End of an Era

This is my 50th and last post on this blog. My website is currently down - not sure why, something to do with the server I think. And after freelancing all summer I've produced a large body of commercial work (somehow managed to pay for rent, food, bills all summer from it). I'm now back into my third year at College.

For all those reasons I'm not going to update this blog anymore, I've taken all my other blogs offline, although this one will stay online for now, but basically I am going to recreate my entire online presence. This blog and my website will be replaced and both will only be viewable from one URL, (and be much much better with all my new work).

Commercial projects I'm currently working on:
My Dance The Skull - identity and website.
La Shark (and their monthly clubnight) - identities and websites for both
Bonbon Balm - identity and packaging for lip balm company.
Talvihorros - ongoing identity, website and album covers.

College Projects:
Online 35mm Slide Museum
Dissertation on the social/historical context of slide photography.

Expect to see all this work on the new website - I'm aiming to get it all online before Christmas.

So long for now, check www.jordanchatwin.co.uk for updates.

Lesser Panda

I sent off the artwork for Lesser Panda's demo to be printed today. I ended up recreating their identity for this release - new logo mark and logo type. The front shows off the logo and you can see the logotype on the back cover and onbody CD.

I've got to redesign their myspace page with the new identity as well, which if you listen to, you may understand where I'm coming from with the logo and dark space/sky visuals. Their sound is very 70s/80s and has a lot in common with old science fiction soundtracks - dark haunting synths etc. So the logo is partly inspired by 80s graphics and computer games, and the background textures are manipulated photos from space (courtesy of NASA).





Two projects down, three to go.

FORS

Here's the identity for FORS, an exhibition about 'rethinking the altermodern'. For those who don't know, Altermodern was a recent exhibition at Tate Britain where curator Nicholas Bourriard labels the current globalized state of the world as being 'altermodern' (post post-modernism). Lots of people, although appreciating the work in the exhibition, thought his theory was a load of rubbish. Hence Chelsea student, Samantha Cotton, curates FORS in reaction to it.

The Altermodern logo by M/M Paris

Below are the flyer, invitation and posters designs. I scanned in the multi-type based altermodern logo and cut it up into blocks, like those of a sliding puzzle game. I then reshuffled them to mimick the look and act of said sliding puzzle. The result is an incoherant mismatch (or, as with the invitations, coherent letterforms) of the original altermodern logo - a direct visual representation of 'rethinking the altermodern'.

The logo is derived from the same concept, using blocks/pixels to give the impression of sliding puzzle/blocks locking and unlocking together. This block grid I've used is also in contrast (or opposite to) to the signature fluid/boroque style of M/M.

Flyer Front

Flyer Back

Invitation Front

Invitation Back

Poster (I'm thinking of redesigning this, the blocks are too big).


Although I'm happy with the concept, I am slightly dissatisfied with the execution. More than anything they look unfinished, there lacks a certain finesse, due in part to the conflicting nature of the textured paper from the altermodern logo and the clean blank digital surface of the background (something my tutor, Peter, pointed out). He then continued to point out a million other things that weren't right and completely ripped the designs and logo to shreds, which was deflating to say the least, but largely he was right with his criticism. I won't go into what he said, but he did suggest making the letters F O R S out of the blocks (so credit to him there for the front of the invitations).

Current Projects

Our second year External Group Project is finally over. After a ridiculous amount of time, effort, and money, all of our work has now been destroyed. Woo. Photos of the exhibition to come.

The fun doesn't stop there though, currently I'm working on 5 projects outside of college which, thankfully, I can use for my 'personal project' and be assessed on at the end of term (still have presentations and third year proposals to do though). Those projects include:

Identity for Event Projection (audio and visual equipment hire company)
Identity for Fors (exhibition coming up at The Rag Factory, off brick lane)
Album artwork for Lesser Panda's new demo
Album artwork for Talvihorros' Debut album Some Ambulance (Benbecula Records)
Album Artwork for The Frantic's album High Public Sweat (collaboration with Olly Chapman).

