Emma Charleston - Graphic Design

THURSDAY OFFICE PARTY

2012-01-19T17:48:00.001Z

Sorry for a lack of creative updates.

This is not going to break that trend. Why would I do drawings when I could be dancing?

Made using Kinotopic app for iphone.

OK Stupid

2011-12-18T19:06:00.002Z

Anyone who reads this blog semi-regularly will be aware of my contributions to Alex's Unstruck project. Every day, he gets asked a question, answers it in under 500 words, and then an illustrator illustrates that answer. I do a weekly illustration for him, but unusually this week I was also asking the questions.

Alex answered the questions in a random order so I wouldn't know which one I was going to get to illustrate. I reckon I got one of the most difficult, but then I always think that.

In the end I quite enjoyed it though. Here it is...

As some of you may know, I've been on OK Cupid for quite a white. That 'quite a while' kind of says it all - it's clearly not proved successful at it's intended purpose, and to be honest, I don't ever expect it to be. All I know is, going on dates with complete strangers from the internet is a very special kind of scary fun, and I've enjoyed the whole experience a lot.

I've also, strangely, enjoyed all the inevitable not so fun bits... Creepy messages propositioning marriage and 'make many babies together', 5 star ratings from thoroughly strange/disturbing men, and some charmingly awkward meetings of not-very-like minds.

So I decided to create some kind of summary of my (and presumably, most other people's) experiences on OK Cupid, and this is it. Click to embiggen.

Oh, and if you're a charming man who thinks we might get along, let's go on a date! :)

(I don't consider this one of my finer graphic design/illustration/artistic moments. But it was fun. So I'm sharing it here...)

More festivity

2011-12-17T17:15:00.002Z

Well this is the THIRD christmas card I've designed this year! I guess I've got into the swing of things now. This one is for the company I work for (Kings Colleges), to be sent out to various people.

I ended up doing a whole lot of variations because I couldn't decide which one to go for! So I figured I might as well share them all with you here. I'm still not sure which one we'll choose...

Wellness

2011-11-26T23:48:00.001Z

Another one for Alex's Unstruck project...

Retrospectively, I think I prefer the circle to the heart (which you can see if you click the link)... but I do too many circles. I enjoyed the texture making, even if I'm not pleased with how it relates to the text of the piece. It's always an experiment.

I'm sorry. More early festive creativity.

2011-11-19T22:58:00.001Z

I'm not actually feeling particularly christmassy, but as I'm trying to have a thrifty christmas, it makes sense to try and use some creativity to save money.
So no nasty plastic ribbons for me this year, oh no! I'm going to print out these and stick them on presents instead. I'll wrap the presents in simple brown parcel wrap and hopefully these will jazz them up a bit. I might even print them off onto some slightly thicker card and use them as tags to write names on.

I'm sorry. I know it's too early for Christmas

2011-11-14T22:49:00.001Z

But this is for a competition!
The excellent Stack Magazines are running a competition to design a Christmas card - the only criteria is that it had to be A6 and include magazines in some way.
So here's my entry.

Gosh I hope I win. £250 would come in very handy right now, and I would LOVE a subscription for next year.

I'm being super selfish and not even linking to the competition because I'm worried one of you will go over there, enter it, and do something better than me. (Ok, that is selfish. Go on then.)

Quiet time

2011-11-14T22:40:00.001Z

Here's something I've been meaning to do for a while...
I go to church, and have been going to this particular church for a few years. It's a beautiful building, and every Wednesday it's open for the general public to go in and have a look. Importantly (to me, anyway), there's no pressure from whoever is supervising the church - it's not a evangelical 'COME JOIN US!' sort of atmosphere - it's just a friendly welcome for whatever that person might need... Be that prayer, quiet time for thought, or just a place away from the rush of the city centre for a few minutes.

There's been talk for a while about getting an A-board to stand outside, so that people know the church is open. Now, let's be honest... churches are not renowned for their amazing graphic design. In fairness, my church does a fairly good job as keeping things simple and understated, so I'm not about to storm in there and start insisting we use Helvetica for all the orders of service.

But I thought it might be a nice thing to design a big, bold message for the A-board. I don't expect this will be used. And even if they are interested, I will probably work on something more than this. This is a first draft, I guess.

I've done two colour schemes, and I'm not sure which is most appropriate, although I definitely prefer the second one :)

No sleep

2011-11-04T21:46:00.002Z

Some things which make NO SENSE

2011-10-11T22:12:00.000+01:00

For some explanation, take a look at Unstruck

Hope and Social

2011-09-23T23:53:00.001+01:00

Well now. This is a nice thing which I have enjoyed very much.

A few months ago I had a lovely email from a man called Simon who is in a band called Hope and Social. He nicely asked me if they could use one of my illustrations for their album artwork, which I agreed to, since he seemed like a nice chap.

Anyway, at the time he mentioned that they liked my work, and would, at some point, like to ask me to produce a poster for their next tour.

Well, I love music, and I love designing related to music, so this was a delight.

So that time came around, and after a few hours crouched on my living room floor over this...

I ended up with these.
You should DEFINITELY full view at least one of them. Go on.

They're getting them printed to sell at their shows, as a limited edition. Initially we were going to do ten of each colour way, but due to financial restraints we're just going with 40 of one colour in the end, the orange one. It's going to be printed on a lovely recycled stock, and I cannot WAIT to recieve mine in the post - not to mention meet the guys at their London show.

If you're in the vicinity of any of those places on the appropriate dates, you should definitely go along. And buy a poster ;)

Playing Cards

2011-08-20T15:56:00.001+01:00

So here's a thing I've been wanting to talk about for a while.

In my day job, I work for a small group of international colleges. There are a lot of different elements to what I do there - from designing brochures, print ads, leaflets and flyers, right through to designing actual signage within the colleges, getting branded umbrellas made for day trips... it's varied, to say the least.

One part of the business is persueding students to come to our colleges, and this is frequently done by trips abroad to meet education agents. Giving gifts is a fairly established part of this, right across the industry. These can range from branded pens and notebooks, to sweets, postcards, mugs, calendars, and many other such things. The main aim is for the gift to be both functional (so the agent will want to actually keep it in their office close to hand) and well branded (so they remember who gave it to them). An added bonus is if the gift can in some way promote the colleges at the same time.

Something I thought of a few months back was a branded deck of playing cards. Everyone loves playing cards - they encourage socialising, they're good for entertainment on trips abroad, they're small and easy to carry, and they have a lot of possibility for branding.

So we set to designing our very own pack of cards. One of the parts which I most enjoyed was designing the reverse of the cards. My attempts started out slightly pitifully - playing with the logo and trying to see if it made a good repeat pattern. Turns out... it doesn't. I spent quite a long time trying though!

This was probably the best I came up with, but still not brilliant.

This one looks like some kind of party gone wrong.

I decided it was time to go completely back to the drawing board, and started again from scratch. Here were some ideas...

After talking about it though, we decided the backs of the cards needed some kind of branding involved. I spent quite a while trying to shoehorn this into my existing designs...

But ultimately decided to go back to the drawing board AGAIN, and start from scratch. This was a good decision, because I produced these. Which, if I do say so myself, I really like.

This was the final design which we went with.

I also illustrated the box in a similar style, and an ace of spades and creepy joker. The rest of the cards featured a selection of photographs by our lead photographer Wayne, showing the whole spectrum of college life, from our summer camps, to our classrooms, to day excursions, all in delightfully vivid technicolour. If I'd had my way, I'd probably have liked to illustrate every single card, but the whole point of the project was to promote the colleges, and I think this was definitely an effective way of doing it. The pack functions both as a pack of playing cards, and as a portable photographic marketing tool.

So anyway... here are some shots of the final packs, which eventually arrived yesterday.

A blog which is, at least partially, not about me for once.

2011-08-09T22:32:00.001+01:00

Well… Like I'm sure a vast majority of the country, I have been left reeling by the riots in London the last couple of nights.

At times like this, Twitter seems like both a blessing and a curse - during the day today, the rallying of Londoners to clean up the streets has been truly heartening. But late last night, hearing stories of muggings, friends of mine boarding up the fronts of their houses to try and stay safe, while links were posted to videos and pictures that sent shivers of horror down my spine… Well, sometimes I wonder if it would be better to switch off the TV, radio and internet, and just NOT KNOW what's going on.

But of course I could never actually do that.

It is depressing though, feeling so powerless. I found myself wishing I could take part in the clean up operation, donate clothes or food to the people made homeless... something to show solidarity.

Anyway, as the morning progressed, news emerged of the Sony warehouse burnt down in North London, taking with it the stock of a vast roster of small UK music labels - some of whom will really struggle to come back from this hit to their physical stockpile.

As the day progressed, there were rallying calls to help out these labels - either with a one off donation - or, better for both parties, by buying their music.

My good friends the 405 led the rallying call with this piece...
Where you can read a full list of the labels affected, and see 10 albums which the 405 personally recommend as good buys.

Inspired by them, I've decided to make my own list - and as I started looking into it, I was stunned to discover just how many of my favourite albums have been released by these labels.

I hadn't quite realised how much I love Warp Records either, as 6 out of 10 of these albums were released on Warp.

So without further ado, here's my list of 10 albums I would highly recommend you buy/download. It's just one small thing to help one small group of people affected by these senseless riots, but every little helps. Music is a huge part of my life, and this is both a selection of the music which makes me happy on a day to day basis, and me trying, in my own futile little way, to do something to help the amazing artists and labels behind it.

I've even made a Spotify playlist here, where you can listen to tracks from the albums I've recommended.

1. Battles - Gloss Drop (Warp)
Probably my album of the year so far. Their first album 'Mirrored' (which you should also buy…) was widely critically acclaimed, but for me personally, this is a stronger overall piece. The final track 'Sundome', is a work of sheer brilliance, and the selection of guest vocalists is inspired, from the weird shouting of the Boredoms lead singer Yamantaka Eye, the lead single Ice Cream's Matias Aguayo, through to an unexpected cameo from Gary Numan.

2. Prefuse 73 - Prefuse 73 Reads the Books (Warp)
I've been really enjoying this album the last week or so. Glitchy, strange samples, but not by any means difficult listening. I don't know much about Prefuse 73, other than he seems ridiculously prolific - so I'm sure I'll be picking up more albums by him soon.

3. Bibio - Mind Bokeh
Unusually wistful electro, and with beautiful artwork - this is one I actually went out and bought as a physical CD - something I generally save for either highly anticipated albums, or beautiful artwork. This one was the latter, but the album itself is a huge grower too.

4. Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children (Warp)
One of my calming albums - appropriate for these troubled times! Slightly melancholy, eerie electro.

5. Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma (Warp)
This is one of my favourite albums of all time. Well, I know that's a bold statement to make given that it's only been out a year or so, but I've listened to it enough times to feel fairly safe in that conviction. Elaborate, unexpected and incredible, there's something new to hear every time. Don't be put off by the first 10 seconds. It gets easier and far far more beautiful. AND Thom Yorke guest vox on one track. What more could you ask.

6. Tyondai Braxton - Central Market (Warp)
Classical music, generally speaking, is not my thing. This is probably the closest thing to classical music which I enjoy, and I enjoy it a lot. There's an orchestra! It's incredible, seriously - definitely an album to listen to start to finish. The centrepiece 'Platinum Rows' is something quite magical. (Plus being the closest I'll ever get to taking the kazoo seriously as an instrument)

7. Four Tet - Pause (Domino)
I always associate Domino with Franz Ferdinand, so was surprised and pleased to discover Four Tet is also on their list of artists. I actually bought this album about 5 years ago… I remember, because I was still in sixth form, and bought it from Bangor Cob Records - best music store in North Wales! For some reason I barely listened to it at the time, and it's sat quietly on my hard drive, waiting for appreciation. Well, I appreciate it now - and would highly recommend you do too. Easier listening than his later album 'rounds'.

8. Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise (Rough Trade Records)
The album always reminds me of Alex (of Unstruck Fame) - it was him who recommended it to me. This is another calming album, but also uplifting. Hours have been spent walking by the sea listening to it.

9. Ratatat - LP4 (XL)
Instrumental bliss - and danceable as anything. I saw them live a few months ago, and they were an absolute delight. Some of the best video visuals I've ever seen at a live show too!

10. Tokimonsta - Creature Dreams (Brainfeeder)
I previously only knew LA based DJ Tokimonsta for her incredible mix compilations, but this EP which came out a couple of months ago shows that's she's a pretty impressive musician in her own right. Sparkly and uplifting electro, but without losing a slight sinister hint throughout.

If you've listened to the playlist but decided that I actually have dreadful taste in music, but still sympathise with the cause of the labels, then do make a donation using the following link, and check out the 405's article of all the labels affected, to see who you might like to support.

Portraits

2011-08-03T20:53:00.001+01:00

Well, I did these this morning at work for a project it turns out we're not going to do any more. So I can share them with you here. Some vector portraits.
I initially produce them in black and white because it makes the process easier for my little brain, but I've also included the cyan versions I did later. Click to view big for extra-super-mega-ultra detail.

10 points* if you know who they both are. A further 10 points if you can guess how they're connected and why I drew them.

*points not redeemable for anything. Haha :)

I drew this today.

2011-07-29T23:53:00.001+01:00

For Unstruck... (you can see an explanation of the Unstruck project here)

You can see the piece which my illustration relates to here... A bit of a struggle to come up with anything particularly literal! I enjoyed this though.

Minglin'

2011-07-27T22:53:00.001+01:00

Well now. This was TWO WEEKS ago! Bit late on the blogging, and for that I apologise.
The opening night of the Haiku exhibition which I took part in was an delight.

You can read a bit more background to the show here

The venue was the Maison Bertaux in Soho, which has in the past played host to various creative types, perhaps most notably The Mighty Boosh's Noel Fielding, whose vibrant, surreal paintings are perhaps best known for their part in the Mighty Boosh DVDs and books.

The actual gallery is in the basement - the upstairs street level is a delightful little patisserie, which was a strange combination of granny-like charm, and neon/feathers/glitter which wouldn't have been out of place in an episode of the Mighty Boosh.

I had a ridiculously jammy biscuit.

Anyway, the show itself was very well curated and hung, with the poems displayed in black frames, and the accompanying artworks surrounding them in pale wood frames. The artworks were varied, with Bonnie Friend's beautiful traditional illustrations contrasted with Chrissie Cant's more abstract interpretations, and my somewhat non-unified, varied attempts.

Overall, a lovely little show to be part of, and if any of you DID make it over there to see it... thanks :)

Here I am (Right, very sunburnt, pulling silly face) with my friends Rosie and Hannah... Thanks especially to Hannah, Rosie and Michael (who took this picture!) for coming along to keep me company!

Happiness, symbolised

2011-07-27T22:19:00.000+01:00

Same old same old, that bit where I say 'sorry for not doing a blog' 'I've honestly been really busy!' etc etc.
Enough of that. Although I am sorry. And I have been really busy.

Anyway, today at work I was tasked with designing some small icons for a brochure. The icons needed to symbolise things like 'food and drink', 'excursions', and, most difficult: 'fun'.

Well as me and my senior designer agreed, fun means different things to different people. So I decided to ask the Twitter hivemind that is my 400-odd (very odd, sometimes...) followers...

I got various responses...
"those party tooter things that unroll when you blow them"
"a smiley face? a party hat? a small man jumping for joy?"
"kids laughing?"

And then Tom Robinson suggested "A GLOWING MULTICOLOURED ORB"

I liked this. Abstract. And most definitely fun.
However, my icons were to be limited to one colour, which I pointed out.

"Bah. How about a saxophone with cakes pouring out of it?"

Now I'll be honest... That's not something easily iconable. But it's definitely something that needed drawing. Because I genuinely have nothing better to do with my evenings this week.

And in case you were interested... This is my final icon representation of 'fun'. He is having SO much fun. I really hope we actually use him.

Maison Bertaux, tomorrow night...

2011-07-13T22:25:00.000+01:00

Well I probably haven't really mentioned this nearly as much as I should have done. Regular readers (ha! difficult to be a regular reader when I only post once in a blue moon!) may remember my semi recent Haiku illustrations. Non regular readers can see them here and here.

To summarise the project again, my friend Danny decided he'd ask some of his artistic friends to produce illustrations for some of his poems. He liked the results to much that, in collaboration with two of the other artists, he decided to put on a small exhibition in London.

