Four Eyes Colourblind Prints

Above and below are a couple of shots of my first 3 colour separation screen prints based on the self portrait photograph I posted a couple of weeks ago. Screen printing is something that I've never had the opportunity to try before until now and it's one of those things that always seemed weirdly magical as I never had any idea how the process worked. 

Now however, after more than a good number of weeks colour mixing, test prints, taping, reprinting and endless experimentation I am finally getting comfortable with how it works. Being able to hold a sheet that only you yourself have printed, from creating the artwork, shooting the screen, mixing the ink and pulling the print is really amazing.

Four Eyes

First in a selection of self portrait images for a screen printing project I'm working on. Way more work to come on this blog from all of my classes when I get the time to upload it. 

For now stay tuned.

Norman

Everything seems to be weirdly connected at the moment...Yesterday I posted about Andrew Bird: Fever Year, a music documentary cum live concert film following a year with Andrew Bird, a ridiculously talented musician who's touring schedule almost (but not quite) got the better of him in 2009.

Today whilst spending my usual time browsing the web I came across the trailer for a new independent film scored by the man himself (Bird) titled 'Norman'. I won't try to explain what it's about or why you should watch it but I have posted the trailer above for your viewing pleasure. All I will say is that it looks fantastic and that I am pretty happy I'm over here in the good ol' U S of A as it's being released here in just under two weeks time. YES.

Side note: going to try blogging a lot more regularly from now on. Not quite daily but, I'd like to avoid 4 months gaps ever again if possible.

Andrew Bird: Fever Year

Chronological isn't always logical so it turns out. 

Here is a post from something I have been doing today, in New York. 

This evening I went (alone) to watch a film titled 'Andrew Bird: Fever Year' as part of the 2011 New York Film Festival. For those not as musically inclined as others, Andrew Bird is a musician who's relentless touring and recording schedule over the last decade has left him with a huge following across the globe but very little success in the form of 'hits' and record sales (not necessarily a bad thing).

The film is a music documentary cum live concert film combined together in a very natural way, with neither side really dominating over the other. It documents Andrew at the tail end of 2009 where he played 165 shows throughout the year and the resulting effect it has had on his health; the film is aptly titled 'Fever Year' as it's mentioned many times throughout it's rare that Andrew doesn't have a temperature of below 102, but yet he continues unabashed and very enjoyably to perform every night. 

The film was fantastic, made even more so by a Q&A with the director (Xan Aranda) who's thoughts really helped complete the circle and made me appreciate the film so much more. There was a very clear collaboration between subject and director, they both knew each other as friends and as creatives. It was great to see the film as both of them had wanted, instead of watching an exotic and talented animal in an glass case being poked and filmed by it's master who didn't know it's name or understand what it did. 

I am not a writer, I tried to write a few paragraphs about the film and found I just wrote the same thing over and over again. I know what I feel about it and that's fine by me. I feel very lucky to have seen it as it's only going to be screened in film festivals and not made into a dvd or distributed widely. To quote Xan..

"He (Andrew) doesn't write anything down so why would he make a DVD?"

Below are some of the concert posters showcased within the film as Andrew likes to collaborate with creatives rather a lot as the top picture is testament too. Anything like that is great to see but especially for me as a designer it was just fantastic, a few of them below. I've gone on too long, it's 2AM and I'm tired.

 

So little information about this film to be found online. For anyone who's interest has been stirred you can try the link below...

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/andrew-bird-fever-year

Five Leaves Left - Finyl Vinyl

As per usual it's been quite some time since my last post on this blog and I now have quite a bit of work backlogged to begin to blogging over the next week or so. To that end here is one of my final projects from the end of 1st year at Chelsea. For anyone who isn't aware I am just over one month into a four month exchange programme at F.I.T. in New York. Blogging stuff has been the last thing on my mind (until homework day comes round) hence it's taken this long for me to get round to it.

Above is my redesign of Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left vinyl cover worked on as a collaboration with our guest tutor Peter Chadwick of Popular studio. Looking back at how I approached this project I suffered with my normal method of approaching a project and even regressed back to a high school style of being afraid of our teacher as I hadn't done the work certain weeks, didn't see him and therefore lost out. Lesson learnt.

