Ralph Steadman

Ive recently been reading 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' by Hunter S Thompson, which is illustrated by Ralph Steadman. I didn't think that I liked the style of illustration, but the more I read of the book, the more appropriate they become. His use of energetic line, ink splatters, his mix of free hand and geometric shapes give the illustrations a sense of madness, which is definitely appropriate for the story....

Narrative.....in a sewer...

So, another brief that i recently completed was to create a narrative sequence based on or inspired by a given photograph. The photograph I received was of a sewer/tunnel, so I used it to set the tone and location of my narrative.

I definitely found it quite a challenge to come up with a narrative that I thought would be either interesting or funny or had some sort of story to follow and it not be solely about the visuals. So after a little bit of research I thought it would be interesting to go along the lines of some of the myths and legends that have cropped up about sewers and underground tunnels. One of the most famous myths was about alligators living in the New York sewer system, so I came up with the idea of someone hunting this mythical creature, which I thought would make an interesting narrative to follow through, and also give the opportunity for a conclusion at the end, as I definitely wanted it to be a mix of visual and content. 

In terms of working method, this was the first time I had created imagery almost entirely digitally, so it was definitely an experiment! From my final images, I can see a lot of things I would like to improve upon, and at the top of the list is definitely my people drawing skills. I struggle with drawing people and getting them to look "right" (whatever that means!). I think with more time I would have been able to come up with a figure that fit more coherently with the rest of the images. 

Anyway, I've posted them below for you to take a butchers at....

(give 'em a click to make them massive like)

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Make a Product...

So, I've been busy the past couple of weeks working on a couple of different projects, one was a product design brief and the other a narrative brief. Product first then eh....

With only 4 weeks to come up and make a finished product, I made a decision early on to carry on from my summer project, along the lines of animals. Trying to bring a bit of logic into play, I thought that an appropriate product to apply the idea to would be baby/children's clothes, but rather than go in the cutesy/fluffy direction that most babies clothes go, I wanted to create a relatively high-end look (alas I am a poor student!) to the clothes by using some slightly more graphic designs, and employing a neutral and more natural colour scheme to both the clothes and the packaging.

I've posted some photos below of both the baby grows and the packaging I came up with. The animal designs developed and became slightly more sophisticated than what I had done over the summer, and stenciling them by hand meant I could play with different tones of black and grey. I also found the packaging really exciting to look at, and found some inspiration from the packaging website http://www.thedieline.com/ , check it out if you can..and my photos below!

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