Paris, Le Quatrième

As you can see, the last day in Paris was dominated by the most famous landmark in the world, the Eiffel Tower. The first stop was Place du Trocadéro for an elevated view of the tower. Then I walked towards the tower and over the Seine. The queues are long to go up the tower itself so as you can see by the third picture, it was dark by the time I came down.

The second photograph is a view from the very top of the tower to the gardens below.

The last photograph is of the very last evening in Paris. It was topped off with a carafe of wine on the heated terrace of a local restaurant in Montmartre whilst nibbling on meringue from the patisserie around the corner. I didn’t expect wine and meringue to go so well together!

Sunny Day in Blackrock

These photos were taken on a trip out to Blackrock, a seaside town in Dublin. The photos were taken from the footbridge of the local train station. The first picture shows a disused bathing area. At least I hope it’s disused, it’s a bit on the run down side after all. The view of if of Howth peninsula in the background.

The second picture shows the diving tower which has lost it’s boards over the years. Even though it’s full of graffiti and rust, I still think it has a lot of charm. The bathing area has been there since the 1800s and the concrete ‘pool’ was built in 1887, more on that here. So it is a shame that it looks like this now but at least we still have these reminders of bygone eras. There are a few spots like this still around Dublin that I’d love to be able to get around and photograph.

The graffiti may not bother me too much, it’s the litter that gets me. I don’t care about drinking outside, but take you crap with you!

Going Nuts with Photoshop Many Moons Ago

This was a second year of college project. That feels like a million years ago now! This image was part of a booklet but the rest of it is pretty horrendous to me. I can’t bare to embarrass myself by putting the rest of it up but I actually really liked the colours in this one and I’m also mad for symmetry, so up it goes!

It’s not really like any of my other work. I wouldn’t often heavily work in Photoshop, especially at the time. A few tweaks on things here an there sure. But I guess I just wanted to try do a project using it fully. So it’s a bit filter-laden there. I think everyone needs to do things like this to figure out Photoshop though.

Basically it was part of a concept that every memory has a song for a small booklet. So I made five images to illustrate that point and I did it through photo collage. So I combined photos I had taken and things related to photos like frames, negatives, cameras with things related to music like CDs, tapes, vinyl, gig tickets, MP3 players, headphones etc.

From Paris, With Sweeties

This was a little gift that I was brought back from Paris. I had to take a picture of them before I ate them because they were so cute and pretty. It’s a shame to eat things like this sometimes. Like those arty cupcakes, you can see the effort that went in and then your shoving it in your gob and dusting the crumbs off your lap five minutes later. Well that’s what they’re for I guess!

But anyhoo, these were little marzipans dipped in dark chocolate and decorated with icing flowers on top. I don’t even like marzipan! It’s gross! But these were lovely, had to put the photo up.

Thank you to the boy that bought them :)

 

Animal Emotions – Activity Pack Cover

Apologies for the crappy images. For some reason, I never took any photos of it college with the proper set up so this is a quick bedroom floor job I’m afraid. Buy anyway, this is the outside cover of my childrens activity pack that contains all the activity sheets I designed inside. The sheets on the inside were printed on matte paper as this is easier for children to draw, write or colour on. The pack cover was printed on a thick high gloss so it was more sturdy and appropriate as a cover.

This is the reverse of the outside cover. It simply show the contents of the pack and a ‘barcode’ to show how it would look if it was an actual product.

The circular flap on the edge of the activity pack layout above and below show where the pack folds to hold the sheets themselves .I decided to add another layer to the activity aspect by having two puzzle type questions about the picture of the tiger on the inside cover below.

You can see these activity sheet inserts for the pack above by clicking here and here. They include a fortune teller making activity, colouring in, puzzles and facts.

Animal Emotions – Zebra

My third and final animal that I chose to illustrate was a zebra. In hindsight, I’m not sure it was the wisest selection because it’s not as colourful as the other animals I made. But ah well! That’s nature! Can’t go raggin’ on zebras now. And I guess I did make up the colours of the ostrich too. Hmmm. Scratch all of that. The zebra stays. Probably the most famous animal of the alphabet. See – it keeps with the kids theme as well haha.

So above we have a shocked zebra, a sleepy zebra, an in love zebra and a weird zebra. Instead of using a more familiar type of stripe, I collected photos of patterns in my room. I took a photo of a houndstooth patterned jumper I had and printed off a few images. I could then use that as a paper layer in my zebra collages. This was a good idea before I even knew it, because the characters were made before they were put into a fortune teller format. If I had gone with more traditional stripes, it would be too hard to distinguish between the tiger teller and the zebra teller. So luckily I had a new pattern.

As you can see, the pattern in the outer corners gives the zebra character his own separate identity. Unfortunately, I have no photos of the zebra ‘fortune’ teller showing the inner part, but I do have some shots of the outside and how you use them. This is for anyone who has never seen one of these doodahs in action!

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.