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FMP 2021- part 2

This is the final half to my 2021 final major project.

along side the release of the comic, I have also custom fit the tarot in this story, originally made to fit a5, into tarrot appropriate ratios, to be seen and printed accurate to real life.

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FMP 2021- part :

This is the first half of my 2021 Final Major Project, more specifically the digital edition of my comic; Shifting Midnight. The project is primarily created and availibe in digital format, with this being one of two places to view it, the other is my personal website www.cpreeceart.com.

At the core however, both are the same fully illustrated story featuring a dive into tarot and their modern use in fortune telling. Featuring 5 unique interpretations of classic tarot cards, made to be less abstract and better suited to modern interpretation.

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Fida Fashion Project: Part 4

With the main leg of the work done in VR, I came to adjust the image to it’s final state in an Image editor.

I started with the colour grade, going for something slightly draber, since i wanted your eye’s attention to be drawn towards the contrasting colour. I decided to fill the Anarchy symbol in post due to the technical limitations of the VR app, which did not work well with fine details. Additional fine shading to remove some of the 3D artifacts and I was ready to work on some background vairiations.

I ended up going with a simple background compared to the more wacky patterns, since I wanted the focus to be on the image, specifically on the Anarchy symbol, and the subtle shading would help give the character something to stand on.

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Fida Fashion Project: Part 3

I took some additional Reference images for both footwear and my backpack, these specifically covered me and Tommy as we didn’t show footwear and so I used a pair of hightops as a backup to accent with our outfits.

As the project perscribed, I decided to render my project entirley in VR, a medium with potential for interesting styles. VR would also offer me the ability to work on the project in 3D space allowing for compostions to be set up perspective correctly without me needing to guess.

The process started with wire frames of each of us, posed to match reference, I ended up focusing on tommy, I found his overall appearence to be more impressive overall, and combined with the backpack and shoes, I could put more attention into his outfit than spreading it across all three.

The attentions to detail became apparent when using the in app tools for texturing. Planes would need to be maniputlated like cloth in order to give the figure physicality and small details would need to be worked in with a vector brush.   

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Fida fashion Project: Part 2

Much like with Pro Works, I took this in two directions. First I made some quick sketches, with ideas based on current trends in consumer fashion, and some insight into my thought into what I thought would be cool fashion.

Second, I collected some reference images, of myself, and my friends Ricky and Tommy. Both of them offered different styles. while Ricky went with loose fitting and comfortable clothing, Tommy owned a very personalised jacket. I personally have a clothing sense closer to Tommy, and as such, I was natuarally more pulled to it.

Idea’s I was already thinking about such as retro homage and comfort clothes, and when looking at both, it was apparent Tommy’s jacket went the extra mile over a band shirt.

Compared to my own clothing too, Tommy’s jacket showed much more personality and good use of colour.

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Fida Fashion Project: Part 1

My next project comptetition was a fashion focused one, A paid submission competition. What made this project stand out was their active engagment with emergin technology including video games and VR being necessary.

the more challenging part however would be to create a design that refelcts modern, specifically 2020 fashion. In order to have an idea of what to do I would need to consider my own fashion and the fashion of those around me.

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Pro Works Project: Part 4

The final design was assembled, the background also changed so that the main designs could be easily viewable from a mobile screen and accounted for the parts of the design clipped off of the edges of the bottle.

The final part of my design now consisted of which tones i would use for the bottle, as stated, I was previously impressed by the flamingo designs use of brushed metal, however, when I tried it on this design, I was less impressed. I tired tones of blue, to reflect the sea, and black as a wildcard. 

White ended up being my bottle of choice, and also helped accentuate the fishing lines that ran up the bottle. 

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Pro Works Project: Part 3

Leading on from part 2, I made my short list, I picked only basic blocks with a range of different fish. I felt that getting too exotic with the block shapes detracted from that original concept I had started with, but that I still wanted the diverisity of fish to be fairly good, since similar styled fish would just be boring.

I started with the bottle and made sure that i could pull off a believeable metal finish, as the flamingo bottle had left me impressed at how attractive it looked. I also put hooks behind the bottle as a temporary background, to fill the empty space.

The fish designs were mult staged, first the ice effect was done, then the fish themselves, and together gave the final designs the cartoony look i was going for. It helped that I made my shading sparing and on the ice blocks, did not use lines for vertices behind the fish.

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Pro Works Project: Part 2

Leading on to the conceptual phase, I had two main ideas, I wanted each idea to encapsualte a sense of winter, as the competiton required.

My first idea was the Spaceman, when thinking about the winter night sky I realised the snow, that is enigmatic of christmas and the holidays could be easily mistaken for the stars, and that the typical Nasa astronaut suit seemed to share some similarities with snowmen, and as such, My first idea was to create a spaceman winter scene. On a dark bottle it would have made rendering the floating appearence also work to my advantage.

