Saturday 30 November 2013

More on colour and landscapes

I have discovered two artists recently, I am usually a late arrival at the queue for jumping on the bandwaggon so excuse me if I am telling you old news.

I am particularly excited about these two as they are landscape artists and they use colour in a very exciting way.

The first is Peter McDermott.  I visited my friends Kate and Phil and they had a mug and a few framed prints of his on their walls.  Peter paints his landscapes in watercolour, here are a collection of beautiful moody paintings of Scotland.  But it is collection of graphic prints that are getting me quite giddy in the spending department.  He has a series of posters inspired by the old fashioned railway posters as I have been. He has done a series of prints of my beloved Scotland and another place very special to Rob and I, the Lake District.

You can buy his work online at a number of outlets, I am currently going silly on bayattic.com. Check out the aviation pieces and his mugs too!

Peter McDermott's Lake District c/o bayattic.com

Peter McDermott's Vulcan c/o bayattic.com

The next artist is a chap I met at the Manchester Christmas markets.  It was a striking limited edition print with a block of bright red that stoppped me in my tracks.  It was a pen line drawing that has been coloured with acrylic.  The drawing is of Old trafford and is part of his series of football grounds.

Jamie B Edwards' Old Trafford

Now, although I did work for MUTV, as did my sister and a couple of friends and my brother in law Andy still does.... I am not really a fan of football.  Having said this, I was very tempted to buy this as it was so striking. I also perhaps should have bought it for Andy or my other brother in law Phil who is a mega fan, as his beautiful son Callum.  I didn't.  I had already bought Phil a shirt, Andy a load of chocolate and Callum well lets just say it has a rotor and a remote control (shhh it's a Christmas surprise).

Anyway, the only people I hadn't yet bought for were Rob's brother Brad and his partner Anna.  Oh what's that you say Jamie? You do City? Brad is a die hard blue, he also appreciates art.  Not entirely sure Anna would be thrilled with football memorabilia adorning her walls, so I chose a framed print of Maine Road a) it's a nostalgia trip for Brad and b) with it already being framed it stands more chance of being hung somewhere :)

I got home and had a nosey at Jamie's website and there is a collection of landscapes too, including my old home village of Marple Bridge.  My favourite is Hurst Spit.

Jamie B Edwards' Hurst Spit 

Get yourself down to the markets, Jamie is there for the run, until the 22nd December.  The range of Football Ground prints are available mounted or framed at a discounted price so snap them up!











Tuesday 1 October 2013

Colour and Landscapes - a workshop in development


I love the tourism posters of the 30s.  I have been taking inspiration from well known artsists, Brian Cook, Norman Wilkinson and Tom Gillfinian and trying to decide what to do with them. Local landscapes seemed an obvious choice.

This idea came to me whilst doing my second year group project with Becky, I was producing some simple landscapes for the game that we were designing.  I want to take my own photographs and use graphics packages Photoshop and Illustrator to create digital 'screen prints'.

Here was my first trial. Very basic. This was created in Photoshop, traced a photography by hand using my wacom bamboo pen and tablet and coloured using the fill command, paint bucket and fill gradient tools.
First attempt at digital version of 30s style landscape, used in my 2nd year group project

As you can see the colours are rather basic and in very deliberate blocks, giving the impression of the landscape, rather than the detail.

Here is an example using another method, this time a local sight of Holmcombe Hill and it's tower, looming over my adopted town of Ramsbottom.

This method is again a combination of simple tools in Photoshop. I used the cutout tool in the filter gallery to simplify the image. This dilutes the detail into colour blocks, whilst retaining identifiable elements.

At the top end of the cutout options you can produce some very abstract images, which I love and am exploring in another avenue, but for this stage of the project I am keeping the landscapes recognisable.

I then adjusted the brightness, contrast and tweaked the curves and levels to exaggerate the difference in the colour blocks.

Finally I used the replace colour adjustment to give a wintery feel with some pretty pinks to the whole picture.

Alternative method using cut out filter and replace colour

I am developing a tutorial for my Media Club kids (they won't thank me for referring to them as kids) demonstrating these two different, very simple methods.  I am hoping to practice and perfect my own process of recreating those great Railway Posters.



Tuesday 13 August 2013

Life recently..... Graduation and Family News

So much to catch up on...

I got a first! Get in! I graduated from Leeds Met as a Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours in Multimedia Technology.



I am getting bigger by the minute with Waterfall-Hallam #2 due in 5 weeks


and major sneaky...... my baby sister got married.... I didn't do the full suite of photography as I am larger than Jupiter and was also on catering duties, but I got a few corkers.  Until she has seen them I'll be keeping them private, as soon as she has picked her faves, I'll blog them!

Bride getting ready

Friday 9 August 2013

Final Assignment - Group Project 2013

This is our final project and I worked with the most wonderful people, Famida, Rebecca and Judith.



The blog at finproductions.co.uk shows all the work that was created but I just wanted to post some of the highlights here to showcase my contributions.

We produced a web resource for an imaginary client Wedding Proposal.  This was a website created in Flash with advice, tutorials and supplier databases for the novice wedding planner, Brides and Grooms to be.



I had taken on the role of Production Manager, so was responsible for the planning and ensuring all aspects of the brief were covered and on schedule.  I wrote much of the body of the presentation and it's supporting material.  I also took on graphic design work, wedding photography including photo editing, video production/post production motion graphics, blogging and social networking.

Rebecca was our Web Developer, Famida Lead Graphic Designer and Judith Marketing Manager.  As we were a small team we took on other roles too helping produce all the research material and visible content for the site.

The site is no longer live due to hosting costs, something I may seek to address as I think it would be worth keeping up for the near future.

Here are some examples of the work I did.

Pitch Document for Wedding Proposal
Click for link to Pitch Document
Wedding Proposal Working Product Presentation Handout
Click for link to Working Product Presentation Handout

Wedding Proposal Final Presentation
Click for link to Final Presentation Handout and Video






















Wedding Photography

Wedding Photography

Stationery Design

Advertisment Design

Advertisment Design

Advertisment Design

Wedding Photography

Initial design for the itunes profile

Wedding Photography

Producing the company blog/ production diary.  Customised with own designs and HTML/CSS

Stationery Design

Wedding Photography

Finding and shortlisting colour schemes for the corporate branding
Design the corporate branding for our production team

Created full suite for the corporate branding


Creating the motion graphics titles and straps in After Effects

Creating the handouts in InDesign

Initial designs for the appearance of the thumbnails in thw website/ app

Wedding Photography

Forecast and managed the project scheduke, taking details from the brief and setting manageable deadlines

Wedding Photography

Wedding Photography

Created icons for social network sites

Wedding Photography

Wedding Photography

Designed assets for itunes submission

Wedding Photography

Wedding Photography

Wedding Photography

I filmed and edited a video tutorial


Mock up of how app would look in mobile device

Wedding Photography

Research for Supplier Database

Mood Boards

Wedding Photography

Wedding Photography

I supplied full access to my wedding photography

For my research paper I chose to answer the question "Why Blog?"


Overall grades: Project evaluation - 77, Project Implementation - 72, Project Research and Plan - 75