I'm delighted to say that my works (four in total) will feature at that show, and that the private view is tomorrow night at the Maison Bertaux in Soho. I'll be honest and admit that I've taken something of a back seat in the organisation of the show - other than sending my works up to London in a very securely packaged 'do not bend' envelope, I've not contributed to anything else in terms of organisation.

Framing, choice of gallery, private view drinks and music... well, they'll be as much of a surprise to me as they will to you! (if you decide to go and take a look). It's quite exciting, and I'm very much looking forwards to seeing all the works gathered together tomorrow night.

However, I'm a realist, and I know most of you probably won't make it over there...
So I figured I'd share my other two illustrations with you here.

The first is for this...

Nature eludes me
In this city. My nature
Runs from this city.

I hope this makes some sense. This cityscape is not far from my home in Brighton.

The second is for this:

I see you hiding,
Amongst the flowery shade
Black, raggedy cat.

Took a bit of an abstract approach to this one. I created these flowers. They're taken from an image of a flower I took a long time ago, out of that image, I cropped cat sillouhettes, and then rotated these to reform into flower like forms again.
I doubt anyone would work that out from just looking at them though, so hopefully they're just pleasing abstract forms.

In the actual show, they've been hung in one frame as one single piece. You can see a sneaky preview of that here, in this image of the show being hung. (I hope you don't mind me using this, Chrissy!)

I'm sure I will take some pictures at the private view and post them here afterwards. Mainly of me mingling about the place with a glass of red wine in my hand. Even though I don't drink wine... that's just what you do at private views, right?

Looking inward

2011-06-09T22:12:00.001+01:00

So, another illustration for one of Danny's haikus... You can read a bit more about the project in this previous post

This is the next haiku I chose to illustrate...

Do we all forget?
Being happy is an end
To looking inward.

As is my way, I decided to take the idea somewhat literally, and created an instructional diagram which demonstrates how to look into your heart. Haikus are quite an interesting form of poetry, because they're so open to interpretation... so maybe I've taken it in entirely the wrong way, but that's part of the fun of the project I guess.

I started by drawing a heart...

For a while I thought it might be nice in red, but I changed my mind.

And then some BIG LOUD ARROWS. Look inwards, you see.

A year of incredible

2011-06-09T21:56:00.001+01:00

It's pretty hard to believe, but this week was the University of Brighton Degree show - that means it's a whole year since my degree show - a whole year since I graduated.

Of course it's part of human nature to discuss the nature of time and how quickly/slowly it passes by, so it's no surprise I find myself doing the same thing - running off the same old clichés*... "It feels like just yesterday" etc etc

But it DOES feel like just yesterday I was gleefully standing in front of my degree show, looking out into the 'real world' and wondering what it held for me. Fortunately the ensuing year has held a lot of delightful, exciting, unusual and fortuitous occurrences, and I feel like a very lucky little graduate.

Anyway, much though you might have believed otherwise, this blog isn't actually about me talking about myself (for once). It's about this year's amazing group of graphic design and illustration graduates from Brighton Uni.

That last link will take you to their website, which was built by the excellent Josh Harrison. He was one of my degree show helpers last year, and lucky for him, I didn't realise at the time what an insane coding wizard he is, or I'd probably have tried to rope him into helping me build some ridiculously extravagant website.

I was lucky enough to go to the private view of the degree show, where I had a lovely time mingling around and soaking up the excitement. The next day I went back for another good look around, but didn't have my camera with me. I made a third brief visit after work, when I rushed around snapping some of my favourite pieces.
Unfortunately, I'm dreadful and didn't note down all names... So on the offchance you read this and see your work here, please tell me so I can link to your website!

Right, onwards...

For starters, a beautiful new alphabet by Bryn Mackenzie...

Shamefully, I didn't see the name of the graphic designer behind these beautiful pieces, but they were undoubtedly some of my favourites... (And my dreadful light reflecting images don't really do them justice either)

Katie Scott's gorgeous illustrations were another highlight...

Another illustrator whose work I loved was Pete Gamlen...

I first met Thom Bird midway through his final year, when I helped him cut out a selection of corrugated cardboard triangles. His paper and card exploits have continued and he has produced an amazing collection of final pieces.

I saw Charlie Sheppard's work earlier on this year, and the project which he's chosen to display is one of my favourites. The sports hall floor is so evocative and he created some beautiful posters to continue the theme.

Zöe Austin makes lovely photographic montages. Her postcard/business cards featured one of my favourites.

This is just a very small selection of the work at this year's degree show, and there is so much more amazingness that I couldn't possibly fit it all in one blog. Although you've missed their Brighton degree show, fortunately, there will be another show in London from July 8th – 12th at the Rochelle School. You can find more details on their website, and I'd highly recommend checking it out. We put on our London show at the Rochelle School too, and it's a beautiful setting for the work.

Now... on to the next year!

*It's only today I learnt the keyboard shortcut for ´... Learning doesn't stop at the end of formal education! I'm gonna be cliché, café and blaséing left right and centre from now on.)

LA local campaign

2011-06-09T19:56:00.001+01:00

So, here's another little project I can show you...

Our college in LA wanted some local marketing materials, (posters, flyers etc), to be distributed in other areas of Los Angeles. Generally our marketing materials tend to revolve around bright, aspirational photography, but unusually, these were requested in black and white. Also, one of the great selling points of this college is it's incredible location, just off sunset boulevard, and only minutes walk from the 'Walk of Fame', and other central Hollywood attractions. This is an especially strong marketing point for people who already live in LA, as they'll know exactly where this is, and how great a location it is.

So we decided not to use photographs, like we usually would, and instead to work on a design which would centre around a map.

I LOVE maps, and very much enjoyed creating this isometric representation of the streets surrounding the college. We also used a recreation of Google's - now iconic - place marker, to show just where the college is

Here are some early layouts...

Ultimately, these were printed off on coloured paper, so that - despite saving on print costs - they still stand out on a wall of other black and white ads and posters. This bright colour, combined with the hard lines of the map and the bold text created something pretty effective.

Invitations.

2011-06-09T19:09:00.000+01:00

It's been quite a while since I've written anything, and I'm sorry for that. It's genuinely not through lack of busyness though.

The day job is proving to be quite delightful, in terms of allowing me to actually spend my days working on interesting and fulfilling projects. However, quite often, I'm not actually able to blog about them until they've been 'released into the world', and by that point I've usually become distracted by the newest shiny thing I'm working on, and, as a result, never get round to showing you. I'm easily diverted.

Anyway, this was a quick, short project we did, and I can show you it now.
Our Oxford college runs an art foundation course, and they needed some invites for their final show.
We went for a simple, typographic treatment - it fits with the overall Kings brand, as we're using our brand typeface, and various style conventions, but we've gone easy on our use of the logo (settling for the simple circular version in the bottom corner on the back), which means that this piece is much more about promoting their show and their work than Kings as a brand.

The main challenge of this piece was actually finding a printer who could produce it. From the start, me and James were really keen on the idea of printing a fluorescent spot ink onto greyboard... it's a bit 'trendy', but I like it. For this effect to be achieved on a small scale (we only needed 100 invites), the only real solution was screen printing.

When at uni, we tending to think nothing of just getting something screenprinted, but in the real world, it's remarkably difficult to find a printer who uses this technique. After lots of research and plenty of dead ends, I eventually tracked down a lovely guy up near Haywards Heath (http://www.acresdesignandprint.com/) who was very helpful indeed, and managed to produce the invitations exactly to our specifications.

He was doubtful whether the flourescent ink would show up very bright, as - when printed on such an absorbent stock, he expected much of it would just soak in and fade away. But we were both delighted to find the invitations turned out just as vividly as we'd hoped for.

I really like the useage of greyboard in this context - for me, anyway, it has strong associations with my art foundation course: the back of sketchbooks, using it to build models, using it as a cheap cutting board and so on... it's a material I strongly associate with the 'behind the scenes' of creativity.

We actually got these done a couple of weeks ago, but I'd been waiting for our lovely photographer Wayne to take some nice shots of them for me. Thanks Wayne!

Happiness

2011-05-10T21:23:00.000+01:00

Another Unstruck illustration for Alex...
This time, the question is: 'If misery loves company, what does happiness love?'

The Unstruck project is a collaboration between questioner, writer and illustrator. Alex gets 7 questions a week - one each morning, and half an hour to write an answer for each. He then hands his answer over to an illustrator who has half an hour to produce an illustration. It's an exercise in speed and generally squeezing out some creativity - for him, on a daily basis, for me, occasionally, when I volunteer, or am asked.

This one wasn't so easy. I think it's a lovely piece, and of course, happiness is a beautiful thing, but how to illustrate that? Decided to take the somewhat easy option and go for a typographic piece, based on the text of the article, and the idea of what 'happiness loves'...

Alex says he'd like it on a t-shirt. Which is definitely a compliment.

Pattern-tastic

2011-05-02T19:57:00.001+01:00

Well, the repeat pattern urge struck me again, and I spent far too long last night drawing this drawing which didn't even work very well in the end. Oh well.

It was inspired by this old tile which I saw during the day. I love those amazing elaborate cracks which appear in old ceramics. But through a combination of laziness, and actually genuinely feeling like it looked better that way, I didn't entirely fill in all the gaps.

Unfortunately due to my lack of perfectionism and choosing a very elaborate pattern, it doesn't EXACTLY match up at the edges, as you'll see if you look at the full view. Oh well. Another lesson learnt for the future!

Here's the tile which inspired it all...

Here's the one main section which will repeat...

And here are a few examples of the pattern.

UPDATE!

My friend is a delightfully technical game art designy type who knows all about repeat pattern textures. He kindly applied by pattern to a sphere, which I find irrationally delightful, even if it does make the errors in my repeat a bit more obvious...

Modern Toss

2011-04-30T23:19:00.000+01:00

I do a bit of writing for the excellent Bored of Brighton blog, about events in the Brighton area - generally arts and music. You can read some of my previous pieces here, here, here, and indeed, here.

Anyway, a couple of nights ago I was lucky enough to attend the private view of Modern Toss' new show at Ink__d gallery in Brighton. Here's a cheeky preview of my piece about it for Bored of Brighton, along with some pictures I took on the night.

The press release for Modern Toss' new exhibition promised - amongst other things - some 'challenging' tea towel designs. Tea towels are not generally renowned for being 'challenging', so I was pretty excited to head over there and take a look.

I arrived fully prepared to be 'challenged'… but although I was challenged getting through the crowds to actually see the work, I found myself more charmed than challenged by the work itself.

I got the impression that this show would consist mainly of anti-monarchist Royal Wedding themed work. Much of Ink__d's last show (Carrie Reichardt's "Mad in England") was based around this idea as well, and I did wonder whether two such shows in a row right be a tad samey.

Well I was completely wrong. For me, modern-toss are best known for their comical dissections of the harsh banality of day to day office life, as well as their 'home clubber' strips, published weekly in The Guardian. Both of these are generally small, simple illustrations, and I had wondered whether the show would just be many of these, blown up in size and framed, but again, I was delighted to be proved wrong.

With several beautifully produced screen prints, and some unexpectedly gorgeous type treatments, I was charmed afresh by their sense of humour in a new context. As well as these differences, there were also some unusual mixed media pieces, still cleverly reflecting the themes they work with so well, but in a new and fresh way. I was particularly delighted by their famous 'Periodic Table of Swearing' - while displayed in it's original context as a tea towel, it had also been made up into a suit by famous local tailor Gresham Blake. A perfect example of how this show takes their work and style and finds ways of displaying it in new and inventive ways.

While there were a lot of delights at this show, possibly my favourite piece was actually quite well hidden - pasted up on the back wall of the outdoor garden, entitled 'Retail Village of the Damned', it is an Escher Style depiction of crowds flooding into an inescapable shopping centre.

The show is on until May 30th, and is particularly worth a visit next weekend on the 7th of May, when the boys from Modern Toss will be there producing portraits of visitors to the gallery.

I see you drivin' round town with the girl I love and I'm like: haiku~

2011-04-30T22:55:00.001+01:00

My friend Danny writes poems.
He asked for anyone who was interested to consider illustrating one of his haikus. I decided to get started on this one...

Woman in purple,
Eats blueberries one by one.
Pink lips. Black hair. Eyes..?

I guess poetry is a very subjective thing, and it brings to mind different imagery for everyone who reads it. This immediately reminded me of blackberry picking as a child, arriving home with fingers stained blue and purple from the berries - as an adult, whenever I eat berries and get stained fingers, I feel like a child again. The richness of the colours delights me.

So I decided to go with this idea of berries, fingers and the deep, rich colours. Here are some of my initial experiments...

And here is my final illustration.

Danny wants another version with the text somehow incorporated, which is always a challenge, as I hadn't originally envisaged this. Here are a couple of attempts, but that aspect is still very much working progress.

Woodville

2011-04-14T20:25:00.000+01:00

Oh dear oh dear, long time no blog!
I have a whole combination of dreadful excuses which I'm not going to bore you with, because it doesn't matter. I'm back now.

A bit of an unusual blog for me, as I don't actually have any of my own images to show you. Well, not still images anyway. Last weekend I had the pleasure of making a short amateur documentary of a photoshoot at Stanmer Park, Brighton.

Two of my colleagues - James and Wayne - also run a wedding photography company, Horse and Carriage. While the vast majority of their work is wedding based, they also get the occasional non-wedding shoot, like this one.
The mission was to photograph the band Woodville - Louie and Charly - for their upcoming album cover, plus some general promotional shots.

The shoot had been very thoroughly planned by Art Director James, but could still have ended badly were it not for the beautiful weather we were blessed with on the day.

I'll let me video tell the rest of the story... suffice to say it was a really interesting process to be involved with. Well, I say involved... all I really did was creep around the shadows filming goings on, although I did also serve the purpose of test subject in some initial lighting test shots, along with James...

I really enjoy making short films like this, although still have a lot to learn, especially with regards not wobbling the camera around... oh well :)

Woodville Photoshoot from Emma Charleston on Vimeo.

(I'd recommend watching it on Vimeo, rather than the embedded version - it's a bit bigger)

Tide

2011-03-23T22:15:00.000Z

Thanks to the SUPER MOON, low tide in Brighton has been exceptionally low for the last few nights.
I try and keep this blog to vaguely creative stuff, but this definitely seemed worthy of an entry for sheer interestingness...

I went down to the beach at about 6.20 on Sunday night for my evening stroll, completely unaware of the freakish events the moon had got going on. (Well, I was aware the moon had been unusually bright, but hadn't appreciated it's impact on the tides...)

When I got down there and saw the vast and unusual expanse of shining sand I immediately scampered home and pulled on my wellington boots with the glee of a small child preparing for snow. I actually RAN back down the hill to the beach, because I was worried the sun would set before I got there. Fortunately it hadn't, and I wandered down onto the sand and aimlessly wandered in and out of the sea, watching the sun set.

It was pretty beautiful.

Next day at work we were talking about it, and I learnt that the tide was going to be at it's very lowest that night, at exactly 6.30. This time I prepared, and headed down there earlier, at about 6.

Any regular readers of this blog will know of my undying love for Brighton, and it's nights like this that confirm it... at the point of the beach parallel to my house there was a band making themselves a music video. I have no idea who they are, but they made for wonderful listening.

Tide from Emma Charleston on Vimeo.

While they played, parents and children paddled in the sea, both in wellington boots and some, bravely with bare feet.

I found a HUGE starfish in the shallows, and pointed it out to a small child and his mother who were stood nearby. We all stood and looked at it and tried to decide if it was alive or dead (difficult to tell with starfish)

I made my way along to the derelict West Pier, where I could already see crowds gathered. Normally the top of the pier is a hundred metres or so out to sea, and much of the wreckage leading up to it is invisible beneath the waves. This low tide exposed more of it than I had ever seen before - possibly more than anyone has ever seen.

At some points on the beach you could get within just a few feet of the main wreckage, and there were people in waders walking around and underneath, exploring the structure like never before.

(Just after that picture was taken, that guy stepped off his board-thing, and the water there was only about knee deep)

The general atmosphere amongst everyone on the beach was one of such friendliness and marvel, and so many people were down there taking advantage of all kinds of things you can't do on the normally pebbly beach... cycling, sandcastle building, running...

