A Reminder About Submitting Roughs

I just wanted to remind you that your roughs must be approved by me before you create final art for your pieces this semester.

A couple of students have sent me final art for pieces for which I haven't seen any rough sketches.

From now on I will only accept final artwork if I have seen and approved a rough sketch of it.

Thanks for your attention to this!

Tips for Composing Beautiful Images

These images are taken from the book Composing Pictures by Donald W Graham.

Live Trace Settings for Illustrator CS5

These are the settings I use to get the best results from Live Trace.

Adding Halftone in Illustrator

Option drag the shape you want to add texture to.

Select the Gradient Tool and fill the shape with a gradient.

One end is 50% black with an opacity of 100%.

The other end is white with an opacity of 0%.

Go to Effect > Pixelate > Colour Halftone

Max Radius 6

It should look like this.

Go Object > Rasterize > Bitmap at 300ppi

Then Live Trace with these settings

Expand

recolour and drag back over the original shape.

Preparing Your Business Card in InDesign

This is a very handy tutorial about how to design your business card, prepare it for printing and liaise with a printer.
It's from vector.tutsplus.com

http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/designing/quick-tip-designing-a-business-card-with-indesign-cs5/

And don't worry if you haven't used InDesign before. I am happy to help you in the preparation of artwork for printing.

Second Year Show - Business Card Assignment

In preparation for the second year exhibition in, Amanda has asked you to create a business card for yourself.

The standard dimensions are :

90mm x 55mm.

You don't have to adhere to this, but remember that you want your card to be able to fit into a wallet or a business card holder. The ones that don't do this can tend to get lost.

As an illustrator, your card should give some indication of what you do!

You can use an existing piece of illustration, part of an existing piece or you can create something specifically for your card.

The copy on the card should include your name, some way that people can contact  you and a website or blog if you have one, so that people can see some of your work.

You should put plenty of thought into the design of your card, as it is probably the way that most people will be introduced to your work, so make it look fantastic.

I will inform you of dates for when this should be finalised in coming weeks.

Reminder about Semester 2

In the second semester I will not be setting assignments. You will write your own briefs and will create 5 folio pieces from those briefs.

The preferable scenario is that you create a range of works which covers a variety of styles, rather than 5 pieces which are all basically the same.

Your first task is to present a written submission briefly detailing the five assignmnets you will be undertaking.

You will post this document to your blog for assessment by me. It doesn't have to go into details such as document size or exact pictorial content, but it should let me know the kinds of things you want to create.

Please note that if you create five pages from a graphic novel, that will count as one assignment. I'd like each assignment to show some difference from the others to enable you to create a folio that shows a range of skills both conceptually and technically.

As usual you will show me sketches for all your work before you proceed to final artwork.

Areas in which you may want to work:

Magazine editorial

Children's books

Adult books

T-shirt design

Storyboarding

Advertising

Package Design

Character design

Comic books

Websites

Concept art

Good luck!

New Computers.

I was hoping that we would have new computers for the start of semester 2, but unfortunately it doesn't look like it will be the case at the moment. 

I'll keep you all posted on when it is likely to happen. I hope it won't be too long.

Congratulations Paris!

Congratulations to Paris, whose dirty apartment illustration was chosen by Alan Attwood, editor of the Big Issue, as his preferred piece.
The image will be published in an upcoming edition of the Big Issue.
Alan's second and third choices were Aaron and Melissa's pieces. Well done to them for their fine work too. Any of the three would have been great choices.

Preparing for Semester Two

In the second semester I will not be setting assignments. You will write your own briefs and will create 5 folio pieces from those briefs.

What I would like to see is that you create a range of works which covers a variety of areas, rather than 5 pieces which are all basically the same.

Your first task is to present a written submission briefly detailing the five assignmnets you will be undertaking.

You will post this document to your blog for assessment by me. It doesn't have to go into details such as document size or exact pictorial content, but it should let me know the kinds of things you want to create.

