Workshop 2 15/11/15

Todays workshop was to create a book cover for a Penguin Classic.
I had a look at other Penguin Classic book covers that have already been created.

The Portable Edgar Allan Poe 2006

Pygmalion 2007

The Purple Cloud 2012

Wuthering Heights 2008

I like how creative the covers are for these books, especially the first three books. They are colourful and eye catching and they would be seen if they were on a book shelf in a shop.
However, the Wuthering Heights book is not colourful and I don't think it is as eye catching as the other book covers. However, the cover does sit well with the theme and story line of the book and it sets the scene for what will happen so I think it has some good qualities that go well with the theme of the book.

We had 11 book titles and synopsis' to choose from. I decided to do a cover for Wuthering Heights and I would like to make the cover more eye catching like the first three examples of Penguin Classic books.

I did some rough drawings and jotted down some key words from the synopsis to work with.

Wuthering Heights is quite a dark tale but mostly it's about a romance. I wanted to demonstrate this using the two hearts joined together and the demonic love of the characters showing through this as well. However, after discussing with my tutor we decided that my drawing was too modern for a 'Penguin Classic'. I needed to take it back to a more Victorian feeling, so I put the character in costume.

 I feel that this works but I need to do a background that fits the image of moorland and also ties in well with the characters.

I created this and darkened all of image on Photoshop. But on reflection I decided that I wanted the hearts to stand out more, so I went back and lightened this part of the image.

Although this has improved the image. I'm still not happy with the final outcome as a whole. I feel I need more experience using Photoshop so that I can make the image sit better with the background. Or do a different kind of background. I don't think they work very well together. I like the effect of the hearts and the detail on them, but I don't think the rest of the image works with the colouring pencil. I think this image needed to have been either  more of a mixed media image or I should have used a different media, maybe an acrylic or watercolour paint.

The feedback I received from the peer review was 'nice shading and spot colour', 'which book is this for?', 'research ways of shading i.e. top hat' and 'wonderful pencil work. I also like how haunting the characters eyes are.'
I think I may have made my idea a bit too modern for a book cover for such an old story, and this is why some people may have not known that the cover was designed for Wuthering Heights. I think if I had drawn in some Moorland and made it more of a traditional design for a Penguin Classic book cover then it would have been easier to recognise.
I would benefit from looking at alternative ways of shading, that kind of research can improve my knowledge of sketching and shading and give me more techniques to work with and make future work better.
The positive comments were very nice to see, it makes aspects of my work feel like it was effective and my ideas like the darkness of the eyes and the spot colour was successful in this piece of work.

OLIO 11 Brief

From the start of University, we were shown OLIO's. On my first open day and interview for the Uni, I was shown OLIO's. Every year that I've been at the Uni I have seen OLIO's. To begin with I had no idea what it was or why they were showing me them. But after a while I realised it was a collective book of all the work of the current third years who would be graduating that year. When I realised this I was extremely excited and shocked at how fast it had come round for my turn to submit my own piece of work into OLIO 11.
I looked at previous OLIO's for pieces of work that worked well, and pieces that didn't work so well so that I could work out what would be most effective when I create my piece of work.



OLIO 9 - Francesca Williams

I think this Illustration works really well, although it is two separate pieces of work, they sit together very well on a double page spread. The two images reflect in a negative way yet respond to each other effectively. The colours that are used compliment the pages as they are used in opposite areas and the pastel shades set the scene of the images. The use of white flowers on each of the women's knees tie together the two images.



OLIO 9 - Hannah Isaacs

I think this image works well as a double page spread because the image isn't lost in the gutter of the page. It flows very well and the detail of the skeleton and hair makes the illustration eye catching and it stands out against the patterned background.



OLIO 9 - Jess Hinsley

Although the artwork for this illustration is very good, the piece is ruined by some of the image getting lost in the guttering which makes it less effective. This is something that I would like to avoid for my piece of work and to have all the important information of the image visible on the two pages.