And as the sun set and I walked home, I came across these men with head torches and mysterious apparatus, sucking up tubes of sand and ejecting them onto the beach... I asked one of them what he was doing, and he said they were looking for worms for fishing. I said it looked like an awful lot of effort, and he said yes, but a lot of fun too.

I walked back to my house and left them too it, with their satisfying 'sluuuuurrrrrp - SCHLOP' noises, and nearby, a couple dancing on the sand in the sunset. It was insanely corny, but warmed my heart :)

There won't be another Super Moon like this until 2059.... I wonder where I'll be then.

The best kind of day.

2011-03-19T22:21:00.004Z

I approached today with absolute unswerving optimism, which is usually a recipe for disaster, but somehow everything turned out just as delightful as I could have hoped for.

I decided it was time for a long overdue London trip, mainly to see the fabulous Pick Me Up (at Somerset House), but also Outline Editions 'Joy of Spring' show, and to have a general wonder around the Oxford Circus area. (Topshop trip inevitable)

Saturday dawned bright and beautiful, and I very much enjoyed my train journey up to London. Gliding past the traffic jams was particularly satisfying. (WHY would you take your car into London?!)
I headed straight over to Somerset House, which is delightfully easy to find. I didn't even have to get my map out.

I proceeded inside where I then experienced complete and utter graphic overstimulation. SO MUCH AWESOME. Pick Me Up is an excellent show at which picture taking is not at all frowned upon, so I've been able to capture a few of my favourite pieces. But a photo is absolutely no substitute for the real thing, and if you can make it over there before it closes on the 27th of March, I'd highly recommend it!

Kate Moross was first as you entered, excellent as always... I've had one of her 'Don't Panic' poster designs on my wall ever since my first year of uni.

Other highlights for me amongst the solo illustrators work were Jessica Hische (Whose 'Daily Drop Cap' side project is one of my favourite RSS feeds)... lovely letters.

I liked these huge banners. I'm afraid I didn't see who they were by though…

Lovely colourful prints from Gwenola Carrere...

Tom Gauld is definitely a favourite. I've seen his work quite a lot of times before, and it never fails to be brilliant.

That last one by Tom Gauld was a print - Pick Me Up commissioned every one of the illustrators exhibiting to produce an affordable print for sale at £20. I think this is a really good initiative for these kind of shows - it's great to see more affordable ways of buying art.

Talking of buying art... Nobrow were back again with their little corner.

It takes huge strength of will not to buy absolutely everything on that table - I'm particularly tempted by their Graphic Cosmogony, 'Rise and Fall' (Which I've had my eye on for AGES), and one of their newest releases, Hildafolk, by the supremely talented Luke Pearson.

Nobrow's corner wasn't limited to beautiful stuff I want to buy though... there was also giant sushi...

And the biggest wacom graphics tablet I've ever seen.

I headed downstairs after this, where It's Nice That and Themlot were residing.
Themlot had created an elaborate cardboard world, with all sorts of cunning lighting and hidden depths...

While It's Nice That had some live drawing action going on...

As well as the ever popular 'It's Nice That' cinema, showing a loop of 8 or 9 short films. My attention span is shamefully fleeting, but I was drawn in to sit on a bean bag by the lure of watching Thom Yorke dancing BIG SCREEN

However I stayed on after that for more amazing short film pieces... most notably the utterly beautiful 'Eagleman Stag', for which you can view a short trailer here:

The Eagleman Stag - Trailer from Michael Please on Vimeo.

After this nice sit in a darkened room, I headed upstairs where many more delights awaited...
Anthony Burrill had a whole room...

(I should try and live by those words...)

People creating their own photocopy collages! Results below...

In the next room there was live screen printing action courtesy of Print Club London.

A few rooms further were the excellent Evening Tweed Collective. I know I've basically just been talking about how awesome everything is, but... I think you all should know that Evening Tweed are SUPER awesome.

That last one is by Jez Burrows, who I have particular affection for...
At Brighton uni, if you get an interview for the Graphic Design or illustration courses, you get interviewed by a panel of two tutors and one second year student. I don't know if this is normal practice, but it sort of surprised and reassured me, having a current student there too. Anyway, my student was Jez Burrows, and upon finally seeing his work at his degree show, I was delighted that 'my' student interviewer was so great.
Since then I've always kept half an eye on his work, and am delighted to see him continuing to produce such great stuff. He happened to be at Pick Me Up this afternoon, producing limited edition Gocco prints, so it was nice to say hello, and I'm pleased he remembers my face! :)

Anyway, total and utter overstimulation done with, I headed to the Underground. While my journey over to Somerset house saw me jammed into a carriage with an entire Brownie pack and plentiful grumbling tourists, my District line train back was deserted. For the first time ever in my life, I found myself completely alone in a carriage. I felt like I should in some way take advantage of the situation, so I hung from the ceiling bars and swung my legs, span round the central pole, and then decided a more productive use of my solitary tube train time would be a panoramic shot.
Here's the result... (It's not perfect but it's difficult to align things when you're being jolted and shaken - most of these were taken whilst at a station)
Click for zoom!

Anyway, this tube train was ultimately taking me over to Outline Editions 'Joy of Spring' show.
Now after the majestic expanses of Somerset House, this did seem rather small by comparison, but it was worth a visit to see some more Kate Moross, Anthony Burrill, and one of my all time favourite illustrators, the very clever Noma Bar.

Now this was all pretty good.
Could my day possibly get any more exciting?
Oh hell yes it could. I totally saw Bill Nighy out shopping. Only one of my favourite actors of all time EVER! He looked lost, if I'm honest. I'd have liked to have gone and pointed him in the right direction, but it turned out I was lost at the time as well, so I wouldn't have been much help.

To conclude, it's been a good day, all helped by the fact that there has been blissful sunshine and I've eaten loads of super tasty food. Happy face. :)

I would also like to inform you that in the past week I've done some design work of my own that I'm very pleased with, but alas, I can't actually show you just yet. But soon! Soon! Come back soon!

A creative process...

2011-03-14T20:40:00.000Z

A creative process... from Emma Charleston on Vimeo.

I did a thing

2011-03-11T22:56:00.000Z

Another illustration for the 'Unstruck' blog/experiment (My previous contributions can be seen here and here)...

Today's question/answer initially seemed very inspiring, but when I actually got down to producing it, I realised how difficult it is to visually represent our senses, and the loss of them.
I'm not 100% pleased with this, but there's a half hour limit on the amount of time to be spent working on these illustrations, so I sort of had to bring it to a close.

Here we go, anyway...

Just a short entry for today.
More soon.

Elevation

2011-03-10T21:45:00.001Z

Today, my work colleague managed to forget his camera, and since he'd limped all the way in on a twisted ankle, I offered to pop back to his house and get it for him. He lives on one of Brighton's regal Victorian sqaures, lined with vast town houses divided up into flats. Little did I realise that these town houses are so vast that most of them contain ancient, creaking elevators. The ones with doors that you have to manually open and close.

Now... this led to some of the most fun I've had all week. This may make it seem like I've had a pretty unremarkable week, but I suspect you're just underestimating how much I love lifts.

Well actually kind of love/hate. I have recurring bad dreams involving lifts, being trapped in them, falling down lift shafts, and so on, and if a lift stops unexpectedly I get very claustrophobic very quickly... Yet I'll never turn down the chance to go in a new or unusual lift. The mechanism and concept sort of fascinates me, and the idea of the lift shaft as a 'non-space'. If you can possibly bear to read an 8 page article about elevators, I'd highly recommend this one... which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I felt like I was breaking every single health and safety law relating to lifts, and it felt GOOD!
Here's a wonky, wobbly, handheld video of my retro-lift experience. Fun times.
(And a whole new genre of lift to add to my nightmares)

Elevate from Emma Charleston on Vimeo.

Anyway... I can't believe I've written that much about a lift, when in actual fact probably the most worthwhile thing I've done today was to attend the Carrie Reichardt private view at Ink__d gallery.

I'm writing this up for the Bored of Brighton blog, so I'm not going to spend too many words on it here, suffice to say it's a nice little show, and ink__d is always worth a visit.

Nothing like a bit of unconventional, anarchic ceramic work to liven up a Thursday evening!

An outrageous amount of fun, for a Tuesday.

2011-03-03T22:43:00.002Z

I've been a little bit slow writing this one up, I do apologise.
I'd say it's because I'm still so overwhelmed from the ridiculously fun night I had on Tuesday, but in truth it's probably just because I've been a bit lazy.

But no longer! I definitely think this was a blogworthy night, as it was both creative and social, and those are things which I strive for, in life, and in blogging.

The event was 'Drinkydoodle', at the cosy green glowing Northern Lights pub.

Basically it's an event put on by two Brighton based illustrators, and involves a room full of people completing entertaining and unusual drawing tasks, whilst drinking. Oh, and the drawing tasks are usually timed, which is always a good thing. Generally everyone from the most incredible professional illustrator to someone with no drawing skill whatsoever will descend to the same level of crude scrawling and shouting when under time pressure.

I think of it as 'the pictionary law'.

Anyway, things kicked off with picking a random word out of a hat. I got Australia...

For clarification purposes, top right, that's a cane toad being stabbed in the back. And bottom right is a fence running through an arid desert. The rest should be self explanatory. (!)

The next task was a still life task. We were all given an object to draw... and two minutes to draw it in. We got this NES. Nice.

Following this was a good old fashioned game of exquisite corpse. Seriously, it never gets old. LOLs all round.

Following this, a slightly less traditional task... in groups, drawing characters from scenes in films. My group of three got The Big Lebowski, which I'm ashamed to admit I've never seen... It was generally considered that I got a pretty good likeness of that guy on the right though.

The introduction to our next task threw me slightly - we were told to draw 'the world!'... I thought this was meant in some kind of creative, interpretive, metaphorical way, but actually we just had to draw the most accurate map of the world we could, from memory.

I don't think I did too badly...

Although I also respected my friend Alex's efforts...

The following task was fairly straightforward... Pick a scrabble letter and draw as many things as you can beginning with that letter. I was pleased that I managed to fill my sheet of paper within the time limit! It was commented upon over the course of the night that I was very orderly with my layouts - most other people were generally layering and mingling their drawings a lot more. What can I say, it's the graphic designer in me...

After this, another quick 'pick some words out of the hat' round, where I got 'your mum and dad'. I'm quite pleased with this drawing, my mum and dad basically look EXACTLY like this:

To finish the night, it was time for a bit of life drawing.
But in the context of drinky doodle, this doesn't mean nudity, it means drawing scenes from 'That's Life' magazine. AMAZING.

We got this delight.

"I BLEW UP MY FACE AND SURVIVED". Also, that caption down the bottom that got cut off says 'I'm so sorry mum', and that's a picture of his mum.
Oh dear oh dear.

The next Drinky Doodle will be at Jam on April 12th, and if it's even half as good as this one, I will feel I've got my money's worth.
Well, I say 'got my money's worth', but actually it was free, so basically a win-win situation all round!

So much fun.

Nice bit of crayoning...

2011-02-28T21:58:00.000Z

A little bit more for The 405, they've decided to make their excellent new music compilations (See here and here) a more regular thing, and have been kind enough to invite me to produce the artwork on a regular basis. How lovely!

Slightly intimidating though, but I always enjoy it, and Oliver is the kind of guy who sends e-mails using words like 'ACE!' and ridiculous amounts of '!!!!'s, which always cheers up my inbox.

So anyway, here's this month's cover, and you can read the article and download the mix here...

I also did headers for all the individual artists, here's some of them.... nice enough...

but I think they look just super in the actual context of the article, with images for each artist.

I'd highly recommend you download the mix too - it's free music, and the 405 have a knack for picking out some of the best of what's around at the moment, without being predictable or succumbing to trends.

For my part however, I have been listening pretty much non stop to the incredible Gil Scott-Heron/Jamie XX collab/remix album, 'We're new here'. I'd highly recommend it.
Take a listen to this and hopefully you'll enjoy it too...

While I'm at it (blogging that is), here's another amazing thing that has caught my eye. I've never pledged to anything on Kickstarter before, but I am very very much tempted by this gorgeous looking book...
I'm actually inclined to wonder quite why it needs Kickstarter funding - I'd have thought any good arts publisher would have snapped this up!

Well well, what a lot of stuff.
Here's one last thing for you. I think this is incredibly beautiful, clever, and indulges my love of public transport and fascination with timetables.

Back to the drawing board...

2011-02-25T21:52:00.001Z

Today was a bit of a creative struggle.

I don't know, some days, nothing seems to work. I've sure everyone has experienced this at one time or another. I'm asked to perform relatively simple and enjoyable design tasks and everything just looks rubbish. I blankly stare at the screen, hopelessly willing the type to magically make itself look good. Needless to say, that doesn't happen.

Added to that, every so often 'the grey curtain of doom' (Mac equivalent of 'blue screen of death') has been descending...

Oh dear.
So yes, spent the morning stuck in a bit of a rut, until one of my work colleagues suggested I get out a pen and paper and actually do some illustration.
This was nice.

The task was to represent some British stuff. Fairly vague, although I knew the context in which it would be used, which helped.
So I did this drawing...

Besides jazzing up my desk space a bit, I scanned it in...

And coloured it up.

I can't really show you the final application for it, but thought this bit might be interesting to see. I feel a lot better now. Hopefully come Monday I'll feel completely creatively refreshed and I'll be able to make typography work again!

After doing this drawing I rewarded myself with a greek feta salad sandwich from Waitrose, and it might have been the best shop bought sandwich I have ever experienced.

Thought you should all know.

A whole load of good things.

2011-02-20T21:44:00.001Z

Long time no blog!

I am sorry. I'm going to make up for that with a blog of mammoth proportions which you'll probably struggle to get through in one sitting. (In these modern days of short attention spans it might even take three sessions. I'll put in lots of pictures and videos to try and make it more fun)

I was talking to my fellow blogging friend Rosie about this last night actually, and she said I should milk my fun few days for all they're worth and do a whole series of posts, but that's not really my style. Much like my real life persona, when I'm blogging I tend to just chatter senselessly and at great length without taking a breath.

So here goes!

Basically I've had an interesting few days, and have fallen in love with Brighton all over again. Not that we ever fell out of love, but y'know.

On Thursday, Beardyman was playing at Digital. I'd known about this show for about 6 months... It had been rescheduled and for some reason I'd continuously procrastinated getting tickets. Mainly because I had no one to go with, and because I'm middle aged before my time, even the thought of a 'doors at 10' show makes me start yawning and rubbing my eyes with tiredness.

I happened to mention all of this on Twitter on the morning of the show, and it turned out that an acquaintance/friend of mine, David Hopkinson, was doing the background visuals for the whole of Beardyman's tour. 'Oh wow!' I thought, 'I've got to go now!'
Of course by this point the show was completely sold out, and I spent a few hours feeling incredibly cross with myself for being so indecisive.
But then, delightfully, Mr. Hopkinson managed to get me a spot on the guestlist. Which I say in a blasé, casual sort of manner, but I've only ever been on a guestlist once before, and it's still outrageously exciting to me.

The show was excellent, I don't know if you're aware of what Beardyman does, but here's a video of him, and appropriately it was made by Mr. Hopkinson...

"Monkey Jazz" BEARDYMAN & mr_hopkinson™ from David Hopkinson on Vimeo.

All kinds of awesome. At the show Mr. Hopkinson was doing live Google image searching relating to the subject matter of the song, whatever Beardyman happened to be improvising at the time. Pretty amazing, and totally different to anything I've seen before with live music. Fun times, and great to see a friendly face from the other side of the country again.

The next day, Friday, was another day where I spent a substantial amount of time frustrated with myself for not getting tickets to something I'd known about and wanted to go to for ages. And then somehow managing to get in anyway.

The incredible photographer Noah Kalina spent this weekend with Garage Studios hosting a series of talks and workshops. Unfortunately the workshops were well out of my price range, and the talk was scheduled for the same night as a work do. I'd resigned myself to not going, but come Friday afternoon, all my colleagues were tired from a couple of days away filming and general hard work fatigue, so evening plans were called off.
I then desperately scrabbled to secure myself a last minute ticket for the talk.

