Illustrator1

I had my first illustrator session today, which was really good, we had to trace round this cartoon and add shading to make it look a little more realistic. It took a bit of time to get used to because I've never done Illustrator before, and I'm used to all these photoshop shortcuts.  Tonight I did a bit of research on YouTube looking for some short tutorials I could watch about the basics of illustrator, I found this video about creating reflections of images which was pretty cool. So as you can see from the picture I have added in a little bit of reflection.

Although it was a bit hard today, I found it really interesting trying to learn about a new program. I am looking forward to next week when we will hopefully do some more on this mac program. 

PPRD

I haven't written a post in a few days. So basically over the weekend I was working on research for my sketchbook, and I did a bit of annotation.

This morning we had our PPRD session, we didn't really do much because it was a bit unorganized. We made a spider diagram highlighting stuff that we find difficult in writing essays, our group got punctuation, grammar and structure.

I got the rest of my letterpress back which looks pretty good, because it is actually in colour this time. Dr. Anna wanted us to find an image that represented racial controversy for our seminar this afternoon and I found this editorial illustration i liked the style of but nothing else i.e. the concept of the idea because it doesn't work with the advert and doesn't get the message across:  

The poster is for a Hanes advert, they specialize in clothing without labels. For this idea the strap line is 'because the world gives you enough labels,' the picture is showing a man lugging behind him the stereotypes of his group. This particular campaign wanted to extract a reaction from the viewer, and thats what I wanted to do when I brought this into class. Is this Racist?

PhotoShop 2

This morning I had my second PhotoShop session, learned a few more things here and there, like the whole colour balance thing, and by pressing 'alt' you can set the whites and blacks to the right position so it will look good when printed. And the select layer tool when moving it from one photo to another using a mask. Compared to yesterday though, I felt a bit like I had a system overload with the whole intake of PhotoShop info, there's only so much you can remember in a day.  

In the afternoon I did sketchbook work and research found most of the stuff I was look for, I just couldn't find a place to print it, which was a bit annoying, so I ended up staying at uni till 6 trying to print stuff off.

Now I am going to try and find a picture and start analyzing it for Dr. Anna for

 tomorrow, exciting stuff!

I scanned in a bit of the letterpress we did from our first session, I think it looks pretty average, but hopefully I can do something with it:

Letterpress 1

I did a couple of hours of letterpress this afternoon, I don't know, I felt it was a bit tedious mainly because my big 'S' wasn't printing I had to find a  piece of card to put underneath to raise it to the same level as the other letters and try printing again, but that still didn't work, so I printed it separately to the rest of my characters, and after about 4 attempts of that the end product looks awesome but it just took time to get there.

I just came back to the class room to pick up the rest of the work I did last week, and found out that I did the wrong quotation.....

Oh well it sounds the same pretty much, instead of 'shore people shout' I wrote 'sea shore shout.'

best day ever :|

PhotoShop 1

Did a bit of PhotoShop with Clive, I new most of the stuff, because I had done basics tutorials before, and had just forgotten what I learnt. Today there was some stuff I didn't know about photoshop like the quick selection stuff, and the spot healing brushes which, was pretty cool. I also got the chance to refresh my memory on masking because I hadn't done any of that stuff since last year.  

Kyle Cooper: London

So after I left you last night I walked to Lidel to do some research for my Vernacular typography case study, Neil said we should pick a place we haven't been before, but I decided I would rather do it of a place that I wanted to know about. He said in the lecture that we should go into a place that we don't know as such, and when we walked in we were to record what we saw, he gave the example of a supermarket, and thats what got me thinking, because I don't really class Lidel as your average supermarket and I didn't know enough about it to get a feel of the atmosphere, so it was really a willingness to learn the environment around me. I took about 30 pictures of all the things that stood out to me in the store, for example the signage (as our project is generally to do with typography) I also noticed a lot of negative spaces in the store from the lack of people shopping, and the fact that there were piles of boxes in certain isles, this got me intrigued and made me think about some of the artists I had learnt about that day, one of which was, 'hello colour,' a style in which I would like to experiment with. I need to go back to take a few more photos on friday, generally looking at the different types of food they sell, rather than the straight written, rubbish signs, that choke each isle lol.