After looking at previous OLIO's, I think I would like to create ideas that are double page spreads and not two separate illustrations. I feel that the images flow well across the two pages and you can get more information about your illustration across the wider area, therefore making it more interesting to view.

Our brief for OLIO 11 is to create 2 pieces of work with different approaches to the theme of 'The Eleventh Hour'.
My first response to 'The Eleventh Hour':

- Drinking tea...Optimum drinking temperature
- Check if you've got your passport/if it's in date before a holiday
- Cleaning/doing chores before Mum gets home
- Seasoning food
- Buying Christmas presents
- Washing up
- Writing essays or doing work
- Sort out cars MOT/insurance
- food shopping for dinner party
- Putting parsley on the dinner "God fathers we forgot the parsley" (an old childhood memory)
- Drying clothes before a night out
- Putting on lipstick/lip gloss
- Being born/giving birth
- Decisions in history - e.g. gun powder plot, Berlin Wall
- Suicide saviours - last minute of life
- Environment
- Last tree, in a pod - protecting it
- Mexican day of the dead
- The one that got away (romance)
- Bees
- Natural Disasters
- Decision making
- Consequences
- The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
- Catching trains/buses
- Changing your mind
- Deadlines
- Fate
- Casino
- Gambling

This is an array of different ideas I have taken from my own research and thinking and a group tutorial where we spent an hour discussing loads of different ways we could interpret 'The Eleventh Hour.'
I found the group tutorial really useful as my ideas were quite static to begin with but talking about ideas as a group opened up my mind and allowed me to think down a number of different lines that I hadn't thought of before. This therefore helped my imagination and contributed to a much more diverse range of illustration ideas that I could create.

We had a few InDesign workshops which were very useful as I hadn't used InDesign before. An introduction into setting up a document and placing images on the pages gave me a clearer idea of how my OLIO work is required to be submitted. For example, page size (165mm x 235mm and 3mm bleed), number of pages (4), CYMK colour, press quality, a TIFF format file, a JPEG format file, our name, student number and contact details...We were also shown the specific requirements of saving our files to make a PDF for the submission.
I feel a lot more confident with using InDesign again in the future and for other modules that are approaching.

Workshop 1 - 8/10/15

Todays workshop was a Live Brief. We had a choice of 7 different articles to create an editorial piece of work from.

The article I chose was: "What are American spies doing at Oktoberfest?"http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/what-are-american-spies-doing-at-oktoberfest/ar-AAf0uJm

 I did a few quick rough sketches of some ideas. I felt there was some strong characteristics of the first quick sketch so I played with this idea a bit more...

After experimenting with composition and layout I came up with some clearer and more effective ideas.

This is the image before I scanned it onto a Mac and edited it using Photoshop. The image needed some neatening up and a few alterations.

Here is the final version of my editorial piece of work, after Photoshop. I wasn't overly impressed with the outcome of my work. I went over the one day deadline and the only thing in the image that I would say I am close to being pleased with is the Spy. The rest of the image isn't to the standard that I am happy with and I would have liked to have put a lot more detail into it, especially on the beer glasses. The reason for this not being to a high standard is I set too much to do in the time frame. In future I need to think more about timing and whether my design is realistic to complete in my choice of media in the allotted time. I also need to put more thought into my choice of media, what I'm good at and prefer to use isn't always the best for artwork with a time limit. I would also be more careful with my design as the ellipses on the glasses aren't very even and I feel this also lets the artwork down. I think if I were to have created the image in layers and put them all together on Photoshop then I would have been able to move aspects of the image around and neaten up other areas more effectively. With programs like Photoshop available I need to consider the finish of my work more before creating my image.

The feedback I received from the peer review was 'sensitive palette is good'. I used quite soft colours and blended them so that they appeared quite subtle, so this worked quite well. It may be something I use for other pieces of work in the future.