We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.

So for my new project we are entering real life competitions, and the one I've entered is designing a window campaign for Ted Baker. The brief wants us to combine 'the Britishness of the brand' along with the traditional English sense of humour. So after a few weeks of soul searching I landed upon my idea of creating oversized victorian dolls houses, with characters inside, and I bring in the humour through the characters (they will be partying in the house!) Anyway as yet I have no concrete work to put other then my experimentation for my mood board, but I will be back with some 3d prototypes very soon, as we have been told to document our project on our blogs, so I will now be writing very grown up posts just incase my teachers are reading.... (these images are a result of 3 weeks inside my sketchbook and a new grasp of photoshop)

Snake Charming...

So I have a fascination with snakes. It's a weird obsession, but really, I can't explain it, I love the creatures, and My jewellery collection backs this up. So a few weeks ago, while rushing through the last minute christmas shopping, I spotted them. Beautiful opaque tights with exotic gold snakes winding their way down the manikin's legs (the ones pictured above are in blue but just as lovely). I was in love. So I immediately enquired the price. Well, £45 was the price, and as much as it pained me, a faithful primark girl, I had to walk away. Knowing how clumsy I am , I would have laddered those tights in seconds, and sent £45 of my student loan down the drain. So instead I dream, trapped in my Northumberland home town, with the 8 inches of snow that has held me hostage for the past 3 weeks, I dream of them, and in an effort to procrastinate further from my deadline I have drawn them. One day we may be reunited, until then, I dream......

Make me up..

As part of a new project I am sketching for an animation, I am studying the quote "Nothing of me is original, I am the combined effort of everyone Iv ever known" and I hope to make a little animation over christmas (although lack of any animation software means I will have to be creative in doing so!) Anyway these are just ideas for creating a morphing character who will change with the aid of plastic surgery/airbrushing/make up to become someone who is indeed no longer original.

The sketches

Somehow in my busy student schedule I find the time to actually do some drawing, I usually

do them when I'v totally lost all inspiration for a brief so I get distracted and go back to drawing

what I love most, fashion drawings! Bad habits tend to develop from drawing from photographs so please excuse my proportions. Anyway hopefully I'm finally getting more images up on here so my blog will actually have lots of drawing on it, which would be fantastic. And Hi to my 11 followers!

The final one

So the final animation has been done, although the title may be misleading, as this is indeed my final animation but there is no sound. Which is a shame because my very talented sister Zoe composed a piece especially for the animation, which was amazing, so hopefully I will be able to upload the sound separately or find an actual version of the animation complete with sound! The final DVD is what I'm proudest of, is complete with DVD menu with images from the animation, is only compatible with Macs unfortunately. So the animation took a total of 5 weeks from start to finish, 150 drawings for all of 30 seconds. Although the film is short and shaky at times, I am pleased I completed my first animation and I look forward to doing many more (hopefully longer). So the story is that this would be a fashion film for a website or advertising purposes, and I based it on an Alexander Mcqueen dress from his 2007 spring/summer collection, in which the dress is constructed entirely from flowers. And the candle part was just part of my experimentation (see earlier post) so overall I hope to be posting a few more animations on here, so I would love to hear your thoughts!

Animation Fascination...

For my most recent project, I am animating, and loving it. Granted so far I have produced a total of 30 drawings to produce what seems little more then a few seconds of film, but after years of seeing my drawings as still, to see them move is quite amazing. I will admit, I find these far more interesting then anyone else will, but really, I might be a little bit proud of these, if that's allowed? So I'l fill you in on the project, I'm animating fashion, whether this will become a showcase of clothes or a story in it's self remains to be seen, but right now I'm just trying to get to grips with the software (Teaching myself means this is a slow process) but I'm optimistic, the theme of my animation is going to be based on a collection by Alexander Mcqueen circa spring/summer 2007, and perhaps one particular dress, crafted almost completely out of artificial (i presume) roses. (A drawing of which I made in my 'time to get back to work' post) and drawing the dress really fascinated me. Infact the whole collection gave me an eerie Victorian vibe from which I am basing my animation on, I'm bringing in some kind of spooky Versialles interior of which I will post pictures up soon I'm sure. I would also like to state I realise their not the best quality and very short but still worth a little watch? I will be posting more drawings from this project but for now here are my little, teeny tiny animations........

Time to get back to work

After a long, long summer, of relaxing, holidaying and basically neglecting work and blog, it's time to get back to things. And it's straight in the deep end. I'm working on a project which involves finding a place for your illustration within the industry, the point of the project is to keep illustration relevant, with photography replacing all the things Illustration was once used for. With my drawings I always imagined creating an digitally illustrated catwalk, I'm doing this by animating my drawings (on a very basic level as I am a complete animation novice) I was inspired McQueen's Kate Moss hologram way back when. Designers are always competing with their catwalks, finding new ways to make sure their clothes are photographed. So having just begun the project I only have some very basic sketches to illustrate my ideas so far. My vision is having my sketches animated on screen, by photographing my drawing after every line is drawn and eventually after editing it into a film. By the end of November I will have the finished product up here, but in the meantime these are the sketches I have done in preparation.