The Dancing Printer

I think I got that thing you get when you are at home for too long and get so ridiculously bored that even the smallest, most pointless thing will entertain you for a few long hours. Having said that here's a short film I made of my printer whilst at home in Norwich last week after noticing that whenever you print something it does a little (happy?) dance. It amused me so hopefully it'll amuse some of you.

Back in London now so slightly less cabin-fever-ish...

Loads more stuff to come soon hopefully as and when I get some free moments

Watch This Space

Golden Foam

So finally here is Golden Foam in all it's one minute glory.

Enjoy.

Film Poster

Movie poster for our film 'Golden Foam' will be collated with the 9 other groups posters and be printed as one long reel. Photos to come of when that happens and stuff. Oscar night is almost upon us, hopefully there will be some photos of that too appearing at some point after Thursday!

Lights, Camera, ZZzzZzzzzz

Started shooting our film 'Golden Foam' on Friday, here's one of the first stills which we shot in Luke's house. Shooting now on Tuesday and Thursday with final hand in on Monday.

Tax On Oh Me

Last Wednesday the entire class spent a entire day in the Graphics Studio with Nigel & Pete who organised something of a one day print workshop for us.

We were each told to bring in one mechanical or electrical item that that had once served a purpose in our lives and that we no longer needed. We then were told to take them apart into as many pieces we could manage and arrange them  by size, shape, colour, material etc. Above are is my super old digital camera pre disassembly and my final taxonomy piece from the workshop. After arranging all of our pieces very neatly and photographing then we were told to ink up and print as many of the pieces as possible in a printed taxonomy. Things quickly got messy, photos below...

R.I.P. Gil Scott-Heron

This is a bit of an out of the ordinary post for me I'll admit

This post is a dedication to an extraordinary singer, songwriter and poet who has died aged 62.

I discovered Gil Scott-Heron and his work whilst working on a college project last term and have not stopped listening to him since. The results of the work have still not yet been finalised but, due to recent events their release may get pushed forward by the people I have been doing it for and hopefully you will see it soon. 

I'm not going to link you to any of his music, you can find it yourselves. His recent collaboration remix album with Jamie XX is highly recommended though. Instead here is a quote of his I get to see every so often painted on the wall of his record company's office.  I only wrote it down last week; to me it's perfect. 

"There is a proper procedure for taking advantage of any investment.

Music, for example. Buying music is an investment.

To get the maximum you must

LISTEN TO IT FOR THE FIRST TIME UNDER OPTIMUM CONDITIONS

Not in your car or on a portable player through a headset.

Take it home.

Get rid of all distractions, (even her or him).

Turn off your cell phone.

Turn off everything that rings or beeps or rattles or whistles.

Make yourself comfortable.

Play your CD.

LISTEN all the way through.

Think about what you got.

Think about who would appreciate this investment.

Decided if there is someone to share this with.

Turn it on again.

Enjoy yourself. "

R.I.P Gil Scott-Heron 1949 - 2011

Slowly But Surely

Yesterday we had our third meeting with our tutors about the current film brief. Now halfway through we have 3 weeks left and have just decided on the final story of our film, the real work begins now I guess but I am super happy with the idea and can't wait to make this film.

Just got back from Canary Wharf after doing some location scouting. Such a weird area but managed to take some nice photos one of which is above...

LP

Just some hand drawn type I did as as test for the LP redesign brief this week. After coming to Peter on Friday with a selection of different ideas and concepts we decided to go for a combination of all of them. Not going to reveal too much just yet as I want to do some test shots and stuff but I'll be making something physical and photographing it.