After keeping a blog for the Penguin Design Award, I've learnt it's the best way for me to keep a sketchbook. Being the obsessive compulsive (or just anal) idiot that I am, I get too caught up with making sketchbooks look good and neat as if they were something more than a sketchbook. I spend all my time making all the pictures at right angles and lining everything up perfectly... which defeats the point of sketchbook obviously. So anyway, with a blog I can spend an hour or two customising the layout and then I don't have to worry about it again, instead focusing on my research and ideas.

This is a blessing in disguise as it means, when I'm working for a client, they can (if I let them) be constantly up to date with my working progress and give me feedback as and when they wish.

Score.

Not sure if I should make them public, but whatever. Here are the blogs I've set up for the three album covers:

Talvihorros - Some Ambulance

Lesser Panda - Demo

The Frantic - High Public Sweat

Penguin Shortlist

My final submission for the Penguin Design Award.
You can see more about my process and concepts behind the imagery here.



I received an email from Penguin the other day saying I've been shortlisted which is brilliant. Last year 21 people were shortlisted, with 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize plus two commendations. I won't hear if I've reached into the top 5 until mid June, so fingers crossed!

It's Oh So Quiet

My blog is jealous because I'm spending more time with it's sister - First Prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. This blog contains all of my research for the Penguin Design Award, the deadline of which is next Friday, so I've been spending most of my time lately on that. The submission must include a sketchbook of ideas/research, an A3 board demonstrating thought processes, final book jacket design mounted onto A3 and a short piece of text explaining the concept.

No pressure then. Here are some designs I've made thus far - I'm still a long way off from reaching my final concept, and quickly running out of time.





Something else I've been working on is designing the identity for my sister's boyfriend's company - Event Projection. They have a variety of sound, light and projectional equipment for hire and have asked me to redesign the logo, website, business card and every other aspect of the company's visual identity. It's very difficult. Here are some early designs of the logo:




Also, what do I use my blog for now that I have a website?

Website

I now have a website! Which is why I haven't been updating this blog for a while, I've been making posters, organising an exhibition and making myself a website. Busy busy bumble bee.

Check it out:

www.jordanchatwin.co.uk

I'm also in the Sunday Times Style today. Go get a copy!

Competitions

At the moment we have to enter a competition and we've been given a short list of competitions to enter. Being as indecisive as I am I've chosen to do 3 of them, which is an impossible task but I'm going to try anyway. The first one is the Penguin Book Awards, to design a book cover The Secret History by Donna Tartt. The other two are both apart of the D&AD awards, one an animation competition and the other a typographic book series competition.

It's okay, because only one of them will I enter a strong piece of work, (Penguin Book Award) the other two competitions are possibly beyond my level of skill and I just see them as a good chance to learn something about subjects I'm interested in but don't know much about.

Anyway, I've set up a research blog for each competition:

Penguin: http://firstprizecadillac.blogspot.com/
Animation: http://secondprizesteakknives.blogspot.com/
Typography: http://thirdprizefired.blogspot.com/

American Concept Cars

Beautiful. Spotted on a french blog: http://viacomit.free.fr

WAFFL-

Made this short film piece for the 'Fact' project at school, which required us to make a piece of work based on a factual theory, concept or idea. I chose hyperreality (although not strictly a factual idea) and ended up straying slightly and making this short film about Disney World and consumerism.

This is the first time I've used final cut pro, so I focused more on the editing and trying to create a smooth, entertaining piece of film than on conveying a certain message or idea. It turns out to be a somewhat anti capitalist / anti Disney film, which wasn't originally intended, however that's how the piece evolved as I put it together. All of the footage is from various home videos, TV commercials and gameshow footage filmed from YouTube with a mini DV camera, which probably infringes several copyright laws but it's all been reappropriated and this in itself feeds back into the idea of hyper reality. None of the music was edited apart from cutting 3 different pieces together, I edited the videos to match the music. Anyway, enjoy...





Music Credits:
Magical Romantic Freestyle by World's End Girlfriend
Ram - Zoviet France
At the Heart of It All (remix) by Aphex Twin

Eeeee Eee Eeee Video

Here's my video for the 'Fiction' project. Was trying to get across the postmodern, disjointed stream of consciousness that runs throughout 'Eeeee Eee Eeee'. I used iMovie and had to edit it in a day, so didn't finish it - I plan to remake it once I've got some free time and learnt how to use Final Cut Pro.

