Catch up

So, a lot has happened since I last posted, seeing as that was a very long time ago, we have a lot to catch up on, are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I'll begin.

The last you heard from me I had just handed in the Okido project, next I chose to do the Brand You project with Chris and Alex from Company London the reason I chose it was because I didn't have much experience of branding and wanted to push myself to do something different that I wasn't comfortable with, and boy did this project take me waaaaaaaaay out of my comfort zone.

The brief was to brand yourself which although it's a really interesting concept and not something that I'd thought about so much before, was a project that I really struggled with, being something of an under-sharer who hates talking about herself, this was a big challenge.

It took a long time to come up with a concept, but whilst I was doing my research I started looking into the meanings of my names, it turns out that Carla means 'Manly' or is a female version of Charles. So I took this and decided to call myself Charles. I then started to think about constructing a personality that people would have to try and find out who Charles is, so I made a campaign called "Who is Charles?". Where I designed a series of posters, postcards and business cards using other people or things to give and idea of the personality of Charles, here's what I came up with.


The poster campaign would have 2 waves, the first would be posters with the question "Who is Charles?" obscuring the faces of what it is and then the next wave would have the faces revealed.

Simultaneously postcards would be distributed with stickers with "Who is Charles" written on them stuck over the face or object that is the clue, so you can peel off the sticker to reveal it. On the otherside it has an explanation of why Charles likes or feels like he is similar to this thing, it would also serve as a data capture device with the option of filling it out to reveal what or who you are.

The Debbie Harry one is my favourite.

Then finally the business card, this would also have a sticker over the card to reveal the face behind:

I also experimented with animated gifs that I was going to use for the website, which were inspired by Terry Gilliams animations for Monty Python, I'm going to try to work on these more later as I really liked them and want to use them.

John Stezaker

Last weekend I went to see the John Stezaker exhibition at the Whitechapel

I really loved his photographic collages and how he rearranged the composition of old photographs to give them new meaning and to make you look at them differently.

My favourites were the postcard and portrait combinations:

Test Mag

TEST is an online fashion magazine that I think is really interesting, I love the films they produce, usually by photographers rather than filmmakers. Sandra Freij is one of my favourite fashion photographers and I love the film that she has done for them.

Some stills:

Magic Eye: Dorian Gourg

These are incredible:

From Nowness:

"Paris-based graphic designer Dorian Gourg conflates geographical references and mystical forms to produce mesmerizing images for his series ADAHY. Inspired by trips to New York and South America, he repurposes his own photographs, shot with silver film, into collage: after digitally scanning the images along with grainy paper textures, Gourg then overlays the textures on the image to achieve kaleidoscopic results. In the final stages of the process, he views the work in a convex mirror, flipping his own perspective to identify areas ripe for further embellishment".

 

 

Okido project handed in.

Last week was the hand in for the Okido project, I've been doing a childrens book which was way more work than I anticipated but I really enjoyed the project so it was worth it. It still needs a lot of work for it to be properly finished so I'm only going to show you the front cover until it's done.

OKIDO workshop

The first class of the new term was pretty exciting, I've been looking forward to this workshop all holidays.
The workshop is taught by Rachel Ortas who started the childrens magazine Okido she is an amazing illustrator and her class was really enjoyable and interesting.

 

We were asked to create a character choosing their habitat as a starting point then using red and blue card only cut out a page to put in a concertina book with everyone else's characters. I choose the city and an urban fox cub called Ailsa who uses her tail to take away childrens nightmares and turn them into stars.

My original sketch

My cut out card piece

Here are some that the rest of the class produced:

 

This is just a starting point to get us thinking about how to create characters. For Friday we have to either develop these characters more or have ideas for a new one to work on for the project so it should be interesting to see what people come up with.

Happy New Year!

Well hello there,
So, College has started again after the Christmas holidays, whilst I was off I have mainly been:

Painting my flat:

My Bathroom is now a lovely green

Getting all Christmassy:

A friend remarked that my tree was "More of a constellation than a tree"

Getting all Unchristmassy:

Seeing my family:

With a substantial amount of working, eating, drinking and sleeping in between.



I don't believe in New Years resolutions but if I did it would be to be more conscientious of updating this blog, so hopefully that won't go the way of most resolutions and fail by the end of January,

Happy New Year!