Five Leaves Left

So bar our film brief we only have one other ongoing project this term. We have been given a brief by Peter Chadwick, a pretty famous "graphic designer" to redesign a 12 inch vinyl sleeve of our choice. I chose Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake as it is one of my favourite albums but with probably one of the worst designed covers I have ever seen. Everything about it is shameful, especially the kerning of the title. Shudder. Going to try and have as much fun with this project as possible. See as vinyl is such a physical format I want to try and reflect that in my process so there will be a lot of drawing and printing going on over the next few weeks. Working with a square is not something we do a lot nowadays as well so I am really going to try and take advantage of this fact, how I'm not quite sure though. Hopefully development will be being posted up pretty soon.

Butex Scholarship

A poster I have designed as part of my application to the Butex Scholarship 2011. Each year BUTEX awards a number of scholarships to students studying abroad for either a semester or for a whole academic year. Each scholarship is worth £500 to each student and all you have to do is design a poster promoting study abroad, seeing as I am a graphic design student I couldn't turn it down. Going to print and send it off next week, fingers crossed! 

Golden Foam

Ok so time for some new projects. Last Tuesday we were given our first film brief by tutor Ed Gill who worked with some of us last year on foundation at Chelsea and who has made TV ads for Innocent Smoothies, Sony and a ton of other companies as well as some pretty awesome music videos.

We were put into groups of 4/5 and just given the title of our movie and told to produce a one minute skit based on our initial ideas. Our film title is 'Golden Foam'. We have just under 6 weeks to produce, film and edit the movie itself with the final results being screened at our very own oscar night at the end of term where we are going up against all the other films to win oscars handmade by each group. We're also going to be producing posters and other promotional material for the film which will be collated and put into a programme which will then be printed and sold on the night.

That's all I'm giving away for now, above is a picture of our group. I love the idea we have for the film so much, just really excited about this project. Below is a film I found as part of my research, completely unrelated now but so nice.

Zoetrope pt.2

Okay so here's another update on my layered zoetrope project. I am still waiting on the video to be finalised and stuff so that'll have to wait till the next time I post about this which probably won't happen till it gets all signed off.

This in short is this is basically a run through for when I present my work to my class and my tutors. Nigel has a saying that if you tell an a difficult idea/concept 10 times to 10 different people that you slowly get better at it, so that's what I'm trying here.

Above are a couple of photos of my final zoetrope and the equipment I used inside my GLAMOROUS studio (Ben's room, thanks for that) to shoot the video. As I explained in my first post my original idea was to create a triple layered zoetrope where the first layer would be a cutout shape, second a printed acetate sheet and third a printed card sheet.

I started by designing the base for my zoetrope, initially trying to work out how to have three circles, all on the same level and all spinning at the same speed. After a lot of head scratching I came up with the neat idea of a tiered base which meant I could place it onto a record player and use that for my rotation. After designing I got it all laser cut, basically to try and minimise any error I might make if I tried to make 3 perfect circles by hand in the workshop. Last minute I changed my mind about materials, choosing corrugated card instead of mdf as I was worried about weight and the spinning power of the record player.

Also got my first layers laser cut, again for the same reason. Bought some acetate and got my third layer printed. 

Sadly after a lot of long afternoons and quite a lot of frustration I still haven't got anywhere near having 3 animating layers that remotely look like they have anything to do with eachother. In the end I think I was a little ambitious trying to get one layer to work was hard enough, let alone three working all together.

HOWEVER, all is not lost...

I started thinking about playing around with layers still, but instead of animating them having something else going on instead. Light is such a versatile medium I wanted to try and incorporate it into this piece. I bought a piece of frosted plastic from paperchase and dug out my industrial light, setup my tripod and started filming. I'm super happy with the final results which hopefully you'll be able to see pretty soon (fingers crossed).

Even though the results are completely different to what I had initially imagined that was the whole point of this project. The direction I took this project in has so much potential, hopefully I'll get the chance to explore it a whole lot more soon. The point of this project was to experiment, try something new, make something awesome looking even if it doesn't have a purpose. That's where I was a little different though but all will be revealed as soon as it's all done and dusted...

Facecake

Having a trawl through my pictures earlier, came across this gem of a snap of my 21st birthday present from Francesca Pequeur. The one and only the I had on my wishlist, Facecake. Cheers m'dear.