Song is 'Enjoy your worries, you may never have them again' by The Books.

Rat Show Posters

Forgot to add the posters and price sheet I designed for the Rat Show, here they are:

The Rat Show

My friends from my course and I are having a little exhibition in Rat Records, a record shop on Camberwell New Road, near the green. Everyone pulled together and produced some really good work. You can see some photos of the private view on Peter's blog, (be sure to check out his work).

On another note, we've also been asked by Camberwell Arts to paint a mural in a playground in Camberwell. It's on the Samuel Lewis Estate behind the bus garage on Camberwell New Road. I don't have any pictures but it's worth mentioning, we've been working on it for a while now. Pictures to follow once it's finished.

Anyway, back to The Rat show. I put in a few old pieces of work (the ones from the Carnaby Street exhibition) and also made some new ones, two of which were made at about 5am the night before on the floor of my sister's living room, tragic I know. Here's the work I showed excluding the Carnaby pieces:

Sadie Melrose - This is also an old piece, from my Foundation course.


Boy

Detail of Boy


Tamla Cowboy


Kate Moss - I hate this... It was originally A4 in size (it's now A5), I was working on it last Christmas drawing from a photo shoot of her in ID magazine. Can't remember why I chose to draw the image as it's not something I would normally go for. Partly Christmas boredom perhaps. I think it was more a test than anything else as I think it's very hard to capture recognisable people, especially models and physically 'perfect' people than it is to capture anyone else as just a slight mistake completely changes the way they look. I had a lot of criticism from my friends, partly because of the subject, but also because it was a dull, lifeless drawing. So in an effort to make it more interesting I cut away her hair and replaced it with yellow paper. Mistake I think. I can think of a million other ways to make it more interesting now, and actually in retrospect I think it would've been better as a lifeless study of Kate Moss. But alas it's too late. Nevermind.

C'est la vie.

Homeless

So I'm currently homeless and staying in my sister's living room, which is tough and making it difficult to do much work. We've had a bunch of tasks to do for this project but I haven't been producing many things worth posting... one task was to create an 'everything picture' - to depict the entire novel in an A1 image. I didn't finish mine but I think I was going somewhere with it. Not sure where it is now though.

Anyway due to the circumstances I've opted to make a video for my final piece. This means I don't have to worry about a workspace (as I don't have one) or where things are, I can just film some footage, get it on a computer and edit it all from one place. Here's a couple of music videos that are inspiring me to mess around with moving image.


Black Dice - Kokomo




Kap Bambino - Neautral (Promo video for their Maxi EP)

Eeeee Eee Eeee

The first project of the second year lead on quite nicely from the book cover projects at the end of the first year. We had to choose from a fictional book from a book list and make a piece of work on it.

I chose Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin, an experimental stream of conscious semi biographical novel about a pizza delivery guy in an American suburb. Frequent themes in the book include apathy, day dreaming, depression, suicidal dolphins, social awkwardness, and general oddball nonsense. The narration frequently dips in and out of surreal dream sequences and there seem to be bears and dolphins roaming around the streets just like ordinary people, like that's the way it's always been.

Anyway, over the summer we had to do 60 prep drawings entirely from life, of which I managed to do about 20. It's not easy trying to find depressed dolphins that walk around with sledge hammers in their fins. Here is a small selection of some of the better ones:








My favourite drawing is probably the last one, of Laura asleep on the train. It's interesting to note how my drawing starts off as fairly realistic and traditional, my natural 'style' I guess, and then progresses (or regresses) into these very simplistic line drawings, distorting reality more and more.

Can't say I enjoy drawing out and about in front of people, too much pressure trying to impress onlookers. I can appreciate the advantages of it though, you do get a much better sense of what you're trying to draw. Stuffed animals is probably not a good place to start, it's like going to a morgue to get a sense of what a human being is.

Haiku Book Jacket

At the end of our last term at college (when we were making a series of book covers) we were asked to make one final book cover for a collection of poetry. We were given a small selection of poets and I chose to make a book cover for a collection of Haiku poems. The only restraints were that we had to make the entire sleeve (front, back and spine) and use the standard design template that Penguin use for most of their poetry books (which is a simple white box that contains the title, author etc).

