things said in the Yorkshire tea YCN brief is that they wanted to appeal to a younger audience, so perhaps this is a good opportunity to bring more of my personal work to this project, i am a lot more comfortable drawing characters and things with a little narrative than i am with traditional landscapes. 

So i have designed a few animal characters to continue the project, i feel like this is a smart move after talking with my tutor we both agreed having mascots can greatly boast a products appeals and people will more likely warm to cute endearing characters.

Some digital sketches of my main two character designs, a fox and bunny, who bond together over a cup of tea rather than fighting each other, another suggestion i had was to create a different animal character for each flavor of tea Yorkshire tea have in their range, but i think just designing for the original flavor will be my goal now and perhaps i will think about others if i have time. 

 

These design where made digitally, but i really do want to go back into traditional again, perhaps with inks or watercolour.

Butter Market mural cont. Coming together

As we finally had the panels cut to the right size after some confusion when ordering them, we managed to make all the pieces fit together to make the right sized rectangle that would fit in between Rhiannon and Georgia's two jigsaw like large panels, the panels that we used were off cuts from other larger pieces, luckily we had just what we needed. The next step was to put a white primer on the panels and then put the first base colour on. 

The yellow was taken from Rhiannon and Georgia's colour palette, as well as the red we used, Emma and i mixed the remaining blue colour, this was because we wanted there to be some continuation from their panels and ours, but we also wanted a blue that was slightly brighter and would stand out more. 

The small panels in the photo above are the detachable name plates of the stalls in the butter market, we were emailed all the names and were asked to incorporate these into our design. Emma has the best hand rendered typography out of the two of us, so we agreed she would create these to put on the other large panels. This should create a 3D element that the mayor seemed to be interested in, in hindsight it would have been nicer to have other 3D parts on the mural, perhaps in the actual illustrations, but this task seemed big enough and this would have taken much more time, of which we were running out of. 

The arrangement of  how we want to display the base panels and the small name panels, we mostly grouped them together because we wanted to create a blocky arrangement that would correspond with the design of the mural as a whole. 

One of the illustrations for a panel painted by me, i used masking tape to create straight lines so i could have a box to work with, i decided to make the fish shapes with negative space because it limited the number of colours i needed to use on this panel, we need to make this task as easy for ourselves as possible, and washing brushes takes up a lot of time in between painting, also i feel the negative space works in this one.

This is the only panel to feature people, and i think this was a good idea because it took along time to get the lines right, i found it difficult to 'draw' with a brush. But i like the way it turned out, perhaps i would have made it slightly busier if i'd have had more time. 

First finished panel. 

Hand drawn typography done by Emma, i think these will fit perfectly with the illustrations on the panels, they're the same kind of free hand quality. 

A couple of small illustrations i drew on the remaining small panels. 

Now that the panels are now fully illustrated and the name plates are completed, we only need to put them together, and then we need to varnish the front and back of the panels and finally touch up some parts of the back colour, all things considered i feel we have made good time so far. 

Hopefully we should have the panels completely finished and on their way to be put up in the Butter Market by next week. 

Butter Market wall murals cont.

The mayor of Hereford and his wife came to view our ideas for the murals inside the Butter Market, we had all presented pitches on foam board so they would be clearly visible and hopefully convey our intentions for the walls.
After they had viewed our artwork they then asked for other walls in the butter market to also be worked on, giving us a bigger area to work with. This is fortunate for us because it means that most of us will have a section to work on or at least be able to help with painting and organizing. This is also a great complement for us as a course, meaning we will have our collective work viewed from various different locations in the market.

Emma, Rhiannon, Georgia and myself will be working together to create a mural in the corridor towards the back of the market that leads to Maylord street.

Emma and i will work on the middle section of the mural, Emma will be creating typography for the panels and i will be painting some designs onto them, The Mayor mentioned he wanted names of the current stall owners and perhaps those of people how have previously worked in the market, we may not be able to fit all of the requested name onto the panels depending on space.

Time tables for the coming weeks in which the group will be working on the wall murals in the Butter Market.

Gathering Materials : Paints will need to be selected as a group, along with paint brushes, masking tape and other tools, Wooden panels will need to be cut on in college with the help of a technical demonstrator to reduce costs. 

Week 1 ( 10th to 14th November ): we will aim to have wooden panels cut to size and ready to be painted on by the end of this week.

Week 2 ( 17th to 21st November ): we will try to have 1, perhaps 1 and a half sections of the corridor mural complete .

Beyond this we will continue to work until the murals are completed to the best of our ability in the time we have been given. 

Butter Market Wall Mural Cont.

After the discussion in the group crit i continued to work on a simple, limited colour wall mural design, i decided to tone down the colours i had previously used and opted for a palette easier on the eyes. I also continued with the idea of putting simple design and type in boxes. I tried to develop this concept as far as i could but felt i hit a wall with it and couldn't think of anyway to further develop it, so i made a finished design based on the imagery i already had.

This is my final design that i will be pitching to the mayor along with another design i had made along side this one which has an entirely different direction. 

Here are my thumbnail designs for my alternate mural pitch to the mayor, i wanted to have something that i could relate myself as well as having a design which would appeal to others. This design is mainly focusing on the people of the Butter Market, those who work and shop there and how the market makes them happy. So i drew different kinds of people and how they would enjoy themselves at the market.

This is the Painted version of my thumbnails, some of these turned out better than others, but i feel they would still work well together. 

After i finished these i photo-copied them and played around with the composition of the panels. 

Here is my first design with some of the panels raised from the paper with foam board,i felt that adding an extra dimension to the design might give it a push when it comes to the pitch, also it could be interesting to play around with this idea in the future. 

Here is how my pitch presentation turned out, i put the most developed idea at the top, because i feel it is the most eye catching and detailed design, i also included a photo copy of my sketch book page detailing my second idea and below that the coloured panels for my second pitch idea.