Initially when I contacted Garage Studios it was completely sold out, but I had an e-mail late afternoon saying they'd had a couple of cancellations, and a ticket was mine!

Awesome luck.

And I'm so glad I managed to get one - the talk was excellent. Noah is possibly most famous for his 'every day' video, which features photographs of him staring somewhat intensely at the camera taken every day for six years, and then strung together to a haunting piano melody.
If you're not one of the 18,418,303 who have already viewed it, here you go...

Much of the talk was discussion of this video, and the impact it had on his life afterwards... Commissions inspired by the video, (declined) invites onto large American chatshows, the Simpsons parody of it, large companies ripping off the idea and a paid trip to LA to be photographed with various celebrities in his notorious staring pose.
This one particularly delighted me, and you can see the others in the same set on flickr.

While this was fascinating, equally interesting was hearing how he built the rest of his varied and successful career aside from the video - from his days in college, first commissions photographing restaurant interiors, right through to present day works.

Although the video is clearly what he is most well known for, it seemed to me like his main photography work was quite distanced from that, almost as though the Noah in the video was a different person to Noah the photographer. And indeed, the Noah sat in front of us no longer looked much like the Noah in the video, given that almost 6 years have passed since the last image in it.

He is still taking a photograph of himself every day, (Adding up to almost 12 years worth) but apparently there isn't going to be another video. (Until after he dies, at least...) You can however, view all those still images here.

I went and said hello to him afterwards, which was lovely. Well, I say 'said hello', more like 'chattered incessantly at him for five minutes', but what can I say... that's my style. Sorry Noah.

Here are some of my favourite images of his, although it's difficult to choose.

Anyway, that was a lovely Friday evening, but THE FUN DOESN'T END THERE!

This weekend has been the weekend of the Brighton Zine Fair, Saturday consisted of a series of free workshops at the Cowley Club, while Sunday was the main event itself, the Zine Fair, which was based at the Hanover Community Centre.

I decided to make the most of it, and went to a couple of workshops on the Saturday afternoon. The first of which was a home screenprinting workshop. I crowded round a small table with adults and children alike to be shown how to make your own screen, a newspaper stencil, and then squeegee the ink through.

Having been taught more technical screenprinting using light sensitive emulsions and UV rays, it was nice to see this much more lo-fi approach.

I never got much of a chance to do screen printing while I was at university, for a variety of reasons, so it was nice to finally produce MY FIRST SCREENPRINT.

It bled a bit because the screens were overused and the newspaper was damp, but I think it all adds to the charm. Oh, and sorry about the join down the middle. Had to scan it in two parts, but y'know... it's Sunday evening, I'm tired and I can't be bothered to photoshop it out just now. Sorry guys.

I like to think I was more ambitious than most of the others, but then most of the others were about 16 years younger than me.

After this, and struggling to disengage myself from conversation with an incessantly chattering 5 year old girl who appeared to have decided she idolized my artistic skill (Now I know how Noah felt...), it was time for the next workshop.

Joe Decie was hosting a sort of 'how to' and inspiration session for diary comics. I met him briefly at last years zine fair, and absolutely love his beautiful observational comics, so decided it would be good to hear a bit more about the thought process behind them.

He admitted that much inspiration comes from his young son... I particularly like this one...

After brief struggles to secure a projector, he showed us a selection of his favourite inspirational comics, talked about how and why people produce comics, and then we all set about producing our own.

I decided to document some of my weeks events. Firstly... the Beardyman gig.

As I previously mentioned, I didn't actually have anyone to go with, so I spent much of it sat at the back by myself experiencing the stomach churning bass, and judging Digital's horribly mouldy walls. I did briefly meet up with my friend, and we chatted, and I found my voice getting higher and higher in a desperate attempt to combat the soundsystem.
Later on I saw a music journalist who I vaguely know, but was too shy to say hello to. So instead I sent him a creepy tweet saying I was sat right next to him. OH DEAR EMMA.
Here's what I drew, and I'm quite ashamed really, because it's pretty rubbish thanks to my fundamental inability to draw people... but I'll share it anyway.

I also attempted to document the Noah Kalina talk. I forgot to mention earlier that I happened to meet my friend Andy there, which was good. It's nice when you go to that kind of thing thinking you're going to be alone, but then have a bit of company and someone to discuss it with afterwards.

Aside from the utter crapness of the people drawing, it bothers me how wonky they are, but then I was only half leaning on a little corner of table, so it's to be excused.

Alright, I'm not going to give up the day job to become a comic artist, but it was an interesting challenge, and pushed me a bit out of my creative comfort zone.

In the evening on Saturday was an evening hosted at the Brighton Basement, called 'Making Bread'. I don't even fully remember how we heard about it or why we decided to go, but go we did, myself, Hannah and Rosie.

There was absolutely no bread making involved (pity), what actually occurred was a bit of music, a bit of spoken word, a bit of art, and probably most fun of all, open drawing tables!

We ended up sitting with a man called... Alan? Andy? I don't quite remember, but we somehow all ended up playing quite a shouty game of pictionary (but then isn't pictionary always shouty), drawing each other, miscellaneous patterns, and generally completely filling up our table with stuff, which quite impressed the hosts of the event.

I was quite pleased because Andy/Alan drew me once, but then also appeared to have drawn some somewhat fairytale looking figures, but with my hair. It's nice to have someone appreciate your hair, y'know?

Rosie also managed to meet a man determined to draw a rude word and a full English breakfast on her arm. She managed to get away without the rude word, fortunately.

Entertaining times. And the Basement really is a lovely venue, if you ever get the chance, try and go to an event there.

Today (Sunday) has been the afternoon of the Zine Fair, where I headed over to the Hanover Community centre, and had a delightful browse. Given my current status as employed, I was also able to spend a fair bit more than I did last year too, which was nice.
Here are some of my purchases...

Firstly, 'The optional supplementary dictionary for new words', full of words which I fully intend to try and bring into common useage, and beautifully illustrated.

Then there's this lovely lovely book... the most expensive thing I bought, at £5, but probably also my favourite, full of these intricate line illustrations of every room in a house.

Next, this absolute delight. Beautiful cover, genuinely funny content, you couldn't ask for more.

I liked this too, the chronicles of a graphic designer visiting the job centre every couple of weeks trying to get work. Not so long ago, that was me. It's produced on the books you get given to fill in your 'looking for work' attempts, which I particularly liked.

I met Joe Decie again, and quite probably chattered incessantly at him as well. He talked back though, which is always a positive sign.
I also bought one of his comics, apparently one of his first attempts at fiction. I like it.

The whole fair always has a lovely atmosphere, and I really enjoyed having a mingle round.

It's been such a nice few days.

AND a new Radiohead album. What more could you ask. (I think it's really good)
In relation to that, here's a special treat to finish... it made me laugh out loud for quite some time.

Timelapse experiment and an insight into my 9-5...

2011-01-28T20:43:00.001Z

I've been a bit quiet this week, apologies.
Basically I've been busy learning all KINDS of InDesign magic... Every night as I fall asleep my brain fretfully tries to remember various different combinations of cmd+alt+shift+ctrl+fn... I believe this is called LEARNING, and I feel like I'm doing a darn sight more of it than I ever did at uni! (No offence, uni)

Anyway, today at work plans were being hatched for a future project, involving some timelapse photography, and various tests needed to be done. Here's one of them!

Timelapse Test from Emma Charleston on Vimeo.

Hey! Over there on the right! That's me! I look very tiny somehow, but it's just the lense.

Hopefully soon I'll have some more personal projects to show you.

And repeat...

2011-01-22T23:59:00.003Z

I've had a fascination with repeat patterns for as long as I can remember. I know that sounds like a really pretentious, designery thing to say, but it's true.

As a child I used to spend hours 'helping' my Nan with her quilting, and it gave me an early appreciation for tessellation, as well as the gorgeous repeat pattern designs seen in the fabrics she was using, often remnants from old skirts and dresses.

Later in life I discovered Hannah Werning's gorgeous repeat pattern fabric/wallpaper designs, and fell in love with the concept all over again.

I toyed with the idea during a couple of uni projects, most notably during my attempt at rebranding the Royal Mail, and my entry for London Transport's competition to design new fabric for tube train seats. (Oh yeah, just in case you were wondering about that... I didn't win)

But truth be told... I never really knew how to do it. Repeating patterns are actually remarkably difficult to get right, especially if you have no idea about the correct technique. So it was with great delight that I stumbled across this tutorial yesterday, by the wonderful Julia Rothman. (I got there via this excellent interview with her, featured on Grain Edit)

I'm actually quite reluctant to share it, because it's so incredibly simple, and I know that there are far more talented souls than I who read this blog and will take that idea and run with it - run far further than I ever could!

But nonetheless, I settled down this evening with some fresh white paper and my favourite black marker pen and proceeded to aimlessly doodle. I'm not even sure I like it that much, but once I'd got the desired image, I scanned it in and set to work on it.

So here is my original drawing...

And here it is repeating. Ok, so it's not perfect, but this was my first go, alright!

Here's a simple colour scheme...

And a variation on that.

And you know what? I actually think it's better on a 45 degree angle, but I'm not sure if that renders it no longer a repeating pattern. (Click the image to make it big... it looks better that way!)

Anyway, after all that, I'm not actually even sure I like the pattern very much, but for a first attempt it's not bad. I'm not expecting Habitat to come beating down my door asking me to design a range of Charleston cushion covers though.*

*Habitat... if you would like me to design a range of Charleston cushion covers, I'd be totally up for it.

Diarising.

2011-01-19T22:16:00.004Z

When I was in second year of uni I did a project which involved keeping a 'visual diary' every day for a few months. Basically this involved producing some kind of visual representation of each day, every day. Some days it's an amazing opportunity to be creative, and other days it's just a massive hassle and you're totally not in the mood.
Come the end of the project, the 'massive hassle' side won out, and I stopped doing it.

But a couple of months back I decided it was time to start it up again... It takes a lot of motivation, but some days it can be a really good thing to just set aside half an hour to produce something creative which is totally unrelated to any other projects you've got on the go. And if it's rubbish... Well, no one else has to see, and hopefully tomorrow something better will happen.

I figured I'd scan in a few days to show you. I suppose it's meant to be a private thing, but originally when we were producing them at uni we had to show them to the other members of our class, so it's never really been that way for me. (Although I did pixelate out a couple of bits. You can speculate as you like there - maybe they're bits about my sordid love life, maybe they're bits about my digestive health. You'll NEVER KNOW! Haha!)

Face fail

2011-01-19T22:00:00.000Z

I really need to stop being smug about my new job. But it's difficult not to be when I'm being paid to do such interesting stuff on a day to day basis.
Today I travelled up to London with one of my new co-workers, Wayne. Amongst other things, he's a photographer. A proper good one.

One of the delightful things about working where I work is that we use pretty much no stock imagery. This means that my days of wading through Getty images looking for exactly the right shot of 'happy young people lying on grass with laptops' are over. Now, if I want that picture, I nicely ask Wayne, and he'll go and take it. And it'll be a darn sight nicer and less tacky than standard stock imagery. It's such an outrageously sensible way of operating that I can't imagine why anyone would do it any other way.

Anyway, our mission for the day was to travel to one of the company's colleges, and take lovely photographs of all the staff for the website. Well, I say 'our' mission... Actually, Wayne's mission. My mission was to WATCH AND LEARN. Yeah!

Anyway, in the course of our travels we got to ride on a tram. Any regular readers of this blog might remember that I get pretty excited by trams. IT'S LIKE A BUS AND A TRAIN AND IT TRAVELS ON ROADS AND TRACKS. Madness!

My only previous tram experience was in Budapest... While that was very exciting, I was distracted by a myriad other things, like the sights of a new city, amazing company, and SNOW.

However today, I got a ride on a tram through South London, and Wayne decided he would humour me by capturing my childlike delight on his very expensive camera. Unfortunately it was something of a bad hair day for me, plus I have a chronic case of bad-camera-face... So it's not amazing, but seriously... check out that depth of field. Hot stuff.

Anyway, we then proceeded to the college, where I got to meet lots of lovely new people and desperately tried to make a mental note of all their names. The only one I really remember was Emma, because she was lovely. And also because she has the same name as me, which always helps.

A couple of shots were taken to test the light with me as the subject. The focus on these is so gorgeous I wanted to share at least one, but... I am REALLY not good at pulling nice faces for pictures. Dear dear.

I'll post something creative real soon. Promise.

Some small things...

2011-01-15T12:42:00.003Z

I do bits and pieces for The 405 here and there, and here are a couple of recent headers I've done for them.
Firstly these, for their "Saturday morning video blowout" feature, and you can read/watch the first edition of that here...

And secondly, headers for their weekly gig guide... You can read the first edition of that here
(The photograph used in these headers was taken by me at a Robots in Disguise gig in Brighton, all the way back in 2008, at the now closed Barfly)

Since this blog seems a bit limited on content if I just post these headers, I'm going reappropriate them for a gig guide of my own, of sorts... namely to talk about the last gig I went to in each of these cities. (I'm not particularly well travelled, so some of these were some time ago!)

Well, Brighton being my home town, it's not actually that long since I've seen live music here... Most recent I think was Ratatat. They were excellent, however being in Coalition, the venue with the most pillars in the world, standing in a place where I could actually see them proved something of a challenge. Having been ousted from my hard-fought for 'good spot' half way into the first song (by two drunk obnoxious idiot-men), I spent the rest of the gig lurking at the back of the crowd, enjoying the music, but sulking because of all the tall people and pillars in the way.

As part of Bristol Jam fest I saw Reggie Watts, followed by Jessica Hynes (from Spaced) DJing at the Cube Cinema. Both were lots of fun, and the Cube Cinema is a gorgeous venue that I'd really have liked to have spent more time at. Bristol seems to have lots of exciting things going on at the moment, and I'm pleased to have seen a bit of that while I was there. I'd love to go back sometime.

Despite living within an hour of London I've not actually been to a proper gig there in three years! Brighton generally provides me with everything I need, musically. The last music I saw in London was the Mars Volta at the Brixton Academy, and I was SO excited. Of course they were mind-blowing, incredible, epic, everything I'd hoped for, but they played for THREE HOURS, and I'll be honest, by the end I was just about ready to collapse from a combination of thirst, aches and guitar feedback tinnitus. Fun times...

Growing up in North Wales, the nearest place where bands usually played was Manchester, about two hours away, and it was here that I saw my first gigs, always in the MEN... A huge, echoing vault of an arena, which never really gave me a true appreciation of what a great thing live music can be.
It was only when I was about 18 that me and some friends travelled over there to see CSS in the Manchester Apollo that I truly appreciated the magic of the smaller venue. Robots in Disguise were supporting, which was delightful, and CSS were every bit as awesomely danceable as you'd hope for. Also, notably, this was the first ever time someone tried to chat me up, and the last ever gig I went to where everyone was still allowed to smoke indoors.

The other headers are Cardiff and Norwich... both places I've been to, but never seen gigs at, and there's also Glasgow, which I'm afraid I've never set foot in. One day!

One Static Slice

2011-01-12T22:23:00.001Z

You know what? I've had a GOOD DAY!
You know why? Because I've been offered a job. And not just any job, an actual design job. People are going to pay me to do design. I am actually going to be living the dream.

I can't even express how much this means to me. Of course I won't be completely happy until I've actually been doing the job for a couple of months, and confirmed in my mind that the whole thing hasn't just been one horrible mistake, but... today is a very happy day. I'm not even very coherantly able to express how good this is.

But anyway. Smug though I am, this blog isn't just about the job. I had the pleasure once again of illustrating for the Unstruck blog, and there's a little explanation of that in my previous post here

Todays subject matter was something quite different to last time, and not entirely easy to visualise, but I tried my best. You can view the post in it's entirety HERE
And my illustration...

I was particularly struck by the lines:

"It is probably more reasonable to assume that everything is so complex that we cannot understand on any level the effect of any action we take. We live in a complex iterative system, each moment built on the moment before. There is an effectively infinite amount of information in each instant of the universe’s existence. The whole universe, in one static slice."

So this is 'One Static Slice', if you like.
The image is constructed from photographs I've taken during the past few months, which to anyone else mean nothing, but to me all bring back strong memories of a particular time or place - even from the tiny abstract fragments used here. I thought this suited the subject matter - our actions, and how they can lead to different outcomes.

