The times they are a' changin'

Well university is done...All of my work has been marked and returned, my final show has closed and the results are in... a first class degree with honours, not too shabby!

I am now off to tour the East coast of the United States on a lovely old BMW motorcycle for a few weeks! but as the saying goes; 'there is no rest for the wicked' and I have packed a couple of sketchbooks to have a play with as I go, so watch out for new story ideas & characters, as well as a whole bunch of reportage sketching and maybe even an anecdote or two.

To all my fellow BIAD Graduates (and everyone else graduating at the moment!):

Congratulations & good luck!

IDEA BIRMINGHAM @ The Mailbox

http://www.ideabirmingham.co.uk/

Idea Birmingham promotes the wealth of local design talent that has created some of the most iconic design globally over the last 100 years, as well as supporting new creatives taking their first steps in industry.

Birmingham Made Me will be unveiled during first week April with an eye-catching, city-wide poster campaign promoting designs made in Birmingham and the Midlands. Almost 200 sites have been earmarked. I have been selected to exhibit at the inaugural Idea Birmingham Exhibition in the Mailbox, alongside 40 of the best Birmingham's graduating talent across Illustration, Graphic Design, and Photography.


The show in the Mailbox will be exhibiting 15th -22nd June 2012.

Birmingham Made Me showcases world-beating innovations from the Midlands which have produced designs such as the Land Rover Defender, AGA Range cooker, Pashley Clubman bicycle and Brooks England saddles, together with ground-breaking new hybrid supercar concept, the Jaguar C-X75, named in Detroit 2011 as the Most Significant Concept Vehicle, having been recognised as one of the vehicles most likely to shape the future of the automotive industry.

These, and a great deal more, will be on view at Birmingham's first design EXPO in well over 100 years.  The summer EXPO, due to be held at the Mailbox, the premier shopping centre in Birmingham, June 15th-22nd, has been organised by IDEA Birmingham founder members with the support of the Mailbox.

Graduate Exhibition 2012 -

My final grad show - the last shebang at uni and a chance for YOU to READ MY BOOK!. 


I will be showing a few finished works, my complete dummy book, and on the launch night only I will show my portfolio of original work.

I will be exhibiting alongside all of my fellow graduates. I am in the Illustration exhibition at the school of visual communication - basically inside the main doors take the door to your left (past the stairs and the first door on the left. DATES & TIMES: LAUNCH PARTY - Weds 13th June 6pm -8pm, OPEN DAILY - 10am - 6pm Mon 11th - Sat 16th June I will be attending the launch party & SAT 16th 10am -1pm. School of Visual Communication Gosta Green, Birmingham, B4 7DX. General Info: Bursting with creativity and fresh ideas, our Graduate Shows showcase our emerging professionals. Whether you’re looking of new talent or you simply love the arts, indulge in our students' brightest new work. BIAD Graduate Shows 2012 take place across four sites across Birmingham city from Monday 11 to Sunday 17 June 2012. The events are free entry to the public. Please note dates and times vary according to each art and design site. For further details call +44 (0)121 331 5809.

Graduate Award Nomination...exciting times

Well to add to all the panic...I mean excitement of finishing university in a few weeks I have been nominated for the 'Award for the best use of Narrative Illustration' (Supported by AOI, London).


A nice accolade, which comes with an even more exciting prize of a work placement with The Association of Illustrators in London.


Good luck to my fellow Students and nominees Jasmin Hortop (jasminehortop.com) and Anneeka Hussain)...see you on the red carpet!


Also check out the BIAD (Birmingham Institue of Art & Design) Talent pool: We Grow Cherries

One more for the road

One last spread finished before my final uni submission on Monday...scary times!

 Now a busy few days printing, framing and preparing my portfolio for submission.

Here's a few process pics for this one:

MacMillan Prize 2012 Entry

My entry for the Macmillan Prize 2012 was sent off yesterday, so for better or worse it now lies with the judges. I sent in the above four spreads, I wanted them printed on 300gsm CP NOT watercolour Paper however due to a badly organised print room at uni this was not to be....hopefully it will not go against me! Also included was my dummy book, which was printed on watercolour paper, and hand bound using a japanese stab binding technique...Very pleased with that, the texture and weight of the paper made it a real sensual luxurious feeling book, complementing my work nicely.

