These are the images for my book for the Malcolm X proj.

book jacket projectness

This is what I came up with for my Book Jacket for the weird wife-sauasge story:

When i scanned the image in I used a book I got from the Anish Kapoor RA exhibition this year. I quite like the two images together

And this was another possibitily:

The Sausage

I have another project to do alongside the Malcolm X one. I have to make a book cover for a short story. The story is called 'The Sausage' by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I tried finding a link for it but couldnt, and I cant really be bothered. Anyway, basically the story is about a man who kills his wife and turns her into a sausage and then gets tried in a courtroom. The man is found guilty and he asks if he is allowed to eat the sausage as a last request, but it has sort of disappeared during the trial and it is alluded to that the judge has eaten it. Yeah, it's pretty shit. It doesn't seem very deserving of a book cover to me, and considering it is only about 500 words long. Anyway, it was either this one or pedo-jesus.

These are just a few quick sketches I did pondering the idea. I want to sort of incorporate the statue of justice- the blindfolded lady with the sword and scales. In my head the man on trial is really creepy, a total piece of work and skin and bone and just horrible. I think it has to look pretty sinister. So the whole idea that lady justice can't see and doesn't know what's going on would work really well with that.

The Rye times

So we went on a school trip to a place called Rye which is quite near Maidstone to do some drawing. We had to make three 'unconventional' postcards which depict Rye. This is what Rye looks like:

Rye reminded me of my hometown in Gloucester A LOT. Dursley is pretty much the same; populated almost exclusively by octogenerians, with shops which proudly exhibit it's finest assets, i.e. about sixty-three oxfams. Needless to say, it was a little dull. Here are some of the interesting things I found:

A rather nice looking cheese shop.

An awesome antique rocking horse. I considered getting on it, but resisted.

This guy. We hit it off, but I told him I wasn't into dating right now.

So these are the postcards I made:

Mr. Malcom X and I are pals for the next ten weeks.

My new proj is to make a book. My tutors thought up some sick (or so they thought) famous people and we all had to draw a name from a hat. To be fair, there were some cool ones, Hitler's girlfriend, French cereal killer, LSD guinea pig, and so on. But I got goldie; pretty much encompassing everything I hate. I was not best pleased and spent the rest of the day whining about it. Anyway, as soon as I got home it came to my knowledge that my flatmate didnt want Malcom X because she found him too depressing, so we swapped. Woosh!

But really, come on, Malcom X is so obviously choosable for this type of project, I'm not impressed with their creativing. I could have thought of some way more amazing people. What if you got Jesus..?

August

So I did have a summer project to do prior to the start of my course. I’m now with UCA Maidstone, doing an illustration BA. The summer project was to drawn one’s personal space. But I was doodling in this book before I got the letter so here are some ambient-mind type doodles, and a few sketches;

I got totally obsessed with lines...

Max is easy to draw because he stays still quite often.

I also have these sweet rubber alphabet stamps which I love a lot. I know it’s kind of cheating, because if I want to use stamps so much I should probably make some, it would be more original. I do plan to do that this year. But I really love these, I think they are beautiful, so I used the stamps to record things I was over-hearing people say that seemed interesting to me. I like listening in to peoples’ conversations. It’s so interesting, getting I little bit of conversation and trying to think up the story behind it. Like, for example, yesterday I was at the cash point and a little way behind me there was a man on the phone having a heated conversation and he said “you’re a coward, and if you do this I won’t ever speak to you again, and that a promise.” Shit.

Final major catch up

So these are some brief images illustrating my final major proj from last year which to be frank wasn’t the most awesome project I’ve ever attempted to apply myself to, but I did like the outcome. Apart from the last day when I spent about six hours trying to get into the studio to set up my exhibition the day before it opened. Oops.

What I did was to bind a book, something I’ve never done before and only ever did once, so I think my book was...okay. And I cut into the pages in such a way that I created a 3D scene in the relief of the paper. So I cut a forest into the book. Here are some photographs I took while I was making the mock up and the actual thing.

Then I stamped quotes from the play onto the fabric of the binding, and made a lectern...or rather stood around awkwardly while a technician made it for me. And then I set it up in my studio

The exhibition was really good, I thought. But I’m kind glad it’s over now. I have illustration degree related projects to look forward to now.

This ends the dead air since May

Man. I really kind of abandoned this small slot of internet since I finished foundation. Pretty much as soon as it was over I was so sick of art that I couldn’t stand to do anything for a while. And then it got so long that I just stopped thinking about continuing this blog. But I’m here now. Upon finishing my foundation at Camberwell, I lurked around the streets of London town for about three months not doing anything with my life and then moved on down to Maidstone.
That’s where I am right now. Sitting in my little room at halls, looking out of my, frankly human rights-encroachingly tiny window, at the studio rooms opposite the road. There are still sirens. And there are still shoes floating up high on telephone wires. But I miss London like nothing else. Maidstone is beautiful though, and the course is so much better than Camberwell. Everyone is so much more friendly and the projects are way more interesting and I feel really enthused to learn. So it’s a good start to the year I guess.

Final Major Project

Eight weeks ago, I started my final major project for foundation. The theme of said project is the play ‘’A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. No particular aim, i wanted to keep it as open as possible because i knew i would get bored of it at some point and that would be when I’d have to turn around and start working in a totally different direction.

Mumshape

It’s my mother’s birthday tomorrow. I made this for her:

I made an origami box with a lid and covered it in fabric. Inside it is a pop-out poem on a piece of tissue paper. The poem is called Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas. I filled the inside of the box with speckled feathers and that false shrubbery stuff you get for toy train sets and things. It’s relevant because the poem revolves around a rural English countryside day.

What I was getting at, in making it, was a sort of place, a place inside a box that is private. A space of solitude and contentment. That you can carry around with you. I think she will make good usage of it.

This is the poem:

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

3 Dimentionally Speaking...

In extention of the 3D illustration project, which I really really enjoyed, I made this speech bubble cushion type thing.

Like a creeper, I spent a lot of my time eavesdropping upon the conversations of others. It’s so interesting just listening to other people talk about their lives. Especially in Selfridges, they were truly ridiculous, this is an example of what i heard in there:

“i’m looking for a breakfast tray, you know..?”
“oh, you’ll have to look in our breakfasting section madam."

Lol.

I block printed ‘ARE YOU LOST?’ onto a piece of fabric, which i then sewed up and stuffer to make a speech bubble cushion. I had the idea to make loads of them, really massive ones and then takes photographs of them hanging about London, or superimpose them into photographs. But i haven’t got round to that yet. *sigh*

...un jour...

Old Ladies and Business Men

I made these dolls for a short 3D illustration project in...February or something. The guidelines of the project were to create a piece of 3D illustration based of research we’d complied from observing London’s beautiful public. I had ideas to make many many different dolls. A tall lanky student or a round mother with identical miniature children for example. But the time constraints of the project restricted me (to ten days). So that was a stretch. I chose three of my favourite envisioned characters.

The first is a business man. He is tall and skinny. He is stone blue, because blue is a colour that blends in; A colour that everyone agrees with. His attire is a clean cut suit (it’s from Marks and Spencer). The business man doesn’t have a face. Therefore he doesn’t have any facial expression. He stands on the tube with glazed non-existent eyes. He is a human piece of tofu: he mixes well with everything but doesn’t really stand out.

The second and third are two little old ladies. The kind that live in deepest rural England (where i come from), and decide to exchange, for a day, the Cotswold stone houses and single carriageway roads for vast London. The kind that come up to London for a coach day trip. They bring packed lunches and go to Covent Garden and have tea.