I enjoyed this. I think my good mood helped. Nothing can get me down! (Although my toilet cistern is broken, and refilling it with a bucket every time is starting to get just slightly annoying.)

MAKE YOUR CHOICE

2011-01-11T22:58:00.001Z

I'm doing a little job at the university at the moment, helping them design a leaflet for the UCAS higher education fair. If you've been to university in the last ten years or so, then at some point you'll probably have been to one of these days. Universities from all over the country show up, sit behind a table for the day, and hand out prospectuses (and sometimes free pens and suchlike) to excitable 16/17 year olds who are trying to decide on their future university.

In the event, this design isn't going to be used, so I figured I'd share it with you here, as I quite like it. I was thinking about when I went to one of these fairs, and also later when I went on various different open days (And I went on quite a few...) how intimidated but excited I was by all the big university buildings, and I guess the idea behind this design was to simply represent this choice that the visitors to the fair are faced with.

The leaflet itself will have a map of the campus where the event is being held, a map of the conference hall, and a list of the institutions attending.
This is an initial drawing I did...

And here it is with some type for the cover. (It also had logos for UCAS, Uni of Brighton and HELOA, but for the purposes of this blog I took them off, because I thought they kind of ruined it. :D)

Of course, it's interesting to note that this year the fair may well have quite a different atmosphere to the one I visited about 5 years ago. The young people attending may have much less of the excitement about their future that I had, and many more questions about whether university is even within their means.

This year almost all universities have seen record numbers of applications for places. (I was in the admissions office at Brighton uni today and I saw the huge stacks of forms!) As this is the last year before the potential fee increases, both A-level students finishing this year, and those who finished last year and failed to get a place are desperately scrambling to get onto courses, because next year they may not be able to afford it.

This fair which happens in April will be attended by young people who are facing the prospect of paying as much as £9000 a year for their university courses, and for some universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, perhaps substantially more.

This is not a political blog, so I'm not going to write down a long rant about my feelings on this, but suffice to say I'm feeling very fortunate I have done the university experience already, and I have great sympathy for families and students now faced with difficult decisions about the future.

Just some stuff and suchlike

2011-01-09T23:08:00.000Z

Here are some things which I can't talk about, but I figure I might as well show you, as they make absolutely no sense out of context. They're probably not even appropriate for the brief, but I like them, so here we go. (Also I hadn't posted a blog since LAST YEAR, which is most remiss of me)

Now generally I try and keep this blog to my own work... I've considered starting a Tumblr, because there is so so much awesome stuff on the internet, but in all honesty, sometimes I think the internet is a bit like a big snow globe. It's all just the same flakes (i.e. web content/ideas) in there, they're just being shaken about a bit (i.e. reposted repeatedly by different people in different places).

Is that a good metaphor? Possibly not. But anyway, here's a couple of things that have really inspired me in the last couple of days that I wanted to share with you.

I picked up Tyondai Braxton's album yesterday with no knowledge of him other than that he used to be part of Battles. I listened to it walking along by the sea a few hours ago, and it's safe to say this is epic stuff. Cinematic, magnificent, like Battles but with a full orchestra... the kind of music that makes you feel like you're achieving something worthwhile just by walking briskly along to it. I listen to a lot of new music, and I won't claim that this is the best album I've ever heard, or even the best album of the last few months, but it's something a bit different, and like I say, it made me feel purposeful and worthwhile, which I guess means I've got my money's worth by anyone's standards.

Secondly, there's this.
I know, I know, 47 minutes is a long time in this age of fleetingly short attention spans, but... I think it's worth it. One of the few aspects of our cultural and critical studies lectures which I found interesting was the concept of the flaneur in a foreign city, and aimless wandering is something which I actively seek out - you never know what you might find. This seems to document that process of walking, memories and experiences beautifully, I think. I'd love to see it in real life. It's on in New York at the moment, so if I happen to have any readers in New York... you should really go along.

DUTCH A/V from Tommy Smith on Vimeo.

Thirdly and finally, I got the book talked about in this article for Christmas, and it's just great. Jason Munn's poster designs are just incredible, and I'd highly recommend giving the whole article a read for some fascinating insights into design process. I've been feeling a bit creatively blank since Christmas, and just looking through that book reminded me how much I care about good design, and how important it is that I keep striving to do better! I'll probably never get to the standard I aspire to, but keeping trying is the most important thing.

'Keeping trying'. That doesn't sound grammatically correct. On that note... I shall call a close to this new blog, FIRST OF 2011!

Festive Cheer and all that.

2010-12-25T12:49:00.000Z

I'm blogging on Christmas day, OH DEAR.
Since hopefully everyone who is going to will have received their Christmas cards from me, I just thought I'd share them with you here and wish you a very merry Christmas!

Just some holly. I like how it looks.

Festive Inspiration

2010-12-23T22:05:00.000Z

My parents moved house about a month ago. It's kind of strange for me - before this move they'd lived in the same house for about 27 years, and until I moved to Brighton, I'd never known any other 'home'.

This Christmas is the first Christmas I'm spending with my parents in a house which isn't home, and I'll be honest, I'm struggling to get in the Christmas mood. I don't think it's just the new house... I think I'm also still a bit down about the uncertainty of not having a job, and somehow I'm just finding it difficult to get into the spirit of things. I just ate my first mince pie of the year, and it didn't help.

But anyway, festive or not, I'm here at my parents new flat in Chichester, and this evening me and my Mum went to Pallant House gallery for a wander round. (Free entry Thursday evenings, how nice of them.)

I was pleasantly surprised, truth be told... last time I went round Pallant house was probably almost ten years ago, and I remember creaky floorboards, speaking in whispers, and lots of old, boring paintings. (Because when you're 12, old = boring)

Since then however they've had a massive new extension, so for the most part the creaky floorboards are gone, and there's a lot more room for their incredible collection of modern art. Mum tells me it's the biggest collection in the UK, outside of London, but you'll have to take her word for that because I'm too lazy to research it properly.
And to be honest, that's basically going to be how this blog is... I know I should have made note of all these artists names, but I just walked round, photographed things I enjoyed* and wanted to share them with you.
If you ever find yourself in Chichester I'd highly recommend you pay it a visit and see them for yourself.

I was first impressed by this lovely and appropriately festive exhibition of Christmas cards sent by artists, dating right back from the early 20th century through to the present day. Since starting uni I always like to try and design my own Christmas cards, and this little room served to remind me what a nice thing that is to do.

We then headed upstairs via this Anthony Gormley piece...

And past this huge wall of embroidered name tags, many produced by the visitors to the exhibition. The name tags were commemorating and acknowledging the thousands of women who have been murdered in Ciudad, Juarez in Mexico. I was already aware of this story, and thought this was an incredible visual way of drawing attention to it.

On into the main exhibition space, an array of delights, which I'm basically just going to fling at you in no logical or coherant order.
I particularly liked this charcol drawing. I made note of the artists name, but unfortunately I made that note in my short term memory, and my short term memory's duration is usually about 5 minutes. So I don't remember it. Sorry. But I did take two pictures. Hopefully that makes up for it...

I do, however, remember that these pieces are by Grayson Perry, whose work I love. I'd seen an article about the rug not so long ago, and it was lovely to see it in real life.

This armchair freaked me out in all kinds of ways, good and bad. I probably don't 'get' it, but then maybe there's nothing to get.

On a completely different note, I love love love this wallpaper by Damien Hirst, and would happily have it in my own home...

Along with this amazing flowerbed rug and potted plant...(not by Damien Hirst, don't actually remember the artists name). I sense they would be a bit impractical though.

Moving from the new part of the building into the old part was this incredible light installation, designed specifically for this space. I like it's reflection in the dark window outside.

Something which made me laugh, all the chairs in the old section of the building had pine cones on them. My mum who works for the National Trust tells me that this is to discourage people from sitting on them. I just found it slightly surreal.

And talking of slightly surreal... a coat made of balloons, a wall of velvet filled muscle shells, a melted teapot and a rabbit-deer humping a chicken.

Great stuff.

*I didn't see any signs specifically saying that photography wasn't allowed, but I'm guessing it's probably not. So... sorry Pallant house, I hope you can forgive me! I'm just sharing the contemporary art love. <3

The 405's Ones to Watch 2011

2010-12-21T12:58:00.001Z

Well, it feels like only a couple of weeks ago that I was designing the 405's Ones to Watch 2010 compilation! Turns out, it was exactly a year ago.
Doesn't time fly when you're having fun!

Well today they've posted their selections for 2011, which means I can finally show you the artwork I've produced for them.

I decided to go for something with a wintery vibe, since it's so outrageously cold... and what more appropriate night for some star gazing than the winter solstice?
Also... 'ones to watch', they're watching the stars... potential future stars of music... get it?

(Yes, I know you get it. But I have to explain anyway, it's how I am.)

I also designed individual headers for the artists, which I think work really well with the photographs they've chosen. (You can see that over at the feature itself)

Here's some of them.

A little thing from a long time ago.

2010-12-21T12:34:00.003Z

I always meant to do this, but never really knew how. But now I know how to do automation and animated GIF creation, the time has come!
This is from a project from about a year ago, you can see blogs concerning it here.

When we were taking down our photography set up, we decided to photograph the removal of every object. As it happened, the sun was setting, which added quite a nice effect. Although I've actually animated this in reverse, so it looks like the sun is rising instead...

Anyhow, just a small thing I thought I'd share with you.

Pity we didn't have a tripod... it moves around a bit much for my liking!

Some snow

2010-12-17T17:33:00.002Z

I went out for a walk and there was a short snow blizzard! It only lasted about ten minutes, but it was really heavy, and a fine layer settled. Then as quickly as it had arrived, the sky cleared. I was down on the seafront at that point, and I took 10 pictures, which I've made into a panorama.
Partly because it was beautiful, and partly to test my photoshop skillz.

It's not perfect, but it's taken a lot of curves/levels/hue/saturation/colour balance/magic to get this far.
Click to fullview for detail!

Why are dogs hearts so true?

2010-12-15T18:03:00.001Z

I guest illustrated for Alabaster C's Unstruck blog/article collection/experiment today.

He answers a randomly submitted question in under 500 words and in under 30 minutes, then hands his answer over to an illustrator to illustrate, also in under 30 minutes.
How he manages to do this every day I have no idea, but I agree it's a great way of forcing creativity on a regular basis. (Although some would argue that's not possible, I disagree, I keep a visual diary of my own for that exact reason.)

Anyway, you can see it HERE

And here's my illustration.

I like dogs. This illustration turned out a lot creepier than I originally intended, but as I said earlier,
"I still think it reflects what's being said about bonds in the doggy community, making contact, the idea of the pack and reinforcing connections."

(Click to fullview, it looks better I promise)

11.12.10

2010-12-11T23:42:00.002Z

Frames

2010-12-02T23:04:00.007Z

I'm drawing frames!

Update!

I've done more. I'm quite enjoying these.

Something from some time ago...

2010-12-02T21:49:00.002Z

Just started working on some illustrations for a friend, and remembered that I did some other illustrations for her a few months ago that I don't think I ever showed on here.

They were for her final show as a visual culture student, and her dissertation was about Chinoserie (Hannah, feel free to remind me of the exact title of it!) and she wanted some visuals to accompany the main text that went on display.

I made these for her, a fairly simple vector based on a quick google searched image of a traditional chinese pattern.

Buda/Pest

2010-12-01T23:47:00.000Z

This weekend I've been to Hungary, which honestly isn't somewhere I'd ever imagined myself going, but life takes you unusual places every so often, if you let it.

I'm friends with amazing comedian/musician Reggie Watts, and he invited me to come join him in Budapest where he was playing a couple of shows as part of a festival. Well, why not. It had been six years since I last got on a plane, not through fear, simply through lack of time/reason/opportunity.
I won't lie though, when the plane took off I was still filled with childlike amazement and slight fear to be actually FLYING through the air in a big metal box with a whole bunch of other people. Oddly enough, most of the other passengers seemed fairly unperturbed by it all.

But yes, I got there, met up with Reggie, and was immediately whisked off to an underground theatre venue called Trafo, to see the amazing Temporary Distortion theatre company.

I won't lie, I have little experience of experimental, contemporary theatre, but this really impressed me, a dark combination of film, installation art, acting and incredible lighting. We stayed behind afterwards to listen to a Q&A session with the creative directors, which was fascinating. Reggie actually knew one of the guys behind it (Because as I'm fairly rapidly establishing, he knows everyone.) and had met a few of the others before (as they're all from New York), so we went out for food with them afterwards...

We took the Underground Metro train, which pleased me immensely, as I'm a massive public transport nerd, and the Hungarian Metro system is apparently one of the oldest underground railways in mainland Europe. We were taken to a dark and delightful bar/restaurant by the Hungarian organizers of the festival, where I had some epic bread based delights, and shared some Goulash. Super tasty late night fun.

The next day Reggie was doing some kind of intriguing workshop, but insisted I go and explore the city for a bit, as I was only there for one full day. Well, I wasn't going to argue, and set off to wander the streets with only a vague route in mind. When I visit new places my favourite thing is to just walk as far as my little legs will carry me, and see whatever I see en route. Jumping from tourist attraction to tourist attraction rarely gives a real sense of a place I find, just the same polished vision which you see on postcards.

I set off north from the hotel, heading first via the museum of contemporary applied arts. In all honesty, the building itself was much more of a draw than the collections contained within, which, considering the name of the museum, were for the most part quite un-contemporary.
But as I say, the building was incredible, and while I was walking around a choir were practicing in the central atrium, and the beautiful minor key Hungarian choral singing echoed round the building while I explored... it was quite beautiful.

After this I headed further North, eventually reaching the Danube River, which I sat near to eat an unusual convenience store picnic. It's fascinating but not a little scary being somewhere where you don't understand the language, and the currency is inflated beyond recognition. Spending 2000 of anything on lunch feels incredibly extravagant, but actually was fairly restrained, in Forints.

I walked along a slightly more touristy street after this, where I bought some postcards and looked inside a beautifully elaborate Roman Catholic church. I walked back along the river then, and crossed over Szabadsag bridge, which was beautiful. The Danube is very wide, and felt especially so as I stood in the middle of the bridge looking into it while the trams shook the ground under my feet.

I vaguely meandered back to the hotel after this, before heading to meet Reggie at the workshop. It was being held at a Roma Gypsy community centre, which I think was quite unusual, as the gypsy community seems quite segregated from the Hungarian community in general. I felt quite privileged to have seen such a place, I don't think many outsiders would get to visit.
The centre itself actually had a delightfully warm atmosphere, and the walls were filled with incredible paintings of the Roma community, 'outsider art', I suppose, and after the workshop was over I was able to walk around and have a good look at them.

The young people (mainly guys, 16-19ish) who attended the workshop were incredibly talented, it just made me wish I had some kind of vague musical ability too!

After this we went out again, with the guys and girls from Temporary Distortion and the Hungarian festival organisers, a group of about 20 of us. We went on a tram! This was exciting for me, as I've never been on a tram before. It's basically an awesome cross between a bus and a train, and I think Brighton definitely needs to get some. Here is my happy 'I'm on a tram' face.

We went to another delightful bar/restaurant, and I wish it hadn't been quite so dark as there were some incredible Hungarian film/music posters on the walls which I would have loved to better photograph. I had further goulash and listened to lots of stimulating conversation about the creative arts, both in Hungary, the US, and further afield. The performing arts may not be my area of specialty, but I'm so glad to be part of the creative community in general... this trip has just further served to remind me how important it is to keep motivated and stay creative... who knows where it might take me.

I flew back the next day, which went fairly smoothly... I'm glad I wasn't staying on another day, as it seems Gatwick has now descended into chaos. Lucky escape there I suspect! It did snow a little while I was in Budapest... enough to be beautiful and fill me with winter joy, but not enough to actually disrupt anything. Perfect :)

I drew my phone.

2010-11-15T00:29:00.001Z

Using the brushes app. On my other phone. Technology is weird. I'm drawing a phone using a phone!
I know it's hardly a remarkable drawing, but c'mon, it's after midnight, and it was basically digital finger painting.

Oh and also I just wanted you all to see how awesome my phone is.