Lets just hope it all comes back in time for my final uni hand in!

A few process pics below...not a thorough run through as I was a bit pressed for time getting everything ready for Macmillan's, maybe I will put up a more substantial look at my processes soon...

Another colour spread, may need tweaking a little here and there...

Colour work / Finished pages

my first 'finished' page. I still need to overlay the text...but it is essentially finished, as it would appear in the book.....just another 30 odd pages to go! 

I have softened the colours to create a more relaxed and gentle mood, the more intense colours would have been overwhelming, particularly on the spreads with multiple panels. I am pretty happy with this, a little bit of an ode to Van Gogh's Starry Night, for those art history buffs, in terms of composition and the swirlies (a VG technical term!).

Now back to painting, another two of these need to be done by the end of the week to send off to macmillan's. 

Another little colour experiment...and a little bit better.

I tried a smoother surface so I could get more fine detail in the texture. Unfortunately I only had a piece of bristol board to hand, but it did the job...now off to buy some hot pressed paper and get stretching...

Experimenting

Now that I am happy with the story and design I am moving on to colour work, and developing the final spreads. Above is an experiment with water colour on not paper (not sure why the scanner has picked up a blue hue over the eye - Gremlins!). I have tried to soften & stylise it a bit so it is less photographic and a little more child oriented, however the slightly yellow hue of the face makes him look a little sickly...I think I will do a couple more experiments over the next few days.

I have been struggling to find a book binder that will do short run/ single books for my dummy book... Blurb will do them at a reasonable price, and the right size, but you cant customise the endpapers....no good when overall design is important. Lulu don't do anything near the right dimensions, and trawling through various other book binders has proved similarly technical or cost prohibitive...so what to do?

Bind it myself! I have made a maquette using my home printer and a pretty basic stab binding technique (basically leave a tab on one side, and bind by poking holes through & sewing the pages together - googlay for plenty of tutorials). I am quite pleased with the results, and the larger format of this book works much better (approx 21 x 25cm inc bindings- see pen for scale). I am now planning on getting the pages printed on some nice paper and hand binding a few copies for the MacMillan Prize and to send out to some publishers & agents.

Dummy Book Version 2.0 & The London Book Fair

A couple of spreads from my rewrite and new business card designs for promoting the book down at the London Book Fair next week. I am hoping to meet some publishers, agents and other Children's book practitioners, gonna be a bit scary walking into a big room full of industry pro's in the big smoke all alone...time to nut up or shut up!

Note I have changed the title of the book, the original 'Timekeeper' title came from the original seed of an idea for the book when I was looking at stars and time, however I found as the book developed this element of the story became less important & overt. The new title is more reflective of the characters role/background and helps set the scene for the story... it is a little less assuming, and I like the juxtaposition of the luxurious, decorative style of the cover with the unassuming nature of the title.

A few new/ reworked  spreads for the rewrite. I am refocussing the story more around the main character and making a few tweaks to the design to improve overall legibility. I still need to write the text to accompany the new spreads... but that can wait until all the drawings are complete. I am aiming to have the new dummy book finished by the end of the week in preparation for the London Book Fair (16th-18th April).

Do it again Dummy! - it's hard to be a perfectionist.

Well having 'completed' my dummy book and done few critique sessions I have decided to undertake a bit a of a rewrite.

The process of making a picture book is very much like creating a dot to dot puzzle; you need to get just the right number of dots in the right pages so the overall image makes sense... the problem is it is all to easy to skip dots when you already know what the picture is supposed to be.

When choosing what each spread should contain I found I was focused far too much on trying to explain the plot, whereas a great deal of my story should be focussed around the main character. The end result was the events made sense but it was difficult to empathise or even like the main character so you didn't really buy into the whole thing.