Haiku poetry is interesting in the sense that there is a very rigid guideline as to what makes a Haiku poem. Basically there must be 3 lines, and in the Japanese language, the first line must contain five syllables, the second line must contain seven syllables, and the third line five again. 5-7-5. I find this structure quite interesting as poetry in western culture is much more free flowing. So, I decided to use a grid on my book cover to illustrate this - I think Haiku would look a lot like a grid if the words were pictures. I also used the stereotypical Japanese colours of red and white and put them against a low saturated pale yellow/beige background, to give a sense of the history and age of Haiku.

Anyway, here are the stages I went through to achieve my final result, I started with a grid split up into 3 sections with a ratio equal to 5-7-5:


Although there are elements I like about this one, I think there is too much rigidity, which makes it lose something of the elegance that Haiku has. And so decided to move in a more chaotic and organic direction:



This last one I'm pleased with, I think it captures the balance between structure and fluidity - something that struck me the most with the poetry.

Totally Tropical TV

So one of the members of Lesser Panda, Flash (aka Chris Howarth), is starting up a music blog that aims to seek and expose bands and artists from the past and present who have a strong influence on current music trends. He also wants to promote good new music that doesn't get hyped up, and he calls it www.totallytropical.tv

He's getting someone else to build the website but asked me to produce some visual material for it and after some some discussion decided he wanted a tropical/Bemuda Triangle theme. I decided to take the name of the site and translate it literally - Totally Tropical TV - and create visuals for it as if it was an actual television company from the tropics, perhaps a long gone extinct broadcasting station from the 1950s. This offered me a chance to incorporate some of the TV test cards I've been looking at and try creating some of my own for Totally Tropical. Here's some of the results:




The first one was a tester, very basic and kind of clumsy, but the second two went well and would be used on the website. More to come on this later.

Photos from Italy

I took an old 35mm Olympus camera (which my Dad gave to me a while ago) to Italy and took some photos of things. It's a very basic camera and doesn't allow any control over aperture or focus or anything, so it's pretty hit and miss, but when it does take a good picture it's ace. Here's a few of the better ones:

There was one road that went into this little town and all the way down it were trees with white stripes and red hearts painted on them, it looked like something from a nostalgic wartime childhood film.




This lion was in the kitchen of our villa. So should have stole it.

Plane Drawing

Here's a couple of drawings I did on the plane coming back from Italy. The first one is for La Shark - after making them a poster I thought I'd make some more things for them, but in retrospect I don't think I will unless they ask me to. It's Florence's turf. Plus this generic little illustration I drew on the plane could be applied to anything... replace 'La Shark' with your favourite band name / brand name / person / place / thing etc.


Looks like an Aztec head dress. Anyway here's another quick drawing I did, I drew this looking at the pictures in one of those plane magazines you get in the back of the seat. What a tremendous waste of paper those things are.

Carnaby

The only existing photo of me and my drawings at Blank Canvas, Carnaby Street.

Pollock's London

Over the weekend my genius of a mate, Richard, phoned me up asking if I wanted to put my work in exhibition on Carnaby Street. Obviously I said yes, so he gave me this guy's email and I sent over some of my work. He emailed me back short listing three of my drawings (the ghostdance piece I did earlier this year and 2 drawings I did on my foundation course last year) and asked me to get them framed and bring them in on Monday. So I did, it cost me about 80 quid to get 3 frames and had to white wash and frame them myself... Here's the drawings...




And here's the drawings after I've framed them...

They looked pretty good. So I took them into the gallery on Monday and left them with the curators. The exhibition is called Blank Canvas, run by a group called Pollock's London (set up by 18 year old Josef Valentino), and aims to promote up and coming talent in London. People from up and down the country submitted their work to the Pollock's London website and were then short listed to be included in the exhibition. There's also a celebrity collaborative piece of collage by Annie Lenox, Marc Quinn, Rankin and Levi Palmer. It all sounds pretty amazing, you can find more about it here:

http://www.fashioncapital.co.uk/content/view/9392/255/PollocksLondoncelebratescreativityintheCapit/

and here:
http://www.viewlondon.co.uk/whatson/blank-canvas-at-carnaby-street-article-7010.html"

To be honest, although I think the exhibition itself is great and a really positive thing to do, I personally don't feel too great about being included in it. Only because I don't feel like I deserve it as I didn't work for it, and don't feel very confident that my work will stand up for itself in the show. I think that's just my pessimistic attitude though, it'll be good experience at least.