Brighton Photo Biennial (a small piece of)

2010-11-13T17:16:00.002Z

Well this morning I finally got round to visiting the old Co-op building on London Road, as part of the Brighton Photo Biennial, which finishes tomorrow. You should totally try and get over there, because honestly, it's incredible.

And while the photography is fascinating and varied (and in plentiful supply, thanks to the vastness of the space), for me, it was the building itself that really stole the show.

The Co-op supermarket on London road has always freaked me out slightly. In it's current incarnation it's a medium sized grocery supermarket, and separate weird cavernous post office hall. The supermarket has a kind of bleak vibe to it, and, in my fairly limited experiences of it, always smells quite odd.

What I didn't know was that the building used to house a full, vast, three storey co-op department store, which, for the last month, has been opened up at the weekends to house part of the Brighton Photo Biennial.

As I walked round the building, I guessed that the store had probably closed in the mid/early 90's, but some quick internet research tells me that the store only finally shut it's doors in 2007. The remaining decor seemed incredibly dated, and remarkably crumbling and derelict for a mere three years abandonment. Places in the building were taped off due to crumbling walls or leaking ceilings, and most of the carpets were dated, marked and stained, with the laminate walkways cracking and peeling at the edges.

The vast spaces of the department store which we'd be used to seeing divided up by shelves and sales points were left as completely open expanses, and although broken up by the photography exhibits, for me, it was the space itself that really stole the show.

I think this was at least partly down to how much it reminded me of vague childhood experiences I couldn't quite place. I'm fairly certain I'd never been in that building prior to today, but I remember at some point early in my childhood being in a remarkably similar co-op building somewhere else. I remember my mum explaining to me what a 'co-operative' is while I sat on some wiry brown carpet tiles and she tried on different beige handbags. I guess I was probably about 5.

The whole place had the smell of another place from my childhood, the local community centre, where I'd often spend long Saturday mornings at bric-a-brac sales, church raffles and suchlike. I remember so vividly that smell and those clicky clacky brown streaky floor tiles, just like in this shop. The spot where I took the picture below was almost identical to a place I used to sit as a child in that community centre. Weirded me out slightly, I guess.

I wouldn't describe it as nostalgia, because to be honest the whole place unsettled me slightly... it was almost like the familar had been twisted and distorted... I certainly wouldn't like to be in there alone at night. Not because I believe in ghosts or any of that nonsense, simply because there's something quite unpleasant about what would once have been a warm, friendly, bustling shop, now sitting looking like this.

I particularly liked these works, some of a few non-photography pieces, where words had been cleaned into the dirt in a bold sans serif typeface. References to David Cameron's 'Big Society', and other current political symbolism were the main themes.

As I say, the Biennial ends tomorrow, and that will be your last chance to see this building in the near future. It's well worth a visit. There is some amazing photography (I remember few specific names, but Martin Parr curated the ground floor exhibition, which was excellent... I also enjoyed some work based on the most recent election on the first floor, as well as some stunning large scale photographs of seemingly mundane areas of dirt or plant life on the ground floor.)
But, above all that, see this building. Besides any political discussion about the demise of the British high street, it's simply an incredible space to walk around.

Brushes

2010-11-10T19:30:00.001Z

So somehow, I've got an iphone. It's ridiculous, I totally don't feel I've earned it, but I've got it, and every time I see it out of the corner of my eye, I get butterflies in my stomach and go weak at the knees. (Well, not quite, but almost...)

Since getting it last week, I've mainly been quite boring and only used it to send texts, make crystal clear phonecalls (A great change from my old phone...), take pictures, and set alarms to wake me up in the morning. Oh, and Twitter.

But yesterday, I downloaded the Brushes app (inspired by the excellent Craig Robinson, who I've been a fan of since just about forever), and honestly I don't think I'll ever be bored again.

I don't claim to be an amazing illustrator... even less so when I'm effectively doing electronic finger painting, but I've really enjoyed doing these crude little sketches, so I figured I'd share them... even if their artistic merit is fairly limited!

Possibly not the most audacious start, but the first thing to hand last night when I downloaded the app was this mountain dew bottle. They were being given away free in the centre of Brighton a couple of weeks ago, and somehow I'd never quite got round to drinking it... it just sat on my table looking sad. No longer! Now it's forever immortalized in this late night finger drawing.

Then this morning I found myself sitting at uni with nothing to do, and decided to have a go at another drinking receptable... a disposable coffee cup. (As I'm still unemployed, the uni have delightfully let me go back to help out with the current open days. So if you're planning to go and visit the University of Brighton one of the next three Wednesdays, you might see me in my snazzy blue t-shirt.)

Anyway, after these two drawings, I felt that just drawing an object on a white background was a bit dull, so I rather ambitiously decided to have a go at the sunset on my way home. I took a photo of it too, so you can compare them side by side.
Honestly? I think the drawing is pretty rubbish, and my fingers almost froze solid doing it, but I'm enjoying being spontaneously creative. And hopefully with practice, I could get better.

UPDATE!

This is actually quite addictive isn't it... Decided to do a couple of abstract drawings, although in my mind they were petri dishes growing mysterious bacteria...

And then decided I should practice some more observed drawing... so here's a black and white drawing of my chair. I mean... it's a bit wonky... but you know, I shaded it sort of nicely! Haha, I'm trying.

Bristol Jam funtimes

2010-11-09T00:24:00.000Z

And now for something vaguely creative!
This last week has been the Bristol Jam festival, the only UK festival of improvised performance. I'm occasionally in contact with one of the people behind it, Mr. Hopkinson, (He's called David, but when you've mainly spoken to someone via Twitter it is sometimes difficult to think of them as anything other than their username...) and am also friends with Reggie Watts, one of the performers who was at the festival.

A few weeks before the start of the festival, Mr Hopkinson got in touch with me about a project he was doing to try and get together 1000 drawings of Reggie, as a gift for him. 1000 Watts. Get it?
Well, I figured I'd give it a go... apparently most of them were quite sketchy, but given that Reggie frequently refers to me and introduces me as 'a designer', I felt like I should make a bit more of an effort.

I've been experimenting with this style quite a lot recently, it's a lovely way of creating portraits, although I'm aware that it's fairly overdone... I think many people (including me) have been heavily inspired by Sheperd Fairey's famous 'Yes We Can' posters...

But I enjoy doing it, and figured I'd give it a go for this.

I went to the festival itself for a couple of days and it was delightful, I stayed up far past my bedtime, met lots of lovely people, visited some great places and generally had an amazing time.

As well as Reggie, I also had the pleasure of meeting Ben Dowden, who, amongst other things, makes amazing films. Here's one he made of Reggie, a while back. It's pretty great, you should take a look.

One day in Brighton...

2010-11-01T17:14:00.000Z

Well after my previous blog which contained barely any pictures, this is going to be a long, picture heavy blog. This is good news. Everyone likes pictures.

Sadly, they're not pictures of my work (although I am having fun in that area), but happily they are pictures of Brighton.

This Saturday was something of a ridiculous day for Brighton... This year, the annual Zombie Walk (Where Brighton's undead trudge through the city centre and probably traumatize lots of young children) happened to fall on the same day as White Night (The night long city festival celebrating the changing of the clocks, amongst other things), which meant that Brighton was packed with people, and even more filled with ridiculous and surreal fun than it normally is.

I decided to meet the zombies in the afternoon at Brighton pier, and then proceeded along the seafront towards Hove. I was somewhat swimming against the tide (official figures state a turn out of at least 2500 zombies!), but fortunately zombies love the paparazzi (also beer), and were quite pleased to let me go along my way as long as I took a few pictures of them lurching about in return.

So here you go...

Some ridiculously creative costumes, there was even a zombie Wally (Of 'Where's Wally' fame), a zombie Jesus, and just about every profession of zombie you could imagine. It was a hilarious/horrible afternoon.

Evening came, and that meant time for White Night!
I'd been invited to Art Republic's event (co hosted by Ink_d and Wet Paint Productions) which was based in Jubilee Square, so that's where I headed first. The square was filled with glowing pillar like constructions - which, at the point I arrived, were still blank, with the artists just beginning to work on them. I stood and watched them for a while, and also watched some of the short films being projected on the wall of MtHotel, before heading on.

I had decided to head along to Grand Parade and the Phoenix gallery next, mainly because Grand Parade is where I studied at uni (until I graduated this summer), and I'm a sucker for nostalgia. Phoenix gallery is a place I've visited lots of times, and I really like their general ethos.

We walked along New Street, where there were some amazing glowing paper sculptures, through Pavilion gardens, past the Dome, and then on to Grand Parade. There I saw some more lovely light based sculpture in the garden, (like giant seed heads) but decided to come back later for the Earfilm cinema...

We proceeded along to the Phoenix Gallery, where we were intrigued and oddly hypnotised by an installation piece about 'Super Cell Static Storms', featuring lots of strobing lights, desk fans, and hypnotic humming noises.

We decided to head back into the centre of town from here, but on our way were distracted by a small, cosy looking marquee outside St. Peter's Church... we squeezed our way inside, and joined in with everyone else, drawing small monsters, watching an absolutely delightful shadow puppet show, and listening to some live music, courtesy of Us Baby Bear Bones.

We then headed back through the North Laines, but were drawn into Pelham Tower car park by an intriguing... thing... and some very loud music. I say 'thing', because I'm still not entirely sure what it was. I suppose 'giant inflatable see through orb with strange skirt round the middle' would be the most accurate description. While we watched, it was lifted up high over our heads by a cherry picker, and images were projected onto it, both abstract, and what appeared to be old film footage. It was incredibly strange and delightful, and as it was pretty dark, extremely difficult to photograph, but I did try.

After this, my companions headed home, and I decided to go back to Grand Parade for the earfilm cinema. Earlier on in the day, I'd been looking at 'Brighton' based tweets on Twitter, and in amongst zombie related ones, happened to see this one

I was intrigued, so decided to go along. And what a delightful 50 minutes it was... I'll be honest, I'm not really into poetry, and have very little experience/enthusiasm for spoken word performance... but this might well have converted me. There was no rhyming, no frilly language, no pretension, just beautifully worded, almost cinematic storytelling, which drew me in and held me till the end. Oh, and we were all blindfolded. This was supposed to enhance the experience, but actually for a bit of it I cheated and took off the blindfold, and it was even better when I could actually see him speaking.

At least 25% of the audience were zombies though, which added a delightfully surreal note to the whole proceedings. (Even more than sitting in a theatre full of blindfolded people already was)

After this I wandered across the park (via some more light based interactive sculpture), and back though the North Laine.

Wandered in and out of various galleries, and eventually found myself back at Jubilee Square to see how the live painting had proceeded... Delightfully, it turned out.

I spent a good while wondering around and looking at all the final pieces - most finished by this point, although some still working progress. The whole atmosphere of the square had changed, from the pristine white light at the beginning of the evening, through to much warmer, softer tones based on the coloured spray paints used. The square was also a LOT busier by this point, so it was quite difficult to capture the final artworks on camera without people wandering across shot!

By this point (around midnight), the whole of Brighton was totally packed, (apparently 20,000+ people turned out for the festival!), and I decided to meanderingly make my way home. I headed along New Street, where I was confronted by an incredibly vivid and fast moving skeleton parade...

And at the end of New Street, out of the third floor window of MetroBet, was this incredible man/woman, singing opera. It was both hilarious and beautiful in equal measure...

Clearly, no picture could do this performance justice, but luckily I filmed it, along with various other bits of my night which still images couldn't adequetly capture (including Us Baby Bear Bones, the floating Orb, and more!) You can view that here...

And with that, I headed home, via a marathon route, lots of very drunk people, and finally some synchronized dancing on the seafront. Incredible.

Brighton, I love you.

The here and the now (and the soon)

2010-10-27T16:34:00.001+01:00

Warning... this is going to be a blog with NO PICTURES... oh no!
But please bear with me, I hope it will be interesting nonetheless.

I just wanted to tell you about a few bits and pieces which are occuring in the near future of my life.

I remain unemployed, however I'm not so down about it as I was in my last blog... I suppose the job which I didn't get just wasn't the job for me, and I'm confident that soon there will be the job for me, and it will be delightful. And in the meantime, there's no reason why my days shouldn't be filled up with fun... Just because I'm signing on doesn't mean I need to spend all day every day sat at home in a guilty gloom!

So with this is mind, I'm going to quite a few gigs, travelling over to Bristol for this, doing various small freelance jobs (most of which I still can't talk about, hence the disappointing lack of pictures), and generally keeping myself busy.

At the moment I'm 'home' for a few days. Until I moved out at 19, I lived in the same house my whole life, and my parents have now decided to sell it, so I guess I'm sort of here to say 'Bye house!'... Although honestly I feel little sentimental attachment to the actual house, much more sadness about the friends who I won't see as often any more.
Although I'm totally coming back to visit lots. Who could keep away from the city that never sleeps... Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch?

Ok, I lied about no pictures. Anyway.
The true point of this blog is to tell you about what fun I'm going to have this Saturday night...
It's time for the annual White Night events in Brighton!

Basically, in celebration of the clocks changing, and the extra hour of night we're all granted, there are loads of incredible performance/arts/interactive sort of events running throughout the whole night in Brighton City centre, many revolving around interesting usage of light and sound and colour.

Sounds like awesome fun right? Well imagine how delighted I was to be specifically invited to one of them, in my blogging capacity, to come along and generally ramble and chatter about it. How delighted? Very delighted.

The event is hosted by Art Republic gallery, the Art Prints and limited edition prints store. (Incidentally also where I bought the frames for my degree show from, so I already have much affection for them... they were lovely) along with Ink__d and Wet paint productions

I'm going to take a little bit from their press release here, as they can describe it better than I ever could...

"Jubilee Square will be transformed in to an open air exhibit with huge illuminated blank columns dominating the scene. Street artists including Req, Pinky, Snub23, Hutch, Mishfit and Imbue will paint and spray freehand on them throughout the night. Continuing on the theme of ‘illumination’ the centre piece will be a digital graffiti wall, allowing artists and the public to create instant works of art. Elsewhere in the square there will be L.A.S.E.R. tagging - where members of the public will be able to ‘light tag’ plus street art related short films will be projected on to the wall of myhotel."

Now basically, all of those artists are people I'm well aware of (And if you live in Brighton, you probably are too), as their work is to be seen all over the streets... seeing them work live should be pretty amazing. Not to mention in an illuminated context... As a child (and still to this day), I'm the kind of girl who gets excited and starry eyed walking through the lighting department in B&Q... that will be NOTHING compared to the joys of White Night. Total overstimulation awaits me.

And while this is the event I've specifically been invited to, there will be a ridiculous amount of other amazing things going on in the city centre that night, so I'm going to be having a good long wander round and soaking it all up. Doubt I'll stick it out through to the 'dawn chorus' (Although it does sound delightful)... but it will definitely be a late night!

If you're in Brighton, you should definitely be out and about that night. No excuses!

Back to patterns

2010-10-22T21:33:00.000+01:00

Well, I'm still busy with various things.
I'm a little bit sad at the moment because I'd set my heart on a particular job, spent ages on the application form, did a really good interview... then didn't get it, because the other candidates had more experience.

I know, I know, it's the old cliche, but how am I supposed to get experience if no one will give me a chance?! I've done several internships, but now the time has come when I really need to get a proper job and start paying the rent like a grown up. And I don't just want a job to pay the rent - I want a job because I know that's what I need to feel fulfilled on a day to day basis. I'm at my happiest when I'm busy, preferably being creative, but generally just working and earning enough money to live!

Well, I'm not going to let it get me down, I just need to keep busy with my own projects, some small freelance jobs, and carrying on applying for work.

Anyway, these are kind of a sideline from something else I've been working on. I've always really enjoyed creating abstract patterns, and then finding applications for them... so these are just initial stages of something I might continue with.

And now for something altogether more creative.

2010-10-09T20:44:00.000+01:00

Here's a little project I've been working on... not going to say exactly what or who for yet, but I've been commissioned to illustrate a 'green man'. My initial instructions were three colours only. I approached it in the way that seemed most logical to me, and produced these three initial ideas.

The client asked for something darker and more abstract, so I changed them slightly to these two variations.

