Some Things

Just a few things that I like that I've found recently, the top image is the cover for the 1956 version of the film, I really love the cover, I watched the film at the weekend, it was good but not as exciting as I'd hoped, I just love all of the accents of the rich English men and their clothes. I also found out that there were no balloons mentioned in the actual book which is interesting because of how often it is used in association with the book. People should refer to books not films!

The second image is by Walter Crane, I found it while researching some things by him for my journal and I just think that it's lovely.

The third image is an illustration by Amy Brown (there's a link to her blog under my photo) I picked this one because of the cats but I've been a fan of her work for a while, I just love how everything she does is fun and carefree.

The bottom two images are some cards that I found in the sale section of Paperchase, I'm not really sure what it was that I liked about them so much but they were all 20p..maybe that was what caught my eye..

Some Labels

I've not posted for a little while so I need to get back into that. Today I pretty much finished my journal and I hate it because it looks like a school project so that's not great BUT I've been finishing off some Homebase tag experimentation which I'm quite pleased with. I took some photos of the samples that I stuck into my book but they're not very good quality because I had to use my phone.. I like the bottom one best, all of the others seem a bit too big considering the size of the packets but the bottom one has 2 smaller tags attached together, I'm still not sure about the type because I used my typewriter and I think that might be a bit overdone but it's the only way I could print directly onto the tag. I don't really want to do too much more for this project because I don't have time before the hand-in and I have a lot of work anyway. My new portfolio arrived today and it made my eyes go funny but it's not plastic!

Shaking a leg..and a seed packet.

The last couple of days I've really been trying to develop my seed packet designs, I've been using InDesign just to try and get through a lot of designs quickly. I'm pretty happy with the results so far but I've not really added anything new to them yet. I still need to add text, barcodes and instructions etc. which is going to be a challenge. I've also decided that I want to try and make a box as I was inspired by the packaging on the green tea that I bought yesterday, I really liked the texture of the box and the typography. A lot to do and I still haven't worked out how to print on thinner paper!

A Few Things

I found the faces above carved into a tree in Chorlton park, I just think they're lovely.





I've been looking at Jenny Bowers work this week, I've had her website saved on my bookmarks for a while. She does stuff for the Guardian, BBC etc. I really like the simple shapes she uses but how busy she makes her work with the colours and lines. The combination of detail with loose colour has always appealed to me.



I also wanted to post the image above, this is the cover of a record that I bought on Friday in a charity shop in Chorlton. I was just browsing and this image really caught my eye because it is so beautiful. The vinyl is A Midsummer Nights Dream by Mendelssohn - I found out that he wrote the wedding march and it was part of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I've not been able to find out who made the image though.

Wow.

I don't really think this is classed as inspiration but I just love it.

Play Time with Book Covers

So to get away from the horror of the journal I've started playing around with my book covers, I can't decide how I feel about them though and I'm concerned about the possibility of major pixel problems when I print them out. I've started using the sepia tool on my photos to see how that looks. I still need to try out some other types but I don't know where to start, 4 books is a lot of type!

Camera = oh dear

This weekend I started my brief for Ian Anderson (it was sent off on monday afternoon) I managed to do the whole thing in 2 days. The brief was to create something that Ian would want to keep forever, my original idea was to make a ticket to the afterlife (then he would have to keep it) however I didn't think there was a way to pull it off in 2 days that would have looked striking enough. I went to the Whitworth Art Gallery on Sunday for some inspiration and did a few more pages similar to the ones in my Homebase book. I decided to do more of these types of paintings and drawings and make miniatures of them. I stored them all in a matchbox (the picture shows this). I think the piece was pretty good in the end, I labelled it as a portable/minature museum. I tried to photograph it for my portfolio and it went really wrong, all of the images came out blurry and I only realised after I'd sent it off so I'll have to try and edit the images to make them a bit clearer. I still have all the scans though (a few of them are above) I wanted the images to feel quite natural history and very organic.