There's a private view this Thursday and then it's open to the public for a week. I'm going on holiday to Italy with my family on Friday night so won't be around when it's open, but I'm going to the private view. Would appreciate it if anyone could go along and have a look!

Le Shark at the Metro

The band Le Shark (note: they're now called La Shark due to a sports clothing brand having the name Le Shark) have asked me to make a poster for their gig on Saturday at the Metro. I made one using a grid and was influenced a lot by my recent obsession with TV test cards. Although it ended up looking a bit more like I was influenced by 1930s Art Deco, but I quite like Art Deco so that's fine.

Anyway here's the result, one in colour (for an e-flyer) and one in black and white (for a poster). I really enjoyed making it and hope to make some more flyers/posters soon because I miss it.

Television Test Cards

So I've been getting really into grids and patterns and bright colours and Eduardo Paolozzi and Bjorn Copeland lately. And recently, whilst looking for some more grids and patterns on google, I stumbled upon the long forgotten television test card. They were a bit before my time but I do remember BBC's most famous test card occasionally screened on TV when there were no programmes on:


Anyway I started to look more into them and found this website made by a bloke called Alan Pemberton, who seems to know everything there is to know about testcards and has kindly decided to share his knowledge with the rest of the world. It's super geeky but I love it.

http://www.pembers.freeserve.co.uk/index.html

The purpose of a test card was to enable you to set the configuration on your television set and each differen't part of the test card has a purpose (to set the contrast or the aspect ratio for example). This makes them more than just pretty pictures and I didn't realise just how many there were and how diverse they could be, alot of them are extremely well designed... they're amazing images. I think they're my favourite things right now.

Tiny Little Elephants

My mate Chris got me a little job recently. He works at The Fan Museum in Greenwich and they had a commision to make 70 fans with elephant designs on them. They also wanted elephants hand painted on the spines of the fans and asked Chris if he could do it. He said he couldn't but put them in touch with me instead. So over the weekend I've been painting 70 1cm high elephants with the smallest brush in the world. Here's a few of them...

Work from Best Before

As I said, we made work in the week leading up to the Best Before show. We were only allowed to use materials and/or base our work on the 99p store opposite our shop. I bought a bunch of coloured paper packs, some incredible blackburn rovers wall paper (the back of which was a plain off-white and actually quite nice to work on), a kids colouring book, a chalk board, a plastic jewel set and a pack of shuttlecocks. Here's what I came up with using those materials.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, lately I've been approaching my work in the same way using pencils all the time, so the restriction of having to use materials from a 99p store was refreshing and forced me to take a different approach. I looked a lot at other artists and to an extent copied their style and, you could say, ripped them off (for example the Bjorn Copeland inspired piece below). HoweverI'm not ashamed of that, nor do I think it's a problem as I'm trying to learn new ways of working and creating images. And although I was trying to work in another artist's style or using similar techniques, I still tried to maintain a sense of my own identity in the work and didn't copy directly what I was studying.

Bjorn Copeland rip off.

John Baldessari

I wasn't aware of it at the time when I made this but Monica Canilao has been doing some work recently of Native Americans that's very similar (and a lot better)... worth checking out.

This piece was on a chalk board made from plastic... needless to say chalk doesn't actually come off onto plastic so it was a completely useless chalk board. Never the less it had a nice orange frame... although I rushed this one and wasn't really looking at any other artists work which is perhaps why it's a bit crap.

This took about 5 shuttlecocks to make. Jasper Johns anyone?

Best Before

So the past couple of weeks have been mega busy as my class put on an end of year exhibition/show. It took place in disused shop in a shopping precinct which was open to the public for 3 days. Here's the flyer for it (designed by Bryony and Flo)...


