Browsing through some blogs, came across designer Martin Sati...some really interesting illustrations. You can view his blog here
I guess a lot of his work is computer illustrated, he incorporates some textiles into his works and works in a slighlty abstract way. They do have a "collageee" feel about them as if the shapes were cut precisicly using a pair of scissors.
Here's some pictures for your viewing pleasure...

Some of my work lately

Franco Baranetti
An unfinished piece of my work, really growing to like him, have him finished by tmrw!
I was actually inspired by someone I posted earlier on in my blog, his name Rafael Grampa ....check him out

Trip to the Tate!

Okay, trip to the tate, I always love seeing it, but didn't spend that much time looking at the masterpieces inside.
Spent most of our time finding ways to understand our target audience for our final project.
I don't think the timing was best, the morning session would have been a more appropriate time as a lot of children come on school trips.
We had a set of tasks to complete

Task 1 - Pick an outcome

Task 2 - Spend an hour using two IDEO research methods

As our target audience were 5 - 10 year olds, we decided to try and see things through their eyes.
We used multiple techniques, one of the simplest to perform was to shadow a child as he ventured through the complex, hopefully using a Tate Info Brochure to navigate.
An idea that we came up with was shaped around how children are young explorers and often don't use maps to navigate, they act purely upon instinct to run around and explore. With this in mind we made a map they'd make and design. Venturing around and filling in the blank canvas.

> Shadowing
In shadowing some of the children we noticed how bored they were with the environment, or at least in the area assigned to them. He was running from place to place finding things, but they weren't interactive and you could feel his frustration.

> Being your customer
I have had my own experience visiting museums as a kid and I have to say that I would have found this place boring. It's not like the History & Scientific Museum in that it has nothing much to interact with. I suppose it's the nature of the beast, but apparently it's not always like that.

Task 3 - Spend an hour producing ideas & presentable roughs for your design

Letterpress session 1

This was my first experience using letterpress technique. I've heard from other people how interesting it was!
This week we didn't delve into anything too complicated, we simply put together our names using 12pt Gilmore Sans.

Some key words to takeaway:

measure - the width of a column

ligature - the combination of two graphemes to make a glyph





















Display type - headline

Text type

Some images from the day:










































The final outcome of this session was to produce a proof to remove any errors arranging the characters.














As a continuation of this workshop by next week we need to bring some meaning to the colour blue and illustrate it through type!

interesting shirt design...i want one!

These guys developed and designed this shirt called Taglio! You can ammend some shapes to the shirt to make Taglios face!                                               

           

                        

 

Jonas Löfgren

Some really brilliant illustrations. It seems to me that he has successfully conveyed adult emotive characteristics in a a child like face. I haven't seen this before with this degree of realism. 

my favorite piece:

01. Close up of a detail
[+] drawing attention the gun in his hand
[-] taken out of context, the previous image was very interesting
[i] I think when you take the gun out of its' 

original context it becomes less interesting

02. Wide angle horizontal

03. Narrow angle vertical

04. Depersonalise a photo with people in it

[+] Makes a statement!
[-] Loss of identity
[i] I wonder how some people become so patriotic, I really consider myself a world-person, so when I see this picture it really hits me! If you take away the flags, images, ideas that he is part of, you can see the underlying emotions that anyone can experience towards so many things. Basically he is a patriot of his country in the same way  I'm a patriot of my Mac laptop :)

05. Crop to abstract

[+] Engaging!
[-] Cold and distant
[i] I wanted to take away the gang related instruments in this image, now it's not so sure if this is a gang member, maybe I should have made it a tad more abstract...?

06. Crop to define

[+] Emotional
[-] 
[i] I've drawn attention to his face that sums up the feeling of this picture, he looks really upset, which I think defines this picture!

07. Make look distant

[+] Scary
[-] 
[i] Sometimes we feel powerless, seeing these two people look out into the distance makes me think of the current global warming situation and how we are trying to do something about it

08. Crop to enhance the emotional impact

[+] Lonely
[-] 
[i] The close-up of the boy with the distant long mess leading into the background plus the aery fog/smog makes a very interesting image. I just simply accentuated what was already there

09. Narrow vertical

[+] Precise
[-] Basic
[i] It takes a lot of technical ability to do what he's doing, so simply cropping a small line out from the picture and making the image longer than the original draws attention to what he's doing.