So I have taken out a few pages, and rejiggered a few more...which gives me a whole bunch more work to do, but I think it will vastly improve the book overall. ( This is the new plan, blank pages are completely new pages, green post-it notes are major edits, yellow post-its are minor edits)

The moral of the story - get ideas into book format as soon as possible! flat plans are just not the same!

The Timekeeper: Progress update

After several (3-4 I think) long and stressful weeks work, I have now completed a dummy book for 'The Timekeeper'. Below are a few more spreads (but not many as I do not want to give the whole story away). I have a rough printed copy, which is slightly smaller than my originally intended size for the book, however I quite like it! It is a bit squiffy in places, a home printer and binding with a single fold is not ideal - a little more research into book binding techniques is needed before I produce the book for Macmillans.

I have sent a copy to a writer/ editor friend of mine who will hopefully help me tighten up the text a little - I am definitely better with pictures! So again I will wait for his feedback before making my final book.

The next step is to develop several pages to finished quality. I am aiming to complete a minimum of 4 spreads, as I am aiming to enter this book for the Macmillan Prize 2012 (a competition run by Pan Macmillan to encourage new illustrators into the children's book industry). I have included below a completed cover design, which could count towards my 4 spreads, however I would ideally like to enter pages from the main narrative, rather than the ancillaries - cover, end papers, etc. 

I have included a spread with text to offer a bit of a flavour of how the final book will read...as you can see definitely a bit of Dr Seuss influence in there! It has been a very long time since I wrote any poetry...maybe in my angsty teen years, but it was great fun!

The Timekeeper: Dummy Book Progress

I am currently developing a dummy book for my current project, with a working title of 'The Timekeeper'. Here are the first few rough pencil pages, plus one colour experiment. The final 32 page book will be full colour, produced using mixed media (my influences at the moment include Shaun Tan & Simon Bartram). I will also be writing the accompanying text with possibly a little influence from Dr Seuss & Edgar Alan Poe.

The story begins with an astronaut named Alan Shepard, commanding the second successful manned mission to the moon, Apollo 14. Little did NASA know he had smuggled 3 golf balls and the head of a six iron (making the handle from on board equipment). Shepard got one clean shot which he claimed went 'miles and miles and miles...'. Even an astronaut could not have imagined the journey that little golf ball had in store.

In a galaxy far far away an old man, who has been living in space since the dawn of time, is happily going about his business of building the universe one (clockwork) star at a time...Until one day a mysterious little orb, all covered in dimples, pops out of a wormhole and shatters his peaceful existence.

What happens next? well you will just have to stay tuned!

I read about Alan Shepard's moon golfing exploits many years ago, and have always been amused by the idea of it being our first contact with an alien species. I finally got the idea for this story while watching Professor Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Universe series on the BBC. The idea that time as relative and only existing with the existence of the universe itself inspired the basis of Timekeeper character. The craftsman aspect is possibly down to my dad (who modelled for over 700 photos during the early development of the book) who is a skilled painter (and previously a carpenter). I also wanted to play around with mythological & religious ideas of a creator, or perhaps father time. All in all this book is the convergence of many loosely related items of fact and fiction weaved together.

I feel it is important to challenge children, and their parents! Making them to question the world around them helps create a curious mind...which in my opinion is the greatest gift you can bestow upon a child.

I hope to have a complete dummy book and a minimum of 4 finished spreads for the MacMillan Prize 2012 for children's book illustration, which closes on Tuesday 8th May 2012

Character Designs & Experimental Space

Final options for the main character.  I think I am going to go for the last one, he has just the right mix of friendly grandad & quirky watchmaker that  I have been looking for.....finally! These were done with water colours and pens.

I am experimenting with different media and techniques to get a nice nebula & general space effect. The first image is water colour. The second image is two panels done with acrylic, one with the nebula colour underpainted before the black is laid down, the other with the nebula painted on top. I prefer the intensity of colours in the acrylics, but I prefer the effect of the watercolour....hmmmm....more experimenting I guess.

Almost ready to start on my first finished spread!