The concept of our show was to base our work and use only the materials from the 99p store that is directly opposite. The shop space comprised of two rooms, one was our display room (where we displayed work we had made during the week leading up to the show) and the other room was a stock room where all of us sat at rows of desks (sweat shop style) continously creating work through a series of organised workshops (such as redesigning the packaging on a tin of baked beans). This was also open to the public to join in and engage with us. Here are some photos of the display room:



And this is the stock room (taken from the back of the shop where the desks are - it's not a very good photo but it's the only one I have of that room)


I didn't take a great deal of photos so these don't give much of an idea of what it was like but I did film the whole event and have over 3 hours of footage which I am going to go through and edit into a short 5 minute documentation (if my computer will allow it).

The whole show was a huge success and really brought us all together. It was great to end the year on such a positive note !

Eduardo Paolozzi

Recently came across a website selling Eduardo Paolozzi prints (http://www.paolozziprints.com) that features a whole bunch of silkscreens, etchings and lithographs I've never seen by him before. I've always liked his work but these prints are incredible. Really similar to Bjorn Copeland but about 20 years earlier. So good.

Bjorn Copeland

Copeland to me is like Jesus to a christian. He's in the electronic noise band Black Dice and designs all the album artwork for them as well as creating these amazing kaleidoscopic collages... Watch and learn.

Stale Bread

Too much pencil, not enough colour. I've recently realised I'm getting into a bad habit by approaching my work in the same way and drawing everything in the same style with the same pencils. Time for a change me thinks...

As Picasso once said, "...to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

Book Cover 2

Just finished week 2 of our book cover projects, this time we were given a week to make three covers to fit in a series. Either a series of H.P. Lovecraft's short horror stories, a series of Mill's and Boon's romance novels or a series of Ian Flemming's James Bond books. I chose horror, unsurprisingly. We weren't given a template like before so needed to consider every aspect of the cover. I did mine entirely with pencil and then added in an extra component (not in pencil) on each book that related to the story in someway.




I was unsure about them at first but I think they're okay, although not brilliant and there's a lot I would change if I were to do them again. I think the biggest issue with these is that there seems to be a conflict or struggle between the ornamental elements and the conceptual ideas. I don't think I quite got the balance between the two... they don't really give each other room to breathe.

Book Cover

We've finally gone on to a new project at Camberwell and are now looking at book covers. This first brief was to make a book cover for one of 3 short stories. I chose Scale by Will Self. It's about a morphine addict who's writing a thesis on motorways (specifically the M40) and lives extremely isolated in his bungalow. He has imaginary conversations in his head and drifts in and out of dellusional dreams often involving the model village he lives next to in Beaconsfield. Here's what I did, above is the original drawing and below is what it looks like with the penguin template we were given...


A drawing that shrunk a good selection of my most used pencils to the size of caterpillars. The original photo was taken from a photograph on the front of an old Fabric poster, the photographer is Nick Ballon. I can't find the image on the internet so here's a photo of the poster/flyer on my wall (along with another Fabric poster - I've never been to Fabric and not massively interested in going but they do have some rather good poster/flyers):

I'm not sure who did the other poster but here's some more of Nick Ballon's work, really beautiful photographs:

In heaven...

Last part of the 'society' project where we had to create a one minute 'documentary' on our society. I created this little number loosely based on our 'god of death'. Quite pleased with it as it was the first time I used imovie and it was all filmed on Yaya's mobile phone.

Camberhell



god of death played by Richard Danks
camera, direction and editing by me.
styling and makeup by Yaya.
set design by me and Yaya.

Pitt Rivers Museum

School trip to Pitt Rivers Museum, which was supposed to be a 'drawing trip' but I only did one drawing as I was too distracted by all the many birds and dinosaurs and skeletons and mammals and mummies and boats and statues and totem poles and shrunken heads and fleas with tiny clothes and a real life wasps nest. It was amazing, I loved it. But anyway here's the one drawing I did of a tiny little monkey skeleton, I forgot to write down the name of it but it was about the size of my hand...

Nursery

Me, Katie, Theo and Jon had nothing to do the other day in college so we made these. Whilst most university students are learning theories, philosophies and studying for exams, me and my classmates are sat around playing nursery school games...

