Designing a logo

I've finished my final logo design for my project I'm currently working on, a clothing/homewear brand. This will feature across the board, for the website, business cards and clothing labels, so I had to get it just right.

I've had a little previous experience with type. I wanted a freehand geometric drawing to make it feel like it hasn't been generated, so the logo seemed like it was designed for purpose opposed to taken from an already made alphabet.

Upon reflection, next time I would print off some letters to use as a rough template, as the curved letters were quite hard to do by hand and it would be easy to lose proportion. They also have to have some uniform aspect to them, so a guide would definitely help. I would also like to find better ways of drawing curves as the last curve of the S on the bottom was especially difficult, so this last chunk I made in Photoshop.

Trying new things

I'm currently working on applications for my artwork, I'm very interested in incorporating it into homewear and clothing. So first steps, when you have no idea how to do something, take a beginners course or consult Youtube, I chose the former, having no idea where I could get some clay and a kiln. Yep, I'm talking about ceramics, I attended a beginners mug making workshop at the Manchester Craft and Design Center, run by the Manchester Pottery School. I do have to say my mug is abit weird but I love it for all it's flaws as you can see I predicted this in my design. 

The plan for the future is to find more classes and have a go on a potters wheel. I would love to sell my designs on tiles or mugs, as these are items that can be a little quirky opposed to dinner plates. My homewear range would be singular stand out peices or smaller ones you could co-ord in a room. Sticking to little use of colour will help me to stay away from trends so much as I would never want the pieces to be kitsch or throwaway, hopefully handmade items you want to hold on to. I'm very much inspired by Moroccan tiles and the beautiful patterns in them, I would love to do some repeating patterns with my work.

Single Cover Art

Some work for a friends awesome band. They wanted something to use for a single cover and would look good on a tshirt. Here's some development and final piece. And I love working on type!

Here's a link to them https://soundcloud.com/purplethreadofficial

Jumping in Puddles

Going back to basics and just playing with your materials can be liberating. My absolute favourite medium is ink, more the watching of how it interacts with water than the finished result. The pictures below I made with the purpose of texture and background for more finalised peices, to give them abit more depth. I always wish I could scan them in wet! Something very intruiging about wet ink on paper... and messy.

Hattie Newman Talk

Hattie Newman is a paper artist and she came to Stockport College to do a talk with us. She makes epic scenes and creative sets all from paper. For our class soon to be graduating, it was great to hear someone so young at the prime of her career, with how it feels and how scary it all can be, fresh in her mind. 

So down to earth, it was an absolute pleasure to hear her talk. Sat down cross legged on the stage humbly chatting us through her impressive client list, such as John Lewis, Louis Vuitton and The Guardian. She just loves what she does, with questions we asked does she ever lose patience, and no, because to her, it doesn't feel like work, yet so many hours, days and some pieces can even take weeks. It's a long process with all the planning measuring and then finally assembly, it's really work that requires a lot of project managing in addition to creative flair.

She works so hard to create beautiful well thought out landscapes, not just scale models but designed to reflect the clients wishes and to convey a message about what the companies all about. Her landscapes are fun, colourful and really well put together with the cuts. 

Fresh out of uni she says she didn't know that her job even existed, as with the case with a lot of jobs in creativity, it's meeting people, researching and looking behind the image and seeing what was done to create that. She moved to London, sleeping on a sofa she supported herself with a part time job and started to get the odd jobs here and there,  then her talent and hard work payed off and she has snowballed, into and in demand successful image maker.

She spoke about the importance of collaboration with others, she says without working with photographers the images would never do the original work justice. She also said about bouncing ideas off of other people and having people assist her in the paper making, imagine making 100 paper trees alone! 

It was interesting to learn about a method I'd never really done before and the awesome results that follow, I feel I would be two hours down surrounded by screwed up paper if I had a go, so hats off to her!

www.hattienewman.co.uk

The 100 Day Project

The following exercise is dictated by photographer Erik Almas, but I felt I could still use this method with my illustration work. The aim is to collect 100 images of things you would like to create. Then to brainstorm words that resonate with those said images, do this for each image then see which words pop up the most. These could be colour, genre, or elements that make up the image etc. You then narrow down the list and see what key words you are attracted to, these are then what you should focus on doing in all your future artwork. 

The images you choose should be the ones that strike you, resonate with you and what you would love to create.

I have been collecting images for a while now and I have hit my 100 mark, so I'm ready to start writing down my words for each. Here below are a few of my favorites. 

Doing my ABCs

I've recently been getting into typography, and wanted to make my own beautiful bold letters to begin my paragraphs. Having recently explored writing my own stories I wanted to make an alphabet that was inspired by and reflects my writing. It's fantasy fueled with elements of dystopia, death, angels and demons, with things that begin with the chosen letter, hopefully to recreate children's classroom borders of "a for apple". 

I feel my next step would be to try out borders and some colour, hopefully they can adapt to screen prints without losing too much of the detail. And possibly make some variations as for use in a story it would be nice for all the paragraphs to have a different design.