The client still didn't like them, and I was on the point of giving up, but decided to attempt something never done before by me... a 'painting' in photoshop! Around 6 hours and 28 layers later, I came up with this. Honestly... I don't like it as much as the vectors, it's no longer only three colours, but the client is happy with it, so there we go! (And as my first time ever using brushes and suchlike, with no tablet and what is widely acknowledged as the worlds fastest tracking mouse... it can't be too bad.)

The client asked that I add some extra leaves in either side... and possibly this is the finished product.

And there's an insight into something of an unusual project for me. Oddly enjoyable though, and certainly took me out of my comfort zone...

I think I'm in love with Wired Magazine

2010-10-07T22:11:00.001+01:00

Funny the games life plays with you. My last blog was about going out with cool people and playing with lego...

This blog is about... well, going out with cool people and playing with lego. Except different cool people and different lego.
Well, I say different lego... at the Creative Review Tweetup, the grand prize for the evening was a lego construction kit of Tower Bridge. (Ages 16 and up!) I didn't enter my name, because frankly the thought of it intimidated me.

But today, fate led me into the arms of a legoey tower bridge destiny, as I joined Wired Magazine over at their HQ on Old Bond Street for some construction action.

This came about thanks to my internship with World of Interiors magazine (which is still delightful by the way!). World of Interiors and Wired magazine are both published by Conde Nast, who also publish Vogue, Glamour, Home and Garden, Easy Living and others.

Wired's test Editor sent an e-mail round all of them, asking whether anyone had any interns spare to come over and help with a feature they were doing about construction kits targeted at adults. Mainly Lego. And because the guys at World of Interiors are awesome, and could sense my palpable enthusiasm, they let me have the day off to go and join Wired.

So this morning I strolled over to Old Bond Street, and was sat down at a big red table with five or six other interns/boyfriends/random people drafted in to help. We were presented with a lego Taj Mahal (6000 piece, age 14+), lego Tower Bridge (5000 piece, age 16+), and a crane construction kit which wasn't made out of lego.

I decided to take on my old nemesis Tower Bridge (mainly because another intern had already got going on it a previous day). After two hours hard graft (which admittedly consisted mainly of rummaging through 5000+ tiny pieces of plastic for 'One of those beige thin ones with only three bobbles and a twiddly bit at the end') I had made remarkably little progress.

(Pic stolen from Wired)

Although it was delightful fun, it was also quite frustrating, and reminded me just how little patience I had for lego as a child. Fortunately I'm an adult now, so I manned up, and stuck it out all the way through till I had to leave at 5.30 for my train! That's 6 solid hours of legoing! Probably more than I'd ever clocked up at any other point in my life!

I didn't see Tower Bridge finished, or the Taj Mahal, although have since seen pictures posted by Wired of the plastic crane lifting the final piece of the Taj Mahal into place.

It has been a delightful day, the main realization of which being the Wired are AWESOME (although I already knew that) and I would actually love to work there. (Despite knowing that not every day involves lego!)

My internship with World of Interiors finishes tomorrow... it's been a lovely month, I'll be sad to go! Special mentions for Mark Lazenby (Who originally got me the internship) and Liam Stevens (who has been incredibly patient with my various photoshop trials and tribulations), both incredible illustrators in their own right.

After this, onwards to the rest of my life!

#crtweetup (Can't we just call it the Creative Review Twitter Meet up?)

2010-09-25T21:09:00.000+01:00

Well life proceeds and I'm keeping busy.
Just finished my second week interning with The World of Interiors magazine, another two to go. It remains fascinating, and a lovely place to spend my days at the moment.

On a slightly more blogworthy note, on Thursday night I was persueded into going to Creative Review's inaugural 'Tweetup'... Or 'Meet up of people from Twitter'.
I'm not entirely sure what it was in aid of, I think both to celebrate the release of their photography annual, the fact that they have over 180,000 followers on Twitter, and generally to try and initiate a meeting of likeminded creative people in a creative space, to do creative things.

The event was based in the design museum, a brilliant venue for starters. Upon entering, (free entry!) everyone was gifted with a free moleskine notebook and name sticker, plus a free drink voucher! I mingled for a bit until my friend arrived, and I must say, people were remarkably friendly and approachable. People just started up conversations randomly, and there were a lot of very interesting people there. Much helped by various activities, including a big table covered in a sheet of paper for drawing. In some ways, super fun, in some ways, quite intimidating, considering many of the people sitting at the table were very talented illustrators! I went for a selection of items relating to the evening. Mainly wine, beer, pens and magazines. (Oh, and Tower Bridge)

As the evening proceeded, we drifted upstairs, where everyone was gifted with a fairly decent sized bag of LEGO and instructed to build their dream house, inspired by the current John Pawson exhibition which at the design museum. This was probably the highlight of the night for me... a whole room of adults intensely concentrating on the structural integrity of their lego creations. There were even two Lego representatives there who had travelled all the way over from Denmark for the occasion! Our lego creations are now on display in the design museum alongside the John Pawson exhibition.

At the beginning of the night, everyone who wanted to had handed in a piece of their work, and after our lego creations were complete, it was downstairs again to see an exhibition of all our work that had been put together by some of the CR team. This was EXCITING! A piece of my work on display in the Design Museum! (Albeit only for one night...) I kind of wish I'd chosen something better, but it was based on what I had already printed at home. It was lovely to see everyone's work, plus projections of work submitted to the meetup's Flickr group, by people who couldn't be there. There was also a live feed of tweets using the #crtweetup hashtag. Technology, eh? (The first picture is stolen from CR's blog... I hope they don't mind!)

On my way out there was just time for a quick look around the amazing Brit Insurance designs of the year exhibition, and to pick up my 'goodie bag' containing a free copy of the Creative Review photography annual and this week's Design Week. (Plus any lego that we hadn't used on our houses - which was actually a pretty worthwhile amount!)

It was a beautiful warm early autumn evening, and I enjoyed my walk across Tower Bridge to get to the tube. A thoroughly worthwhile event, and very well organised. Great choice of sponsorship from Moleskine, Lego, and iStockphoto (Who provided the free drinks) too!

If they ever hold another one, I'd totally recommend going. You have to be on Twitter though, so if you're not already, get on over there! Some remain cynical, but I can honestly say that because of Twitter I have obtained some well paid freelance work, had curry with Brian Eno, and made new real life friends. You should give it a try too. Who knows where it might lead! (Yeah, I totally <3 Twitter, in case you didn't know :D)

The (wonderful) World of Interiors

2010-09-15T22:19:00.000+01:00

Well, little bit of a life update... for the next month, I'm interning with The World of Interiors magazine.
I'm with the art department, which is all about design and layout and suchlike. (I know, I know, you know that already).

So far I'm very much enjoying it. At this stage in my life I'm really trying to get experience in as many areas of graphic design as possible, and having spent a week with Someone (master branding experts), Crush (book jackets, stunning image creation/illustration), RDF (iphone app design), I'm now getting my dose of editorial design.
I suppose I'm trying to narrow it down to see which area I might like to specialise in, but honestly... I've really enjoyed them all, and it would be difficult to pick a favourite!

And yes, the magazine work is no exception in terms of enjoyment. It's so fascinating to see how the magazine is constructed... I'm joining them at the beginning of the December issue, and the very end of the November issue, so I'm currently getting to see both ends of the production process - the finishing touches and the beginning steps of new features.

And despite having little prior knowledge of current trends in interior design, it is certainly an area of interest to me, and I'm seeing some really lovely things, both in interior design, as well as graphic design and illustration.

Talking of lovely... that's what their office is. We're in the Conde Nast publishing building - the same building as Vogue, Tatler, GQ, Wired and several others. Feeling some pressure to make a bit more effort in how I dress, so many very stylish people about the place!

I love that calender. And the donkey.

And completely unrelated, here's a sneaky screen shot tease. This is nothing to do with World of Interiors. All will be revealed at a later date.

Influence Map

2010-09-09T23:50:00.003+01:00

Well, everyone else is doing it, so I'm going to do one too! With a MASSIVE explanation added on. YEAH!

Each row, left to right, starting top left
Noma Bar
His illustrations just blow my mind every time. His work is so reliably awesome, I can't imagine having the kind of mind that just generates such clever imagery and use of negative space on every single project. I've had the pleasure of meeting him several times, at a lecture he did at university, an event in London, and at the private view of his exhibition, and it has been a delight every time. If you ever get the chance to see him speak about his work, be sure to do it, he's every bit as interesting as the images he creates.

Letman
I've been an admirer of Job Wouters (aka Letman) work for a couple of years… for once, catching on seemingly before the general design blogging community, who have been mentioning him a lot recently. I love his stunning hand done typography and layering, and really admire his limited use of computers. Be sure to take a look at his website, as his work is incredibly varied, and very prolific, and unlike many designy websites, there's a massive selection to look at.

Jez Burrows
At the university of Brighton, if you get an interview for the Graphic Design or illustration course, as well as being interviewed by three tutors, there's also a second year student in the room. When I had my interview, it was Jez Burrows, and a lovely fellow he is. Besides being lovely, he's also an incredible designer, and his degree show was probably one of my favourites that year. He's gone on to produce much more amazing work since then, and I've got so much respect for his work ethic and design style.

Simon Page's International Year of Astronomy posters, and design blogging in general
One of my favourite sets of work I've seen in the last year or so has been Simon Page's series of posters for the International Year of Astronomy. This crop does it no justice - none of them were easily croppable. Seek them out, they're stunning.
Also represented by this image are the design blogs I regularly look at for inspiration - which are where I found this set of work. Special mentions for It's Nice That, FormFiftyFive, Share Some Candy, Grain Edit, Information About Information…. but, there are many many more.

Reggie Watts
Back in May, Reggie Watts came to Brighton for the Brighton festival. At that time I followed him on Twitter, and was vaguely aware of his work - inimitable voice-loop based comedy and music. At around midnight on his first night in Brighton, he asked Twitter whether anyone fancied coming for some tea with him. It just so happened that I'd recently made a resolution to throw caution to the wind, so I went, and we sat till two in the morning, drinking tea, looking at the sea, and having delightful conversation. He is without doubt one of the most interesting and unlikely people I've ever had the joy of knowing. Next time he was in the UK, I went to his show in London, and afterwards ending up going out for curry with him, Tim Minchin, and Brian Eno. Which is without doubt one of the most awesome evenings I've ever had… But yes, the reason he's here, as an influence, is that meeting him is the direct result of my decision to be braver and take more chances in life. I'm still an enormous wimp, but that encounter and subsequent kind-of-friendship always reminds me that I need to be more adventurous!

Pick Me Up - Contemporary Graphic Fair
This was an exhibition held in Somerset House, which is without doubt the best exhibition I've ever been to. Basically, it featured the work of many amazing illustrators and graphic designers in the UK at the moment. Not only were Letman and Jez Burrows (as part of the collective Evening Tweed) there, but also many many others, including Rob Ryan (not just his work, but his entire studio, complete with army of scalpel artists), No Brow, Peep Show, Print Club London, and oh so much more. It blew my tiny mind, and inspired me more than any other one event ever has.

BIG 2010
This is the logo designed by us to represent all the 2010 graduates from Brighton's Graphic Design and Illustration courses (of which I am one). I put this here, and made it so big, because one of my hugest influences has been the people I've been studying alongside. When I first started at Brighton I felt hugely out of my depth, and looking at the work of people around me made me feel incredibly small and inferior. However over the years I've come to realise that rather than feeling threatened by them, it's actually far better to be inspired and amazed by their work. Many of the people whose work I admire most are people I barely even spoke to during the course, and it's probably creepy if they ever read this to think I've been 'admiring them from afar'… so uh… don't be creeped out? :D
Tom Van De Velde
Lucy Nurnberg
Daniel Clark
Marcel Cowling
Kaye Blegvad
Tom Boswell
This is just six people out of around 70 incredible graphic designers and illustrators who it's been so awesome to work with for the last three years. They've all played their part in influencing my thoughts, ideas and ways of working.

Letterpress (and other traditional techniques)
Since coming to uni I've had the joy of learning various traditional design production techniques including letterpress, printmaking and bookbinding. And somehow… things just look so much better when you've laboured over them for hours… hand setting type, stitching and binding a book and so on… Not to mention how inspiring it is seeing the work produced in the various workshops by previous students and the technicians.

Brighton
I never thought anywhere could feel like home as much as Brighton does to me. Of course, this was my first experience of living away from home, so I'm sure wherever I'd moved to would have shaped and changed me, but as it is, I came to Brighton, and I still find myself inspired by the place on a daily basis - the people I see, the places I go, tiny little details which make me smile. I chose this particular photo because of the building in the middle, which is the Hilton Hotel… By some extraordinary luck and strangeness, three of my closest friends ended up living in a suite on the very top floor for the last year of uni. We'd sit in front of their floor-to-ceiling-wall-to-wall windows and look out across the sea and across the roof tops. Every time I looked out that window I fell in love with Brighton all over again.

Airside
About 5 years ago I went for a day trip to Liverpool, and I saw an interactive exhibit at a museum there… I don't remember it much, I just remember thinking it was awesome, and I bought a souvenir set of postcards, and have had them on my wall ever since… at home, in halls, and now in my flat. And over the years I've become aware of the multidisciplinary studio behind that exhibit, and many other projects which I've massively admired - Airside. I still love them, and the dream would be to work for them one day - although I certainly wouldn't be ready for it yet! (Trivia - one of the directors of Airside is also the man behind the excellent Lemon Jelly

Libraries
And one library in particular, the university of Brighton's Arts and humanities library, where I've worked part time for the last three years alongside my uni studies. It's been without doubt the best job I've ever had, and of course as well at tidying at putting books away, there's been much browsing and reading and learning done there too. And not just in my main areas of interest, art and design, but also in philosophy, psychology, history, geography, film, music… I don't by any means claim to have a vast amount of knowledge of any of these other areas, but without that library job I know I'd have missed out on so much of what I know now. That background knowledge constantly proves valuable to me on a day to day basis.

Home
I may claim Brighton to be more like home than anywhere else I've ever lived, but there's no denying that I spent the first 19 years of my life living here. Drop a pin in the middle of that picture… that's where my house is. I don't know whether I'll ever live there again, but there's no denying the place and the people I know there have played their part in shaping me into the person I am today.

Beaver and Steve
This is a webcomic I read for some years, and still look back on fondly. The illustration style is lovely, and the humour is right up my street… of course I read it back then purely as a comic, but now I appreciate that I was also absorbing the illustration style, colour combinations, and overall look and feel of them. Clearly, I haven't turned into a comic artist, but I still view them as a big influence.

Storm Thorgerson… aaaand… music.
Well, this is kind of representing two things in one image. Firstly, Storm Thorgerson, whose work fascinates and inspires me… I even wrote my foundation year essay on his work! Also, coincidentally, George Hardie was one of our tutors in uni, and he was part of Hipgnosis with Thorgerson - the team behind the iconic Pink Floyd prism artwork.
Secondly, this image represents music, as this is part of the artwork from the Mars Volta's DeLoused in the Comatorium album. Now, I didn't make this image bigger, because I can't really claim that music influences my artwork. I'm not a musical person, I don't create my own music, and neither do I create many visuals based on music. That said, I feel it influences me as a person enormously. Music plays a huge part in my life, and I spend many hours a day listening to it and seeking out new things to hear. This particular album was one I first heard quite a few years back, and it blew my tiny mind. A proper 'headphones' album.

Josef Albers
At A level Art I based my final project around some of his ideas. 4 years later, when I got the brief for my final exam project in my degree, there was an incredible Josef Albers quote, which I based my whole exam project around.
I know very little about him, but what I have studied he seems like a fascinating individual, and through pure chance played a fairly big role in two very important stages of my art education!

Urban Exploration and 99 Rooms
For a long time I've had a fascination with the concept of 'urban exploration', which is entering abandoned, crumbling buildings, exploring, photographing, and then leaving them as you found them. Due to my fundamental fear of law breaking, I've actually done very little of it myself, but what I have done has been amazing, and I love seeing other's photographs of places that sometimes even no longer exist. The 99 Rooms project admittedly breaks one of the fundamental rules of urban exploration… they certainly don't leave the buildings as they were found. But it's completely worth it.

Art Foundation
I'm sure most degree level art students would cite their foundation course as a massive influence. My work has changed so much since then, and retrospectively I picked up a lot of bad habits while I was there, but I learnt so much, and still look on most of my work there with pride.