My second idea was somewhat inspired by alaskan ice fishing, and the cartoonistic idea of fish in ice blocks, the kind of thing you would see as a strange prop in some cartoon fridge. I had a lot of ideas for ice fishing, many more than with the space theme, and so it preoccupied my initial designs much more.

Due to the sheer amount of derivative ideas that came from the ice fishing idea, this was the one I ended up going with, I expanded my options first however, looking at types of fish, types of ice block and scenarios galore. I would rate them and eventually come up with a short list.

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Pro Works Design competition: part 1

As part of My confirmation of practise, part of my work as an illustrator is to activley participate in real illustration projects, apart from contracted work, the easiest way to start is to find competitions and open publishers that will take your work into consideration. Ultimatley, there is no downside, since even if you dont get considered for the reward, you can look at other competitions for projects aswell.

First of these projects was the Pro Works Winter bottle design competition. I checked the website for the competition details to start with, invaluble information such as the deadline and terms of entry are layed out. The site also offered templates for designers to map their designs accurately.

Pro Works make custom metalic water bottles, as such their site already contained more than enough examples of textures, colours and styles of design they already had, as well as gleam the sorts of deisgns would fit with Pro Works established range.

The range of designs could include brushed metal, full body designs, patterns, all of which looked to encorporate the Pro Works logo into their design and have a chromed lid, ergo i needed to account for that in my designs. 

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'An angry TV chef', Me, 2020

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'Gizmo', Me, 2020

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Hay festival Project 2: Part 5

To finish off the project off I needed to create some superfluous activites for any people who finish all of the work on the alloted workshop tasks before the workshop has finished. In this case it’s worth getting some simple worksheets.

I generated two seperate wordsearches, each ordained by the themes of the festival. 

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Hay festival Project 2: part 4

I employed the measures that I had problem with in the last attempt, starting with the use of media.

I moved for indian ink to more common and thicker acrylic paint. Immediatley the results were much better especially for shading and creating texture, even using the same sponge head brushes gave a dappled effect, which makes it look far more like a traditional spraypaint stencil. specialised brushes like the wide thin sponge were also very good at using independently to make lines or strips without need for stencils.

Another big benefit is the ability to get colour into the work, since acrylic is one of the most common paint variants you can get, making it cheap to stock for the workshop and far easier to stock equal amounts of coloured paints.

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Hay festival Project 2: Part 3

Before I could call it done I first had to test the stencils and in this case I used ink, to see if together it would be a reliable activity. 

From it I also got to test some of the proposed techiniques. Techniques like selective colouring worked well and allowed me to add texture detail to a binary design process. 

My first issue was that the full sized stencil sheets were too unruly, and so i cut them down into smaller ‘clusters’. Apart from making the stencils easier to move about it also means that in the case that one person wants a partucilar shape it’s far more likley they can use it, this would mitigate a need for more stencils per person.

Secondly, during this time I found ink just as unruly, due to it’s thinness, which ended up causing it to run far more than I liked. The ink would also stay wetter for longer, and my access to varied colours was limited.

Thirdly, In the process of creating and due to the occlusion of the stencils, I needed to draw down what I planed on paper first. This simple means that If i was expecting the children to have reliable products, I would need to intergrate planning time into the process, where they could at least sketch out a rough of what they wanted.

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Hay festival Project 2: part 2

With the plan set, the next part is to create the stencils. I made my first stencil sheet. Due to quarantine at the time one of the best ways to make reliable shapes was to find solid items with good shape to them. I made outilnes of things like coasters, mugs and various trinkets I had lying about. Later I had found a set of letter stencils which you could find at most stores for cheap.

Items like this and the brushes I picked up were perfect for this project as it means you can get as many as you need without risk of spending too much, perfect for a workshop, and especially ones where you can expect to either lose or have tools break.

My second stencil sheet was made for more advanced shapes, which I had drawn freehand. Where the first sheet offered precise shapes, this would offer more variation and experemental shapes. I thought this was as important since it became apparent the first stencil sheet didn’t allow me to create the specialised shapes I mocked up in planning.

Using a crafting knife I then cut the seperate shapes out.

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Hay festival Project 2: part 1

The banner was only the first half of my projects relating to Hay Festival 2020.

The second part was more complex, but just as simple to produce; Make a workshop for the children attending. I had the choice between a younger group anywhere from age 9-11, or an older group from 12+. Personally I find my work inherently better for older children, so in the case that I was planning what to do, that is the group I intended to go for.

The theme for the workshop was ‘The art of Protest’ and as a concept it’s simple; to make art important to the idea’s of rights and typically freedom. This theme is on top of the exisiting sustainability theme of the festival were also present.

Being about protest, I reckoned stencils made good sense. They offered that Bansky like style that much of protest art is synonnimous with, but also offered a template where the kids at the event had a new spin to a typical craft workshop, but also for kids who had little artistic skill could also have a reliable base to build their work from, instead of needing to design everything from scratch.

I drafted up some ideas for how these stencils could be used and the planned activities these kids would be able to do.