How fossils are formed

My final gif animation for How fossils are formed.

The original one (5mb in size), then a lower quality one that's below 1mb with reduced colours.

The Walking Dead tee

I printed a couple of t-shirts the other day with a drawing of Michonne from The Walking Dead.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry 2.0

A new bookcover for this book, following my varied Saul Bass inspired mock ups on illustrator I decided to make one out of paper.

However people have frequently asked me what the red is, which makes me think I should start over.

Spoiler warning? Highlight below to read;
The cover is meant to be representative of the girl that Harold meets who works in the garage. She notably wears a red tabard, an apron-like garment. This character is the catalyst of the story in that she gives Harold the idea of his pilgrimage, hence the word 'Pilgrimage' being inside a speech bubble.

Inverted

Same again but with inverted colours and edits on the arrow showing the force of gravity.

Hand drawn test

How does gravity work.
Was meant to delete/repeat that arrow.

My website

I've finished making my website and it's hosted and everything - huzzah!

To see it, click on the image below.

Gif-ing!

How fossils are formed
Hopefully this gif explains it but in case it's not clear...

When an animal dies, its skeleton settles on the ground/sea floor and is buried by sediment.

The sediment begins to thicken and gradually turns to stone.

Over time the groundwater dissolves the skeleton and a mould of the skeleton is formed.

Minerals crystallise inside this mould and a cast of the skeleton is formed.

Eventually this fossil is exposed on the Earth's surface either from natural erosions or from excavations.

Some Saul Bass

Not happy with my book cover for 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' so I've put down some ideas quickly, inspired by Saul Bass's style. These are more glorified thumbnails rather than final products. For the time being.

I began by drawing vectors from some of my development work, illustrations of the character. With these I played around with them on illustrator with various text, colours and compositions, adding new images to use as you can see below.

These last two are references to a character in the book who is the catalyst of Harold's pilgrimage, she gives him the idea that having faith, a belief in something can be more powerful force than more logical/scientific approaches. Not a religious belief, just a personal one. So I thought with the use of her red tabard and a speech bubble under the word 'pilgrimage' was a clever approach to illustrating this.

I also found this funny tumblr which scrutinizes many Bass inspired works.

http://enoughwithsaulbassalready.tumblr.com/

It makes me feel bad for making these now.

Book covers

My last brief was on book covers, I had to choose a fiction and a non-fiction book from a selection of a few and create covers for them (and an inside illustration for either of them).

I chose 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' by Rachel Joyce and 'Faviken' by Magnus Nilsson.
Both sounded interesting in their own ways.

I'm not happy with this one, at first I felt I was spending too much time on Harold Fry, because I'd been reading the book and gathering more ideas for it, so I decided to concentrate on Favkien for a while. However once I got the idea to make it all out of paper, it began to take a while to put together. Eventually when I was happy with my cover for Faviken, I found I had little time to create a cover I'd be happy with for Harold Fry.
Worse still, I didn't make a final, presentable illustration for it either, so I'm going to revisit this part of the brief to improve on it.

I feel a lot happier with this cover. I had fun making it and I received good feedback on it, most problems were technical or easily changed. I've fixed a few things that I discovered on printing but I've yet to re-edit the original scans so that there's no quality loss (the background was pixelated).

I made a gif

The new brief for illustrators is making gif animations of a list of things, such as 'How gravity works'.
Having never made a gif before, I thought I'd try teach myself with an idea I had straight away.

That'll be the day... pilgrim

We had to make posters for films we picked out of a hat (actually more of a plastic pot). However these posters had to be made from paper and use of lighting, not digitally.

So I ended up with The Searchers, an old western with John Wayne, that guy I've only heard about from Family Guy jokes if I'm honest. Regardless I watched the film and after putting down some ideas I decided a sort of desert scene would work best. With horsemen, in this vast landscape in which they need to search.

My initial idea was this.

However I decided to go bigger and change it slightly because I wanted to project the text and the eyes onto the landscape/sky of the scene.

After cutting out a bigger scene and a stencil of the text and eyes I experimented with light and projecting the film onto the paper scenery. Below are cropped photos and mock-ups of the final poster.

I liked the film projected onto my paper scenery but I felt like it wasn't my work and that none of what I'd done over the 2 weeks showed. So I kept it more true to my original ideas and projected light through my stencil with additional orange filtered lighting.

Here's my final outcome for the poster.

Update

 Poster without eyes

Alternative portrait poster

Year 2 - summer project into design

Year 2 has started!

We looked at making layouts from magazine clippings to match 8 tasks for the first part of our first brief back. We then had to choose 4 of these to apply our summer projects to. Here are mine as of yet, whether I'll change them or not I dunno.

Oops - update!

Me, Amy Cuismano and Jess Julien worked together at the end of our first year to produce a book of a minimum of 20 copies which we had to design, produce and sell in the space of 3 weeks.

That was a good while ago now and I've neglected my blog since, so here's some of the pages I made for the book 'Totally not a Spy Manual'.

Front cover, black holes were cut out to make eye-holes/reveal the mirror page underneath. The original plan was to make a newspaper but printing costs/difficulties came into play and so we downsized to a rough A5 shape for our book.

This page was printed on acetate, with mirror sheet sticker on the left side (reverse). The idea was that you could look through the mirror sheet and through the eye-holes in the cover without people realising because all they'd be able to see is 2 mirrored circles. However it turned out the mirror sheet wasn't see-through on the reverse side. We put it in anyway.

 There's a series of pages I made for the book for spy tips, with some small illustrations to accompany the text.

 This is the center spread I made for the book, a where's wally type image but instead of finding a man in stripes, you have to locate the 4 assassins and a bomb.
(highlight below to reveal hints)

Hints - a1: Roof access 
a2: close behind 
a3: hiding his roots 
a4: lampost 
bomb: mind your feet

Locations - Final outcomes

Week 1 - Train station 

2x A3

 Week 2 - Tullie House

2x A4

 Week 3 - Courtrooms

3x A5

(describing the cells, the courtroom and the power relationship between the cells and judges chair)

 Week 4 - Carlisle Castle

2x A2