The Underground, and public transport in general
Ok, I'll come right out and say it, I'm a massive public transport nerd, trains and buses in particular. Ever since I was little I've been fascinated by the underground, it's complexity and planning, and I actually wrote my dissertation about London Transport's incredible use of design over the years. Frank Pick is the man who started it all, and he's one of my design heroes of all time. The particular image I've chosen here is the incredible mosaicing in Tottenham Court Road Station, which was created by Paolozzi. Ever since I was little I've loved it.

Dave Silltoe
When I was trying to think about people who have influenced me, I started looking at DeviantArt. I joined dA when I was about 15, and it's definitely played a major part in my artistic upbringing. So I started looking at the many people whose art I follow on there, and there are so many people on there who have influenced me, but I thought it would be nice to pick someone who I know in real life. (Even if he's no longer active on dA) I've got so much respect for him, he's an amazing illustrator, and against all advice didn't do a foundation, or A-level art, he just went and did exactly the degree he wanted to do, and he has now proceeded to go and get exactly the job he wants. We have dramatically different styles, but I've got so much respect for what he does. (Not to mention the technical nature of his game art design work!) So this panel represents both him, and Deviantart as a whole.

Tesselation
I can pinpoint the moment I found out about tessellation. I was six years old, at school, and I remember being sat at our little yellow table, and being handed a series of shapes, and having the concept of tessellation explained to us. And even back then, I knew it was AWESOME, and we were all given graph paper, and I spent ages drawing different patterns. To this day I still have the same fascination with repeat patterns, and it's an area I want to investigate more in my work.

Craig Robinson
I've looked at Craig's website for years, probably since my mid teens. It didn't even occur to me what an influence his work has been on me till quite recently… But even if his style is nothing like my own, I've got so much admiration for his constant and varied creativity, quirky random ideas and lovely sense of humour.

Rubbish.

2010-09-06T23:40:00.002+01:00

Oh yes! I forgot to post this a couple of weeks ago.
It's a drawing of landfill! (A much more elaborate and big than the one previously) And I really enjoyed doing it. Click to view it big. It looks much more awesome that way, promise. Going to colour it at some point in the not too distant future.

I do feel sometimes that my work is a bit rubbish. HO HO!
This was for a project though... much though I enjoyed doing it, landfill isn't the kind of thing I just draw for the fun of it :D

Yeah, I totally just made my first ever animated GIF.

2010-09-06T21:52:00.003+01:00

THE WORLD (of animated GIF files) IS MY OYSTER!
I'm in the process of ploughing through my massive photoshop book. Despite claiming myself to be proficient at photoshop, I'm aware that there's much more of it that I DON'T know than that which I DO know. And until today, that included the fine and technical art of creating animated GIF files.

I've realised too that this blog is basically going to turn into a chronicle of me hunting for a job. Today, I applied for TWO jobs, one for a lovely looking design agency in Brighton who will doubtless have had thousands of applications, and another for an iPhone app design job in London, which I probably don't have enough experience for, but am hoping to charm them. Perhaps.

So yeah, if you're reading this, and you'd like to offer me a job... well, y'know... get in contact. That would be really nice. Thanks. I can draw stuff, do neat typography, be jolly on a daily basis, write very limited html, make animated GIFs, and... surely you've heard enough by now, right? Right?

(seriously though... I promise I'll be awesome.)

Update!
I made another one. It's not very good, but I have limited resources. Me, running and up and down my stairs, into infinity. I'll do some slightly more intelligent ones soon.

Today I went to Newhaven...

2010-08-28T23:40:00.001+01:00

... to collect a parcel from a delivery company's depot.
Newhaven Harbour has got to be one of the bleakest stations to get off at. Ok, the sun was shining today which improved it, but you're basically in the middle of a half abandoned industrial estate. Here's the 'station concourse'...
I made a panorama because I'm trying to improve my photoshop skills - it's 4 photos stitched together (not very well, but I'm learning)
Click for a big view!

And here's me waiting for the train back to Brighton again. It has been a beautiful day.

A post apocalyptic wonderland

2010-08-24T20:00:00.001+01:00

Well... maybe Wonderland is going a bit far. More like... landfill and a billboard.
This is what I did today. (Click to view big)

Stuff! I have stuff to show you!

2010-08-23T21:57:00.000+01:00

Well now.
It's about time I showed you a worky kind of update.
I have been doing quite a lot in my spare time, but for most of it I've not been in a position to show you.
I'm currently on an internship with Crush, and this is some work I've been doing with them.

This project is to design the cover for a fairly new publishing company's bi-annual catalouge, this one, spring 2011. As I mentioned in my previous post, I do feel quite out of my depth with Crush. They're really very good, and I'm still learning. I've really figured that I'm unlikely to get a job with them, so I might as well spend my time there experimenting and pushing myself, and maybe I'll produce all rubbish, but maybe I'll produce one thing to really impress them.

Currently... I don't think I've done either rubbish, or something amazing... but I'm quite enjoying myself, so that's ok.

My first idea was illustration based... basically just a mass of books. Here's the illustration, and a couple of variations on that.

Another idea began considering the combination of spring, and books. I started creating flowers based on open books on their ends, but in the end they didn't look much like flowers. I quite like it, but it's not really good enough.

Another little idea, simply creating some interesting abstract forms out of book pages.

Finally, this idea, of wrapping objects in pages of books. The objects would represent the varied subject matter of the books put out by the publisher - for example, a rose for romance, a gun for crime, a plane for travel, and so on...
Ultimately this would be a 3D construction, which would be photographed, but as this is just the ideas stage, we needed some visuals to show to the client which would express the idea without us actually having to build the thing. This was what I tried to achieve here (twice, because I was enjoying it :D)... I'm not sure how well it works, but I've learnt some new things doing it, and I think the results are interesting.

So there we go. More to come soon, on different projects.

Crush

2010-08-19T20:30:00.000+01:00

Another quiet time for blogging, but not through lack of work!

This week (and next) I am interning with Crush, who are delightful. While I do feel that I have a long way to go to reach the high standards of their work, for once, I feel that it's technical skill rather than lack of ideas that is holding me back. Photoshop, metaphorically speaking, is a bit like an iceberg, and the bit above the water - that's the bit I know. There are vast, unfathomable depths to that program that I have absolutely no idea about, and that distresses me, because I really want to be good at what I do.
I know that in the last three years I've learnt a lot, but not nearly enough. Today? I learnt how to lock and unlock layers, which I now realise is a mind numbingly basic function. Oh, and how to select multiple areas of the same colour. (Yeah, that would have been pretttty handy during my exam project. Facepalm)

Anyway, enough talk about my lack of photoshop skillz. I've produced some work I'm pleased with, although unfortunately I can't show you just yet.

But here's some of my current surroundings.

And here's a sneaky tease of something I've been working on.

Strange times.

2010-08-04T12:52:00.000+01:00

I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently.

Suddenly with the vast expanse of the rest of my life spread out in front of me, I'm faced with lots of difficult decisions. And blogging about difficult decisions is difficult.

This isn't a personal blog, but I am going to mention that me and my long term boyfriend Martin split up a couple of weeks ago. I mention this because he's been by my side throughout my whole university experience, and he probably averted several minor nervous breakdowns on my part, not to mention being an unexpected source of creative inspiration at times, and a completely honest critic of my work.
We're still friends, so I hope to some extent that can continue.

But now the time comes for me to decide where I'm going to live and with who, what I'm going to do to pay the rent, and how I'm going to fulfill my ultimate dream goal in life - happiness!

The most obvious and direct route to happiness for me is to get a job doing design malarkey in Brighton. However, this is much easier said than done, because Brighton is expensive, and design jobs here aren't exactly ten a penny.

I am extremely fortunate to have got myself another placement, for two weeks at Brighton studio Crush. AND, as luck would have it, they're looking for a new designer/illustrator at the moment.
I'm not getting my hopes up, because they are RATHER good, but I'm hoping that if I try and be as genuine and hard working as possible (which is basically what I always strive for) they might possibly perhaps consider employing me. Maybe. We shall see.

Even if they don't, I'm still really looking forwards to spending a couple of weeks with them, doing design and stuff. Yeah!

Anyway, a while back I promised you a blog about our London show.
So here are some lovely pictures :)

Someone...

2010-07-03T22:41:00.004+01:00

A little update.
I'm pleased to say that I am BUSY! And that is what I strive for in life.

And this week, busier than I'd anticipated!
On Friday 25th, D&AD held their first ever 'creative chat roulette' event. To summarise, a whole selection of designers, from juniors right through to senior creatives, recent graduates, and current students, all logged on at once, and were randomly connected up, chat roulette style. (Except with less penis.)
I probably spoke to about ten people over the course of an hour... Some lovely, some scary, some funny, but all thoroughly worth speaking to. It was quite intimidating though, and when I'm intimidated, I tend to compensate by being ridiculously over cheerful. Lots of 'HIIII!!!' and hand waving.
Hm.
My main motivation in doing it was to invite people to our London degree show (More on this in another blog post soon to come...) and invite people I did.

After the chatting was over, I collected up all the e-mail addresses I'd collected, and contacted them all individually, inviting them to our show.
Little did I expect an e-mail back just shortly after from Simon Manchipp, of SomeOne... wondering if I'd be up for an internship with them, starting on the Monday!
Totally out of the blue, but, um YES!

So I've spent the last week up in London, in their delightful office near Old Street. It's been a wonderful week... In all honesty, they were a bit out of my league, in terms of sheer awesomeness... in dating terms, like if I suddenly started seeing Johnny Depp :D
I've learnt a LOT in my five days, and was very pleased that they actually invited me back at the end of the week. Unfortunately due to other work commitments I can't go back this week, but I really hope to head back up there at some time in the not too distant future!

Anyway, the only downside to the week was the commuting. It's kind of a mixed thing, because I'm a bit of a train nerd, and generally love travelling on trains, BUT... when it's at 7am, every day for a week, and not getting home till after 8 in the evening... it does take it out of you somewhat.
So I made a little film to document my experience of heading home from London after a long day, when you're feeling tired and dazed, and the sun is still shining on beautiful summer evenings.
It's not the most amazing film in the world, but I quite like it.

Watch it here

This is what I am doing now.

2010-06-12T23:34:00.000+01:00

Well, other than my library posts, I feel I've been a little sparse on the blogging front recently.
Which is bad really, because actually I've been quite busy, but busy with things I either can't talk about (ooh-er!), or busy with things that don't really have visible results to show.

Anyway... yesterday I ceased being a student for good, and in 6 days time, I shall become Emma Charleston BA (Hons). It's all quite strange really.
We took our degree show down yesterday too, which was a bit sad, but alright, because we're having another one in London in a month. You should probably come and see it, it's on at the Rochelle School between July 9th - 12th

Here's a sneaky tease of my work!

Anyway, that's something to be looking forwards to, but in the mean time... I'm on the look out for things to keep me busy and earn me money... and fortunately, I'm having some success on both fronts.

My main work at the moment is for an IT company in Brighton. This is what I can't talk about. All I think I can say is that it involves... *whispers* iphone apps... ooh-er!
It's freelance at the moment, although I'm hoping to get an internship with them for a month too.

I'm also doing some work for the 405 again, they're lovely people, so you should really head on over there...

In September I have an internship with World of Interiors Magazine, which I am VERY excited about! Like last summer with 3 Fish in a Tree, it will mean a month of commuting up to London, but as it was last summer, it'll be totally worth it.

In other projects, about a month back I met the amazing Reggie Watts. It was delightful, we drank tea and talked till 2am, I learnt the meaning of 'To Welsh on a bet', and now like Stereolab. He was nice enough to look at my work, and was also nice enough to suggest I might be able to do some artwork for an EP he's thinking of putting out. Chances are it will come to nothing, but I'd absolutely love to do this, so I'm pondering on various different ideas.
One of which is this.

I really like the idea of making one of these only CD sized (120x120), so as opposed to a normal leaflet, you'd have this delightful folding contraption. He did happen to say that it might be a digital release only, which would basically render this plan pointless... buuuuut, I've enjoyed learning how to make it, and it could come in useful for another project anyway.

So yes... I am busy.
It does feel slightly strange because every other year in my life since I was 4, I've been looking forwards to the summer holidays at this stage of the year. But to be honest, I can't bear the thought of just lounging around for a couple of months, waiting for the world to come to me. The way things are at the moment, if I want to make a success of myself, I'm really going to have to throw myself into as many projects as I can handle, and hope for the best!

Come October when my placement finishes, I might find myself with an empty diary. If that's the case, then I'll relax then. Now, I'm just happy to be occupied, and occupied with the kind of work that I love.
Roll on future!

Library Love... Fourth floor.

2010-06-12T21:13:00.000+01:00

So this is the last of my library love blogs.
For the previous two, you can see here and here
The fourth floor is one I know quite well, although very few of the books are within my area of study. The fourth floor is the home of literature, geography (from a historical perspective), history, and general world and people studies. It's also the home of the artists monologues (Books about individual artists).

So here we go!

I absolutely love the cover of this book. The picture doesn't do it justice, the green is so vivid and beautiful, and that lino cut... well, I know very little about the subject matter of the book, but it's about as moving a cover image as I've ever seen.

These books are amazing. There's a whole little section in the library about Brighton and Hove. What I really like about these is the adverts printed on the edges of the pages.

Walter Benjamin. I put away his books a lot. I like this cover.

Woaaah. This is a scary and disturbing book. It's referenced in the Of Montreal song 'The past is a grotesque animal' (2.25): 'I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met / Who could appreciate Georges Bataille / Standing at Swedish festival / discussing "Story of the Eye" '
So I thought I'd give it a look. Yeeeeah. :s

So, uh, another song reference... Tim Minchin mentions Voltaire in his song 'Dark Side' (6.07) :'You could be clever as Voltaire / But it won't get you nowhere if you wanna sell discs...'
So I got out this book, and read it. I enjoyed it, but probably on quite a superficial level, as the Minchin says... he was a clever man, and I probably didn't fully appreciate that. A good read though.

We have to put this book away a lot. It's brain achingly dull (to me), and quite big and heavy. Whenever I put it away, I hum the ridiculously jaunty Patrick Wolf song 'Magic Position' in my head, except I replace the words 'Magic Position' with 'Western Tradition'.

This is a strange and intriguing book, full of various scenarios and discussion points. I can't really explain it any more than that. You need to have a look at it. Is it literature? Poetry? Autobiography? Self help? (Gorgeous ampersand...)

'Loving' intrigued me. There's no blurb whatsoever, and it has a small, blood like stain on the spine. So I got it out, and read it, and HONESTLY? Next to nothing happens. I wonder what happens in his other book 'Nothing'...

This is my least favourite book of all time ever. a) Because it is intensely depressing, and b) because it contains one of the most graphic vomit scenes I've ever read, and being an emetophobe I am still traumatized by it.

This book is AMAZING. It's full of some brilliant photos of people in flares doing synchronised rollerskate tricks. And I really like the page layouts too.

Whenever I've got a couple of minutes spare time I often have a browse through one of David Shrigley's books. LOLs every time.

Matthew Ritchie's work is pretty nice, but what I really like about this book is the cover. You can't fully appreciate it here, but that yellowish section is all holographic, and really eye catching.

Gotta love a bit of Jeff Koons.

One of my favourite painters, Lucien Freud.

Yup, so this is probably the most disturbing book in the entire library (The colour atlas of gynecology comes pretty close though...) That cover image doesn't even cover half of what goes on inside. Seriously urrrghhhhh freaked out.

I also love Francis Bacon's work.

Sophie Calle is an artist who I have only really become aware of since working at the library. Her books are often beautifully bound, and intriguingly laid out. She is a photographer, but her books are rightly also in the artists monologue section. All of her books tell a story, or stories, and I personally find them compelling, intriguing, and beautifully presented.

So this is another one of my favourite books in the library. Women's world, by Graham Rawle. Not only is it an amazingly written novel, but the WHOLE THING is constructed from pieces of old women's magazines from the 1950's and 60's. It's a mindblowing achievement, technically and artistically, and if you ever get the chance, read it. It's incredible, and so so visually pleasing throughout. I've never seen anything else like it.

So there we go... It's time to say goodbye library. I'll miss you! I hope the next staff enjoy working there as much as I have.