10. Bold exciting

[+] 
[-] 
[i] She looks so amazed, you couldn't mistake he emotion for much else. Her face more than the others shows that feeling. I made her the focal point of this one and cut out shapes. It creates 5 separate images, if you look into them you get a similar feeling of excitement and amazement!

11. Discreet

[+] Dark!
[-] 
[i] You see a lot of youths walking the streets wearing hoods, to me it's all one big social problem thats been going this way for a long time. So when you see the picture of the child out there in africa, probably starving, war torn, injured and familyless....It makes you think! 

Photo Workshop 16/10/09 Blue Group

Using some downloaded images from Blackboard we had to alter/crop the images to fit the following criteria
01. Close up of a detail
02. Wide angle horizontal
03. Narrow angle vertical
04. Depersonalise a photo with people in it
05. Crop to abstract
06. Crop to define
07. Make look distant
08. Crop to enhance the emotional impact
09. Narrow vertical
10. Bold exciting
11. Discreet

Image Workshop 09/10/09 Blue Group

On reflection, my favourite workshop.
I really enjoyed this session and I felt like I got a lot out of it.
I think what it showed me more than ever was how not to dwell on one idea.
I do this a lot with my illustration work. I become so attached to the developing image and the idea of how I would like it to be that I ponder and end up moving onto another image.
This workshop was all about idea generation, and doing it quickly within a timespan.
Here were the list of words we could fit our image(s) around for it's theme:
Composition
Editing
Contrast
Rhythm
Texture
Repurposing
Juxtaposition
Surrealism
Narrative
Humor

I focused on trying to produce images in the final category.
Here is my resulting work:

This is the first collage I put together, it's really cluttered and quite unorganised!

I was far happier the second time around... I tried to use the negative space to draw more attention to the central images.

Image with darrenBlue Workshop

Today's session was aimed at generating ideas and illustrating them through collage.
Interestingly, the word collage stems from the french word...coller...which means 'to stick'. So if you can't remember the word for sticking various, seemingly unrelated images together in one place, you can always pick up ya french dictionary and look up the word stick (together).......... that's if you're anything like me :)

....anyway, the aim was to create a collage using a small 4"x6" card. We had newspapers and magazines to scamper thru and salvage what we could.
Initially, the work being produced was unsure and ill-confident, that changed after we had a few pointers thrown our way.
One critisiscm was how we were occupying too much of the negative space.
The negative space can make the images in the collage stronger drawing your attention to them. My first piece was cluttered and outside regulations. Second piece was better!

Looking back on this exercise, I enjoyed it, I felt like I learnt something from it. I think it's good to be able to look at other people's works and make strong, intelligent critics.

Just skimming thru his archives, found some really interesting works. THIS illustration really has so much detail and if you look in close you can see the level of detail, the time it must have taken!! I like the way he has taken some of the darker areas and given them some texture. The characters as well, the guy at the bar looks so threatening, u can really feel his presence in the picture.
The guys at the table seem to be looking at the camera, which makes u think that the illustrator was actually there capturing this piece. U can see how they feel uneasy about the picture being 'taken'

As you can tell by the date-stamps, been scampering through some books and had a look through some of the blogs trying to find a piece of work to pin up here. found one! :)

I stumbled across this artist/illustrator Rafael Grampa. If I'm entirely honest, this is the first time I've seen his work. What I like about his work is its'  intricacy. The picture of the figure below is promoting his upcoming comic-work. I'm really taken-back by the detail. The moment I first saw it I focused in all the different parts of the figure looking at the intense detail. There isn't  much colour but I don't think it matters, the areas where it's solid black makes sure it doesn't feel too cluttered! I suppose there is the risk doing a work with that much detail that it could feel a lil' too much and detracting someone's attention!

I've added another sample from his blog, which shows he can definitely work with colour as well.
beautiful subtle tones in the background. The figures themselves don't have much definition in terms of colour, shading in most areas seems to have been carried out using small clusters of dashes varying in amount according to the depth of the shadow :)

Group James consists of me only, since I wasn't in on Tuesday!!! See if I can do something to catch up... :(