Today we all went to London, mainly because of a lecture Kyle Cooper was giving in the evening. I felt that I used the time as best I could to research a few other artists and get some pictures for my other project I have to do for the typography. We started off by sitting in Starbucks and eating lunch, everyone else bought food apart from me who had the initiative to bring his own sandwiches, Celia made me them in Costa's, I felt kind of bad eating Costa sandwiches in Starbucks, oh well, I'm such a rebel. I also got to read one of those amazing free newspapers, i felt very interlectual, It was about how Madonna and Guy Ritchie were going to divorce which meant that he was going to inherit 150m of madonnas 300m earnings, I don't even know how much Guy Ritchie is worth, but i wouldn't mind inheriting almost half of her earnings.
After that we travelled to the tube to go V&A to see what kinds of exhibitions were on, when I walked into the room there was lots and lots of statues and busts all by different artists, which was very interesting to see different uses of materials and styles. There was also a bit of a fashion show going on in one of the other areas, but I was to interested in that kind of stuff, so we (Jack, Sophia, Ellie and myself) left to get the tube towards the Design Museum, once we got off the train I decided that I needed to start gathering some photographic evidence of different types of typography and Numerics, so while moving at a fast pace I was taking pictures of any words and type that stood out to me. I didn't know that there was so many styles in one street, I basically managed to get my chip filled walking down one street. It was awesome, until all three of my camera battery's ran out of energy  when we got to the design museum there were a film crew and some actors standing outside the back, as if they were shooting a set for a TV program or something which was rather exciting. Never found out what it was for though, you might still see me on TV at some point, that would be good. When we eventually got into the museum it looked like they were getting ready to shut, so we stood in the shop and looked at all the books on graphics design and typography. I picked up a couple that looked good but they were all pretty expensive, as you would expect from the London town. Jack bought a glass bottle of coke which was like £1.90. I think thats INSANE, seeing as you can buy 3 bottles of pepsi from farm foods for £1. But its not really the sane, I guess thats why its so appealing. He did say it tasted really good though, so its ok, I'm not complaining, I didn't even buy it. After taking a few more pictures we then walked back to the train where we would go to the peacock theatre for our lecture, we left early, and still managed to get stuck in delays on the underground, so we arrived outside at about 6:50 when we were supposed to be there at 6:30.
I was quite anticipating the talk from Kyle Cooper as I had done a little research on YouTube the night before to see the types of title sequences he had done. I think after hearing him talk about the vast amounts of works he's done I was inspired to go and do some work on my projects, he taught me 6 things in the talk:

- Get into the idea of working as a community, he said that your ideas will come much easier if you are to work with other designers and artists because it gives you, as another designer to bounce your ideas off other people, which is a very useful tool to use.
- Put yourself into your work, he told us some quite funny stories about how he cut his finger off with a meat cutter in his first job because he wanted to be the quickest and the best meat cutter there was, and then he told us about how he broke his tooth when he tried to bite open this kids shirt, when he was trying to get a hulk style shirt rip and when he was explaining his work to one of his clients, he poked himself in the eye because he was so into it.
- Being open minded. He said that directors always find flaws in your work, so be open to change, apparently Tom Cruise didn't like the colour of the typography on the mission impossible titles, and Mr schwarzenegger didn't like the gun *Bang* in one of his titles, but when Kyle explained to them that it was easy to sort, they weren't listening to him.
- Have trust in your work, I don't remember so much on this point, but i new he had made some very valid reasons as to why you should trust your own work, he said there is always going to be someone who has better work than you in the world so you just have to drive yourself to work to the best of your abilities, and especially work to your strengths, because you were given that gift for a reason.
- Sometimes to be modern you be analogue, his mentor/teacher told him 'keep your hand in it brother' (Paul Rand) and as long as you do that then you would be creating something new, (I don't quite remember how that worked either) it made sense at the time lol

At the start of his presentation he said to the audience a prologue of Henry V. One of the lines he said was 'Chase a muse of fire,' I think he had based most of his life around this one prologue, that statement said to him, keep chasing the highest you can possibly reach and it was quite inspiring to hear that from Kyle as a designer, he also referred to the 'imaginary forces' which, was actually the name of his first company, and i think it says quite a lot about his work ethic and how the points he taught me are integrated. He showed us a series of films in which had know idea that he had been a part of the title sequences or special effects, and they were some big films to such as Iron man, he did the titles and helped with most of the visual effects which was quite surprising to hear he got quite that involved with and most recently he had done the titles and editing in the new film Tropic Thunder with Ben Stiller. I now really want to see that.
I think that I learnt a lot today and was particularly inspired by the work that Kyle Cooper had done, I didn't know the amounts that designers get involved with the work they do, and sometimes roped into a piece of work even father for a second opinion on a different part of the script.
Anyway, again I have written an essay, thats only meant to be like 2 lines a day. I hope to get back into working on Friday as my Mom is coming to visit me tomorrow, so I'm a bit excited about that, and yeh thanks for the sandwiches Fyne