Keeping your ipod cosy...

Last summer I learnt to knit and although I can only do very basic stuff compared to the likes of my mum and granny, I love making things. My sister's husband Martin bought her an ipod classic last Christmas and what better accessory to have than a little sock to keep it safe! So for my sister's birthday I made her a pink ipod sock and finished it off with a little wooden button. Thank you Martin for the wonderful pictures above!!!

Pattern mad...

I love patterns soooo much! I can't help but just see shapes all around me in buildings, artwork everything! I've finally started to work on some of my own designs using collage and paint that I hope to eventually turn into some postcards or something. Here's just one of my first designs.

Not your average comic...

For the past week I've been doing a brief to design a magazine cover for a comic called Bagatelle that is distributed to a few arty colleges. I've just finished the design and I'm pretty chuffed with the outcome. I really wanted to go for something different without the stereotypical "comicy" appearance and of course as per usual I managed to slip in some patterntastic imagery! I tested out quite a few patterns along the way which I might post up in a bizzle. For now it's over and out.

An afternoon rendez-vous with Wilf...

I find life drawing pretty scary at times to be honest! I can deal with the nakedness no problem it's the fact that I find it so so difficult. It makes me sad sometimes when I draw because I'm not the best at it so being faced today with a few hours of life drawing was kind of daunting! However, it wasn't tooooo bad. I was practicing drawing heads and drew the above. It's very rare that I am proud of my work but I was a little chuffed I suppose with this drawing. It may not be the greatest to others, but it made me smile.

Logotastic...

I've just finished a project, creating four logos for four different companies. I'm pretty pleased with my final designs above and had a lot of fun designing them. I'm especially proud of my chicken...cheeky chappy!

Fellside Farmshop - A local shop selling as you can imagine farm produce like meat and veg.

The Open House Project - A children's charity who provide shelter and support for abused children between the ages of 0-16 yrs.

Carlisle Allotment Society - What it says on the tin!

Sealeys - A tools company who produce tools at tradesman quality (I hand cut my final design out of shiny card hence why the image above looks a bit strange!)

Guardian Illustrations - The Degrees of Separation...

I have literally just finished and handed in our second brief of this year. Phew! On the scale of stressful I was on the verge of tearing my hair out but it's all good! I've got some soothing music on and am updating this beast.

The idea behind the project was the concept of "The Degrees of Separation." This is best described by the game in which a person tries to link themselves to a chosen person/object via no more than x moves. Links can sometimes seem strange and tedious between two seemingly unrelated subjects. Our task for this brief was to take a list of 10 items and to produce two illustrations that attempted to portray this idea by using the specified objects. They were to appear in an imaginary Guardian article so we were given image dimensions and print instructions that perhaps would appear in a real life brief. I never thought Admiral Lord Nelson and a Porcupine would ever end up together...oh how wrong I was!

This is of a prickley nature...

We are designing some illustrations at the moment for an imaginary editorial spread. There is a list of items that we have to include in the pieces and one of them is a porcupine! This is my little chappy so far!!!

Don't judge a book by its cover, A Very Short Introduction...

So I'm back at Uni now and our first project after the holidays was to design a series of book jackets for the well known OXFORD series "A Very Short Introduction." We were given a list of subjects from which we had to select 3 to explore and produce designs for. I decided to choose Architecture, Butterflies and Moths and Clocks, Watches and Timepieces which by the end of the project was such a mouthful to say! Anywho, I played around quite a bit with stenciling this time which was pretty fun. I wanted my designs to be quite simplistic and a bit more abstract than my usual stuff. I didn't do quite so well on this project but hey you can't have 'em all can you?! At least I got my type right! Below are my final designs have a ponder....