Animal Emotions – Tiger

These are the second round of characters I had to make for my college project. I chose the tiger because it’s one of my favourite animals and also I thought it would be something I would enjoy illustrating. I think people who can draw can manage things like cats or dogs quite easily because they’ve probably been drawing them in fridge pictures since they were little. Hence my choosing a tiger! So above we have the ferocious tiger, silly tiger, sick tiger and wise tiger. I think the poor green sick tiger is my favourite one of he four. I feel sorry for a piece of paper!

I drew the stripes on rather than use paper. Mostly to save time and effort. But also because regular black paper is hard to come by. It’s usually sugar paper or card and all that would stand out to much against the thinner coloured paper I’d been using elsewhere. So out came the trusty black permanent marker.

If you have seen the previous ostrich post you’ll know I kept to pretty much the same child-aimed colour scheme and layout. In the outer corners we have tiger stripes to denote the animal inside. My little sisters had great fun playing with the ‘fortune’ tellers so I’ll take it as a successful outcome!

Animal Emotions – Ostrich

These images are from a college project entitled Animal Emotions. The brief entailed taking a trip to the zoo to photograph and observe animals. When our research was collected we were then informed that we would be illustrating three of these animals and projecting four different human emotions onto them. The first animal I chose was an ostrich as I had a lot of material to work from in my notebook.

I decided to use paper collage to animate the animals. Every now and then I tried to get away from working on the computer in college. So these are the final four images I chose. I handmade every detail with colored paper, glue and a scalpel. I touched up some of the images with Photoshop to get rid of things like glue stains and tears in the paper.

The next part of the brief was to incorporate the animals illustration into some other sort of media. So some people made posters, flashcards and books. I chose a childs fortune teller. The style I had portrayed my animals was quite child like and tangible so I wanted to make a physical moveable piece that a child would like to play with.

The pattern on the outer corners was taken from the scalloped pattern on the ostriches body. A curvy rounded font was selected to make it look playful and child friendly. So the aim was that any child could print this off and fold it up themselves to play a game with it. Some people might remember making these with copybook paper in school.

Smoke & Mirrors

This was a typographic project I completed during college. Our tutor was inspired by Marian Bantjes, a Canadian typographer, in creating the brief. The aim was to create a highly decorative piece of typography that we could make up off the top of our heads. I had no idea what I was drawing or writing as I began. Typically, when I am doodling, I end up writing my name or an initial, as I think many designers or doodlers would do. So naturally enough, the letter “s” was the first thing to appear.

Because of the the swirling and looping nature of what I had just drawn, I was reminded of smoke. And so, my phrase became “Smoke & Mirrors”. I choose the ampersand because it complimented what I was already drawing. I drew the phrase and painted it so as to make it clearer before I brought it onto my computer so I could tidy and adjust it.

So I scanned my image and adjusted it in Adobe Illustrator. I created a template out of my phrase and added brush effects behind it to play up the smokey aspect of the lettering. I layered the effects to build them like a cloud behind the words. The ‘aim’ for the typographic piece was that it would be wall art or a mural of some sort. Then we had to design a promotional materials for the hypothetical wall art. I decided my image would be wall art ‘hung’ outside The Academy as part of a promotion for a new club night and my print materials consisted of a poster as seen above and a flyer.

I like how the words are less decipherable than the original drawing. It brings the air of mystery back to the phrase “Smoke & Mirrors”. In the poster, I reflected the image under the information to link back to the mirror facet of the design.

Freshly Made Font

This is a college piece where the brief called to make a handmade alphabet. The brief was loosely inspired my Stefan Sagmeister’s project Thing I Have Learned In My Life So Far. Although we didn’t have to make a life lesson into a typographical piece of art, we did have to explore the alphabet using lots of materials to try and create an interesting and unusual typeface. I remember playing around with paper clips and the contents of my make up bag (as you do) at first in order to make some letters when I was in the brainstorming phase.

So as you can see, I was blatantly starving in college the day I decided what my typeface was going to be made of!

So each letter in the alphabet is a different layer in a sandwich or a different stage in its preparation. For example you have mayo > lettuce > chicken > cut sandwich, making up the letters A, B, C and D respectively. Or mustard > ham > cheese > cut sandwich, making up E, F, G and H respectively. I used white and brown bread plus a variety of fillings like chocolate spread, sausage, ketchup, egg mayonnaise, onion, peanut butter and jam.

The class took over the student common room and turned it into a little photography studio to photograph our projects. Other students chose material such as elastic bands, ribbons, pins and skittles to make their typefaces. Needless to say I had the place destroyed with sauce, crumbs and all the rest whilst individually photographing all 52 parts of my messy alphabet! And I went through a buttload of white paper, but, if I wanted to make it that easy I wouldn’t have chosen sambos.

You hungry?