Drawings From the Group Project 'Society'

So our group project where we had to create a society and make a 32 page manifesto about it was due in on Thursday. I was up all night Wednesday putting all of our images into a book and printing off three copies (started at 5pm, finished at 7am Thursday morning). Our idea was simply to translate every aspect of our degree into a religion. I was looking into several different religions/philosophies like Greek mythology, Aztec culture and Hinduism which are all fairly similar in that they each have many different gods to represent different aspects of life. They also have fairly elaborate and complex stories that intertwine and somehow explain and make sense of the world. This is where most of my ideas came from when I was thinking of stories to explain and describe the different gods (tutors) of our religion (degree). I got a bit carried away with this and even came up with a history of the Universe based around our College. I did post the stories that I wrote for it but they're very long and not worth reading so I've taken them off, but here's some drawings:


Dalarius, God of Life - (based on Darryl Clifton, the course leader)


Vormittag, God of Death - (based on Luise Vormittag, she was my group's personal tutor but abandoned us half way through the project to leave the course and teach on a different one. Hence the fallen angel, satan, god of death etc.).

I actually wrote a story about The God of Death and why she took on the form of a vulture with a ram's head but it ended up being about 1200 words long and I don't think anyone can be bothered to read it.

The Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers

... are quite a good indie pop band with a very good name and are only marginally related to what I'm about to say, which is that the current project at Camberwell is one that involves a group with whom we must form a society. We then have to create a 32 page 'visual' manifesto (although it can include words) that explains every aspect of our society. We have untill the 24th of April to do this.

My group have decided that our society is based upon a religion... a religion where by our God, our ruler and almighty devine being that blessed us with life, is infact our course tutor. This may not make much sense right now but that's fine, basically we are students on a course where he is the 'course leader'. He gives us projects, we do them. He tells us to write an essay, we write one. He asks to see the work we produce, we show it to him, etc etc. It's a very literal interpretation of the brief, we have to form a society so we form a society... If you translate these things into the context of the brief (form a society with laws, culture, beliefs etc) then we have a religion where by Darryl is our God. We do what God tells us. We sacrifice our drawings and our work to God. The manifesto we have to make will come in the form of a Holy Book. And the day this project ends (24th April) is Judgement Day... The Apocalypse.

The other tutors on our course are also Holy Creatures of some kind. For example my group's personal tutor Luise has left our course to go and teach on another course... so me and my group currently have no tutor and no guidance through out this project. Thus she is the Devil, the Fallen Angel. Satan.

You get my drift.

So anyway... we have to make an online 'presence' as well... I set up a blog for us and spent a few hours decorating it accordingly.

www.bewarethedevil.blogspot.com

We don't have a name for our society/religion yet... I would quite like to use 'The Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers' but A) not everyone in our group are female, including me... B) It's the name of a band... and C) it has very little to do with our society/religion.

Oh well.

Talvihorros - It's Already On Fire

(front)

(back)

(cd)

Album artwork for my brother's dark and wintery electronic/ambient music, Talvihorros. It's his solo music project, sounds like it's in the same arena as Múm, Xela, Deaf Center etc. He's sending off this demo to various record labels soon and the album sleeves are going to be printed onto simple folded-paper envelopes, photos will follow shortly once I've made a batch of them...

Ghostdance

Drawing for Lesser Panda's 7 inch single 'Ghostdance'. All free hand, possibly the most accurate and detailed drawing I've ever done. The pose this woman is doing is actually a dance from the early 1900s called the 'Cake-walk'.

You can see it in action in George Melies' silent film 'Le Cake-walk Infernal' which, may I add, is beyond amazing. Try listening to Kap Bambino's 'New Breath' when watching it, they go together so well it's actually quite creepy.



(the person who put this on youtube has dubbed some music over the top which I think doesn't go very well with it at all... just mute it and listen to kap bambino instead!)

Tate Take Over Leaflet

back, front

inside (without text)

Tate Take Over Poster

Poster design for Tate Take Over. Not as good as the flyer design, and I messed up some of the text a little bit but over all not too bad. Actually I think it's a bit boring... and bland. The elephant reminds me of how I used to draw when I was about 12. Simple, chunky things... certainly nothing to wet yourself over.

