Award Winning

Today I was awarded the "College Award for Creative Achievement" at the Rutland College, Oakham.
This award is given to the one student they feel has achieved the most in the year, and I was nominated for it by my Graphic Design tutor, June.
In my time at the Rutland College, I worked very hard - I joined the college unsure of my skills and potential artistically and graphically (I had not done as well as I had hoped in my art based GCSEs, and had taken three years out of education to travel and work), and in the time I spent there I feel I learnt a great deal about Art, Graphic Design and Photography, which all has boosted not only my skills but my confidence in myself artistically.

I am very pleased to have this presented to me, and I hope I can live up to the title and talents of those awarded it in the years before and after me.

Proverb Illustration

Uploaded my final piece for one of my modules at university, an illustrated proverb, "There are 40 types of lunacy but only one type of common sense".
I was really pleased how it came out - I used a mixture of styles and techniques - each one representing a feel of lunacy, or of common sense.
For the figure I used several clothing references from a popular sensible clothes catalogue, then created the sweet cartoon character with the blonde curly hair out of my imagination. I used bright and "wooly" looking colours, to convey a feeling of wrapping up warm and sensibly. I also used a classical umbrella, shielding her from the background and the lunacy. As you can see around the umbrella is the lunacy themed area, and inside it is calmer and blue.
For the lunacy area, I used reds and blacks, and drew out the big red moon in Photoshop. I also took photographs of myself making a sinister hand, covered in red paint, and scanned in papers I had created with splats and smears of red "blood". This added the rough, horror-filled feeling to the background.
The text was created using a normal font on a seperate layer, and then creating another layer over the top and drawing over it, using the font as a guide to keeping the letters even and straight, but freehanding a completely different feel to the letters, with the dripping, smeary effect. Then I deleted the reference font, leaving my own hand-written font.

The only critique for this piece, which I noticed much too late, was her hat being in front of the umbrella, instead of inside, and perhaps I could've drawn some "lunacy" images to hover menacingly around the figure in the lunacy area.

Life Drawing

Removed some older works and added a selection of new life drawings, both male and female (full nude). Both of these models were not the "ideal" figure we are subjected to in our daily lives by the media as "perfection". I learnt alot more about anatomy, skin and how flesh moves and hangs from our frames from these sessions, as well as how to interpret age and weight. It's fair enough drawing pretty people, but I must expand myself to a much wider range if I am to succeed.

I hope to update my site as I progress, moving older works to an archive that can also be viewed by the public and potential clients to show how I've improved, but not showcasing them as my current standard of works.

More Illustrations

Added three new illustrations to the site, these are mostly my personal works in my free time. I like to spend my spare time practising exploring my figures and creating characters and ideas. I hope I will keep progressing and learning new styles that I can exhibit in my portfolio and be seen as an illustrator, designer and artist that has a broad and exciting range with bags of imagination!

Every Thursday I attend a life-drawing class, and I will post some of my favourite figures on the site in the life drawing section, and use the rest as references to create more fuller works. I hope that by attending these classes, and expanding on the drawings I can greatly improve my knowledge of different anatomys, lighting and drawing at various speeds.

Graphic Design

Added a few of my graphic design pieces, including logo designs, poster and record covers.
I created these last year as a part of my Graphic Design A-Level, using a variety of artists and designers as inspiration as well as exploring textures and collage with my own photography and papers. I enjoy using my own photographs in my works, as well as painting, scrunching, dying and printing on papers to create texture and interesting background - especially scanned into Photoshop and layered on top of each other.
I feel this creates a natural hand-made look, with the sleek computer edited finish on top.
As I progress through my Illustration degree, I want to use these techniques again, and have been working on creating interesting papers to draw apon, or simply to scan and layer an existing image onto, which I feel will help me create a more distinctive "style" thats recognisable and interesting.

Testing... Testing...

Is this thing on?

Hey there. I'm just seeing if this works - I'm trying to create a small blog on here for news and updates on my work and thoughts, and to help track my progress as part of a university requirement.
I'm trying to create a reflective area where I can record my ideas and thoughts, as well as keep track of my critiques, references and inspirations. How will I be exploring my degree? What am I learning? Am I closer to achieving my goal to be part of the industry? Are my works relevant and successful, and what skills am I learning as I go?

Right now I don't have alot to say - Kaos is on a bit of a hiatus as I'm bogged down with Illustration projects right now, and I have a few pieces of graphic design works I am keen to add to my portfolio as soon as I can, as at the moment there is little to no evidence of my graphic design A-Level here!

Best wishes,
Rebecca