Upcoming

There's an exhibition at the House of Illustration from May - September all about rarely seen picture books from Soviet Russia. I love picture books, and I've become very interested in Soviet-era illustration this year, so can't wait to see it.

Although I've never made child-orientated work myself before, it is a direction I'm think about trying to take my work next year, even if just as an experiment.

There's also this masterclass taking place at HOI this summer, that I'm going to try and go to. Although having a long stretch of Summer to just draw and unwind is great in itself, I think a few structured creative endeavours (masterclasses/self-set briefs etc) might help keep the cogs whirring.

PPP tutorial 14/03

These are some of the key questions I need to be asking myself as I move forward with this brief, and start putting together my creative CV, skills audit, personal statement etc:

• Who am I as a creative? What do I think about my work, and where I'm headed with it?
• Where do I want to work? Why do I want to work in that part of the creative industries? How am I going to get there?
• What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses?
• Where am I going to start looking for contacts? How am I going to approach them?

I'm still feeling a bit unsure about this  part of the module, as though I'm not ready to tackle it yet. I genuinely do not feel as though I've evolved enough as a practitioner yet to know what defines me as a creative.  I'm going to try and get a one-to-one talk with either Patrick or John, hopefully that will help clarify a few of the problems that are currently mixing me up. 

Developing a visual identity

Been starting to think a bit about what defines me (visually) as a practitioner, and how I can use this to develop promotional material, business cards, etc. It's quite hard to mentally sift through all the crap that I clutter my sketchbooks/notebooks with, so I've been trying to play with the basic elements of my picture making. 

Colour

When I use colour in my work, I use a very limited colour palette (6 colours + white, to be precise). I only started to feel more confident with colour after I started working like this, as it just eliminated so much of the choice that I find a bit overwhelming. I think I'll probably to incorporate this defining characteristic of my practice in my promo things, but as of yet I'm unsure whether to try and show how many colours I can mix from this palette, or whether just to use the raw 6. Hopefully some more visual thinking and exploration will help me figure this out.


Type

Hand rendered type is really starting to play an integral part in how I see my practice developing, especially as we move forward with 505. When I had my tutorial with Ben he was really enthusiastic about my lettering, so I think I should definitely try to capitalise on this in my promo material. Especially now that I'm sure I would like to work in (in some aspect) in exclusive publishing and with books, I think that being confident with hand-lettering is probably quite a marketable skill.



Pattern + shape

Although I've always been a doodler, there are some patterns and motifs that have cropping up more and more in my work recently, and I'd be interested to see how I could push this forward. Could end up being quite a nice , simple solution to the problem of how to market myself. A few visual motifs that could be applied to a website/business cards/letter head etc? Could create a nice cohesiveness. 

Still not happy about all this. 

Good good pictures: Mehrdad Rashidi

Mehrdad Rashidi is an outsider artist from Iran, and his drawings are some of the most potent I think I've ever seen. It's so joyous, such a celebration of what the drawn line can be. No pretence, no elitism, just pure drawing. Wonderful, human, inspiring. 

Making a conscious effort to look at so many different types of art + creativity has been the best thing I've done to feed my mind in this past year. Outsider art is wild and interesting and real and uplifting and puzzling and maddening and enlightening all at once. Just what pictures should be. Drawing can be anything and for anyone.

Pete Seeger

Watched this amazing documentary about the folk-singer and activist Peter Seeger. Reminded me of what it is to be utterly human. We need more humanity in the world. Human connections and relationship can be a force of such good.

Good good pictures: Milton Avery

MAKES ME WANT TO USE COLOUR this stuff is dreamy 

Good good pictures: Magda Skupinska

I'm not a very shape-based worker, but there's something I find very visually pleasing about this balance. Great colours, too.

sad mag presentation