While we're on the subject of my work being boring/bland, my tutors have been telling me to experiment more lately... experimentation is not something I usually welcome but I'm beginning to get bored with drawing things accurately and in proportion. I also think it's starting to show in my work (case in point). So once this gig is over I'm going to start something new, although I still have album art to finish which requires a lot of detailed/accurate drawing... but once that's over I'm definitely going to start drawing quicker and using different materials. I don't know where I'll start though... I have this photographic drawing of Kate Moss I've been working on... maybe I could start by burning that.

Oh and the Tate flyers have been printed and are currently circulating Tate Modern, so go down and grab one if you're there.

Oskar Fischinger - Komposition in Blau (1935)

Just discovered Oskar Fischinger. Him and Kandinsky were both experimenting with the combination of art and music and I'm lead to believe there was some sort of rivalry between them. Fischinger has quite clearly blown Kandisnky out of the water and off the planet as far as I'm concerned. This animation is better than most music videos now and he didn't even have a computer back then! Incredible.

Lesser Panda Demo

More Lesser Panda artwork, this is for the sticker that is going on the front of the CD case. Bat with skull head. Dark is the way forward.

And check this beast out.

I want to do a painting of it... Really fucking huge.

Little Lost Lucy

For the current project at Camberwell we had to make something last the duration of a song. I decided to film my friends dancing around in animal masks to Kap Bambino (noisey shoutey glitchy electro). But everything that could go wrong, from delayed trains to broken cameras and retarded computer errors, did actually go wrong. I finally ended up filming the big dance but when I went to upload the video to my computer, more things went wrong and I soon ran out of time.

There were strange forces at work that were really against the idea of this video.

So using my flatmates laptop (who appears in it), I had to make do with what little time and resources I had left and just make this short clip which is nothing like what I had planned. The piece of music is 'The Bells Play the Band' by The Bell Orchestre. I'm content with the outcome, I'd like to make a short film some day and it would probably look a bit like this. I like the style... Harmony Korine-esque I suppose.

I would still like to make the kap bambino video as I do have 2 hours worth of footage of people gallivanting around in animal masks, (unless of course something kills me first).

chatwinning

So I won the tate competition, hooray! They wanted me to replace all the text using the Tate font though... so I had to sand off all the old text and transfer the new text on. Funfunfun. Although I'm glad I did it cos it looks much better. Here's the final version:

They may also want me to design an A4 sheet/leaflet thing as well.

Yeah... me and the Tate, we're like this...

Tate Take Over Competition

I was up all night working on this, didn't sleep for a second, possibly put more effort into it than was needed and generally took it all a bit too seriously... but, whatever... here's the flyer design for the competition, (front and back). The winner gets their flyer printed and distributed by Tate. Not bad. I would explain what it's about but I am in the slow process of collapsing into a small heap on the floor and remaining unconscious for several hours...

The Common Virginia Deer

Found these really nice illustrations of deer, made in 1828 by C. A. Lesueur.

Lesser Panda

My brother's band Lesser Panda are starting to release demos, singles, EPs etc... I sometimes make flyers for them and they've asked me to make some artwork for their new releases, which is very cool indeed. I did this drawing (of a lesser panda) for a sticker that's going on the front of the demo CD case. Although after finishing it I actually don't think it will work as a sticker so I'm going to do a different design for that. Hopefully it'll be used for something else though.

Lesser pandas are infact passive animals and don't get aggressive, I couldn't find any pictures of hissing/snarling/biting pandas so I had to get a picture of a snarling cougar and half make it up.

While we're on the subject of Lesser Panda (the band), I recently designed the front cover to a split EP they're doing with this other band, Innercity Pirates... I'm not keen on the pink but that's what their manager wanted. Also, the diamonds are from Innercity Pirates' logo, and the skull and bones are from Lesser Panda's logo:

And the accompanying flyer, (front and back):

Time Out Editorial

Time Out are asking Camberwell Illustration students to submit work for future articles on books. One of the themes is ghost stories, for which I drew this... not sure if I'm going to submit it or not yet.

Sleeping Plane

Intro

I can't actually start anything like this without having introduced it properly, especially something like a blog, so this is just for my own benefit: As part of our degree we have been asked to keep a blog and update it regularly with our creative work, thoughts, interests, influences etc.

So... here it is... in all its 1950s glory.