Location Location Publication

This is a bit of a nothing post really, just a bit of an update on everything that's been going on I guess over the past few weeks. 

The deadline has passed for submissions to Timbuktu and we ended up with over 40 pieces of writing which was a little unexpected and very overwhelming. We've read through all of them now and have whittled them down to 14/15 pieces we really like and think work well as a group. Getting started now on the layout and design of the actual book which I'll be taking control of mainly and letting everyone else get on with the image making process for the inside images.

Above is a photo of me standing in Wendover woods, the location for one of our photo shoots which we will be using for the publication. We were there for a whole day this week scouting locations and walking around in the mist. Won't give too much away right now but it's an amazing place and one I'd like to go back to in my free time and not for work. 

Production wise have lined up some super exciting finishes for our cover and inside pages which I can't wait to get all together into the final printed book. Our deadline is the 15th of this month. Ah. 

29/2 - The Leap Year Book

Here are pictures of a book I have been working on for a few weeks now for our project ' Cataloguing Collections' which we were given on our first day back at Chelsea. For this project we were required to produce a book using traditional bookbinding techniques to catalog a personal collection.

For my collection I took inspiration from a book I received from my mum on my 11th birthday which had all these amazing illustrated facts about everything that happened in history on February 2nd. I decided it would be cool to replicate this idea but instead focus on a more abstract period of time which led me to look into leap years and the 29th of February. A day lost in time, rightly so to allow for the rotation of the earth and the length of a real year to catch up and align every four years resulting in an extra day.

This year is a leap year and so I decided that it would be appropriate to base my collection on events, births and deaths that have happened every 29th of Feb. since they began in 45 B.C. Using pictures and a special reference method I have created my own index system for representing each leap year's events, ones that aren't celebrated and often forgotten but to some people were huge milestone's in their lives.

Some pictures of the finished book, thanks to my housemate Katrin for helping photograph it. Presenting it on Thursday at the crit. for the project.

Zoo York

So if anyone who reads this blog of mine hasn't heard already, I am three quarters of the way through a four month semester studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. To document my stay I have a photo blog which can be accessed by clicking HERE just finished a mass upload basically covering the last few weeks including thanksgiving which I spent at my awesome friend Liz's (pictured above) in Long Island. Much more to come in the last few weeks of my stay, so sad to think about leaving right now but sort of excited to be going back to Norwich for Christmas and then London in the new year.

Hopefully going to get the chance to blog some more work in the coming week once I get my stuff together.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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:

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.

D.I.Y. Fisheye Lens

So this is going to be quite a text and photo heavy post, apologies in advance.

On Saturday my friend Joakim who I work with at American Apparel was showing me his portfolio for his application to the Graphic Design Communication course I'm currently on at Chelsea. On one of his pages was a bit about how he had made his own D.I.Y. Fisheye lens out of nothing but a lens-cap, door peephole and some bluetac with what looked like some amazing results. My imagination was sparked and almost a week later I have my own D.I.Y. Fisheye lens for my Canon 550D.

Above are photos of the finished products and the parts I used to make it.

Door peephole, bought from Leylands for £4.31

Hama 58mm lens cap, bought from Amazon for £2.57

That's really all it takes. 

All you need to do is drill a hole in the centre of your lens cap that is the same size as the viewing end of your peephole. Unscrew the peephole into the separate parts and thread through the hole and screw back together. BE CAREFUL that the end part of the peephole sits nicely inside the depth of the lens cap otherwise there is a huge possibility of scratching your lens! Other than that, attach to your camera (obviously make sure the lens cap your drilling will fit your lens), set your camera up just so and you're ready to shoot some fisheye shots! 

Below are some photos I took about 2 minutes after I got home from Chelsea with Ben in our garden and house. The camera I'm using is a Canon 550D with the kit 18-55mm lens set on manual focus mode (very important) and non-flash setting. This is such a cheap and easy way of having your own fisheye lens. Let's face it the quality was never going to be brilliant but the photos do have a certain lomography-film-likeness that people are spending a lot of money getting with plastic cameras nowadays. I also took a short video whilst out in the garden which I will upload pretty shortly after adding some audio to cover up my inane chatting about fisheye lenses whilst wandering round our garden.