Zoetrope pt.1

Okay, so this is the first of a series of posts about a piece of work I am super close to finishing which should have happened around a month ago but it took a different direction and proved to be a bit more of a challenge than I expected, in the end producing a totally different result than that I had first conceived. 

The brief for this project was called "New Languages", we were given the task of discovering either a brand new or already existing technology/technique and taking it somewhere new with the aim of creating something completely original that neither we or anyone else had never done before. 

Instead of try and create something brand new using loads of computers, programming and technology I opted for a slightly different and more analog approach. I came up with the idea of making a triple layered zoetrope. For anyone who is not familiar, a zoetrope was one of the first forms of animation. A cylindrical drum which on the inside has 16/17 frames of animation which when span can be viewed by eye through slits at the top of the drum - pictured below.

My idea was to reverse the zoetrope so the images were on the outside of the cylinder and incorporate three different layers of animation into one image. When viewed from the right angle it would look as though they were one image but when moved slightly then the illusion would be revealed. The first layer would be a cut-out shape, the second would be printed acetate and the third would be a printed layer. 

Look out for the next posts coming pretty soon and you can see what actually happened, hopefully with a video once it's been approved the people I've made it for. All very exciting stuff.  

Print Is Not Dead

This evening I hopped on a train to Shoreditch and visited The Book Club where I attended I talk presented by Stack magazine distribution entitled "Printout! - Why print when you can blog?", the talk/discussion was given by...

Rob Orchard - Delayed Gratification

Tim Hayward - Fire & Knives

John L Walters - Eye Magazine

All three men are heads/editors of their respective independent magazines which they are all at different stages of starting up or doing business with. Each of the magazines, though similar in format all have completely different subject specialisms and with it, completely different approaches to the way they approach the running of their magazine. 

Rob Orchard with Delayed Gratification has coined the term 'slow journalism' to as a direct reaction to the internet generation of journalism where every story must be investigated, researched, written and published all within a matter of minutes. His magazine is a quarterly publication of exquisite journalism and beautiful infographics, a modern almanac. Other than a website DG has no online presence whatsoever, launched only last year it'll be interesting to see what happens to them. 

Tim Hayward with Fire & Knives has created the ultimate foodie magazine, based around his passion for food and journalism he gets people equally as passionate, interesting, literate as him to write his articles. By his own admission he is "basically printing a blog" taking talented writers who have not yet had much exposure and giving them the opportunity to have their work published for no fee which then leads to them having more work and the magazine gaining more exposure. They have a website and a twitter account which allowed them to get enough subscribers based on a mock-up issue to print their first issue and have gone on from there to bigger and better things. 

John L Walters from Eye Magazine, I don't really need to explain their ethos. If you read this blog chances are you'll read theirs too and maybe even their magazine and have a very clear idea about what they're all about. 

Despite their differences in topics, journalistic ethos and relationships with the internet each of the mags. and their directors/editors are passionate about publishing and printing. The magazines are their souls and it shows in printed form. When asked about 'the green issue' of the environmental cost of printing a magazine Tim summed it up nicely "No-one has ever thrown away a copy of our magazine" stating "We design a beautiful object as possible, it is not disposable media. People keep them. The first thing I see people do when they get the magazine is smell it, personally I think that is much better as a form of interactive media than facebook or twitter." All of the magazines tick those boxes. There was a small library of tonnes of independent magazines which we flicked through over a drink and were even given a couple of complimentary copies of Eye Magazine, Fire & Knives and Article (see the photo above). All of the magazines were beautiful, like popular magazines like 'OK' and 'Hello' they are printed media but overall they are in a world of their own. 

My copy of Fire & Knives is just amazing. Overall well worth the fiver entry I'd say. 

Chillin' with the guys below, John, Tim and Rob (right to left)....SWAG

Boy Can Sew

Spent all of yesterday fixing my slowing breaking laptop case with a scrap of leather I bought from a shop in Brick Lane about 2 years ago. Was really nice to make something with my hands for once and very satisfying to know I've fixed something myself and hopefully given it another couple of years of use. Looking forward to see how the leather ages and whether or not my stitching will hold up to me throwing my laptop + case in and out of my bag on a daily basis. I have always loved this laptop case since I got it almost 2 years ago now and always get compliments for it whenever I produce it from my bag. Now have a whole new level of love for it. 

If you're in the market for a new laptop case check out the company I got mine from. http://www.colcasac.com/

Stop the Violence

Now we all know the easiest way to a student's heart is free stuff. This coming post pretty much justifies the rather large amount of time I spend surfing teh internet and it's creative blogs looking for work that inspires and excites me. This is Colossal is one of those blogs, a personal favourite of mine and the other day as always I was reading through the newest posts and came across one about this rather neat looking book....


'Stop the Violence' is a collaboration between Thirst founder Rick Valicenti and Photographer Francois Robert and his series of the same name. Each spread of the book features  an individual letter from the alphabet—compositions made of human bones arranged by Robert—in juxtaposition with a page from President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech from 2009. The book is 36 pages long and quite extraordinarily more than a foot in height. Everything seems pretty normal up to this point however when I came to the end of the post there was a link to a website where you could request a copy of this rather amazing book FOR FREE. Amazed, I clicked through the link and filled out the little form with my address etc and 10 minutes later got an e-mail saying that my copy would be shipped by the end of the week! Another 10 minutes later I tried to access the page again set up a link from this blog so anyone else could request one but the edition had 'sold out'. Not sure how that's possible with a free book but anywho, no idea how many were printed but I'm guessing pretty small numbers and the publisher (Classic Colour) seem to specialise in really limited runs. I'll post again when I receive my copy with more details and pictures.


Who said you can't get anything for free these days....


Video above taken from Thirst's Vimeo page:
Pictures below taken from This is Colossal:

Always Remember to Print Fair Children

This week through the most tedious link imaginable I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to help with the setting up, hanging and dismantling of 'The London Original Print Fair' at the Royal Academy.  The print fair is an annual exhibition where printers and galleries come together to showcase and sell their wares to collectors and the public for a very short 3 days. There was a huge mix of contemporary prints from artists such as Gavin Turk and Damien Hirst to more classical fine art prints which was nice to have although it was quite intense walking round trying to take it all in. Below are a few photos I took  of pieces that caught my eye when I had a walk round on Wednesday. Overall it was an invaluable experience to see how an exhibition is put together and hopefully I'll get the chance to do myself one day.

Not So Innocent

Ok so over the past month I haven't posted anything here at all due to a pretty epic 12 week term and rather a lot of work. All of this work is still in progress and will be uploaded over the coming weeks as and when I get it done but for now a project that I have finished...

In short, I made a 30 second advert for innocent smoothies as part of a competition they are currently running. The only rules were that the advert had to use the music provided by innocent and involve the super smoothie character (see above) 'saving the day' in some way. Thanks to Jules and Don for being sports and agreeing to help me film/play a part in the ad itself. If chosen my advert will be on t.v. and I could win £5,000...which could come in very handy at the moment. Watch the ad below and I may be asking you to vote for me fairly soon, fingers crossed...

Read The Signs

This Thursday we spent an entire day having a workshop with ex Chelsea student Lizzie Gove who taught us the basics of sign writing, a subject she studied in depth for her dissertation and final degree project. It was great to spend a whole day doing something physical instead of staring at a macbook for hours on end as I seem to be doing a lot recently. It was quite a challenge at first to get the brush technique and the ink viscosity just right but after about an hour of painting some not so great letters we all began to get the hang of it with some people clearly having a natural talent. During the afternoon we were set a mini brief to paint an alternative word for 'gorgeous', the idea being that everyone in the class would paint a different word, the end results would be scanned and put on one sheet of A1 paper and then each student would get a copy. I chose the word killer as I particularly liked doing 'k's but my 'r's let me down somewhat. Ho Hum. Below is some of Lizzie's actual final work which I saw in last years degree show and have recovered from her flickr in the depths of the internet. It was great to talk to her over the course of the day about a subject she clearly loves, knows an awful lot about and is very good at.

Lovely stuff.