Please note that if you create five pages from a graphic novel, that will count as one assignment. I'd like each assignment to show some difference from the others to enable you to create a folk which shows a range of skills both conceptually and technically.


As usual you will show me sketches for all your work before you proceed to final artwork.


Areas in which you may want to work:

Magazine editorial

Children's books

Adult books

T-shirt design

Storyboarding

Advertising

Package Design

Character design

Comic books

Websites

Concept art

Finishing Your Folio for Semester 1

By the end of this week you should have all 5 pieces of work from this semester finished and posted to your blog.

Your folio will not be assessed at mid year, but rather it will be marked as a complete folio at the end of the year.

If you wish your editorial illustration (Assignment 6) to be considered for publication by the Big Issue:

1 Please have it finished this week and posted to your blog.

2 Please indicate to me that you would like it to be considered for selection.

3 Please make sure that you have your PS or Ai document saved with 5 mm of bleed. This is the document that will be sent to the Art Director.

Good luck finishing everything and let me know if you have any issues.

Addendum to Assignment 5

I failed to point out in the brief that there is no obligation for you submit your illustration for selection by the Big Issue editorial staff.
If you choose not to participate that is completely reasonable. You will just complete the assignment as you would any other.

Assignment 5

Assignment 5

Editorial Illustration

For this assignment you are to create a full page editorial illustration to accompany a story in the Big Issue Magazine.

The Big Issue has a circulation of approximately 35,000 and its readership is a very sophisticated one.

Many of Australia's leading illustrators including Dean Gorissen, Nigel Buchanan, Andrew Joyner, Sonia Kretschmer and Andrea Innocent have contributed to the magazine.

The Big Issue have kindly offered to run the most appropriate of our illustrations (provided it is of publication standard) in a future issue, so this is a great opportunity to:

a) have a published piece in your folio

and

b) have your work seen by 35,000 people.


The aim of an editorial pice is to compliment a story. It should add to the story without explaining it in detail.

The dimensions of this illustration are:

196mm w x 251mm h.

It will be full colour.

Your illustration must have 5mm bleed all around.

You are to provide me with three concept sketches. Together we will choose the best one. You will then develop that sketch to a high standard.

Your final sketch must be approved by me before you proceed to final art.

I will present the best three illustrations to the editorial staff of the Big Issue, and they will choose the one most suitable for publication.

Assignment due: Friday 13 June

Cleaning Frenzy

 Koren Helbig

It was perfectly reasonable that the apartment should descend into such a fetid tip. Not only the domain of youngsters who had yet to develop a mature penchant for cleanliness, the flat had also become a short-term lodging house for all and sundry passing through, some paying their way, others friends of friends who crashed gratis.

The sum total of these assorted residents was wrought large in the kitchen, where barely an inch of counter space could be seen beneath heaped piles of flotsam and jetsam. Plastic tubs filled with foods of varying ages and conditions. Sticks of abandoned bread long since petrified. Spice canisters wriggling with pudgy white worms. Plastic bags leaking foul-odoured fluids. Half-drunk bottles of wine likely untouched since the Middle Ages. And everything encrusted with a horridly grimy and sticky film of oil, layers of the stuff, proving thousands of meals had passed across the stovetop since the last big clean.

For a neat freak like myself, this kitchen was akin to hell.

For the first few months, however, I bore the horror. I, too, was potentially only passing through and the mammoth task of sterilising this wasteland seemed disproportionate to the time I would actually spend enjoying the fruits of my labour. Like everyone else in the flat, I shunned cleaning accountability purely because I didn’t consider myself a long-term resident. It was someone else’s problem.

I kept my own room spick and span, a refuge from the evil of the common areas. The drains in the apartment repeatedly blocked, leaving the bathroom sink a fetid waterhole of toothpaste spittings, mucky soap suds and ends of whiskers shorn from the menfolk’s faces. That wasn’t anyone’s fault. The building was old, constructed around the middle of last century in the Spanish seaside city of Alicante, well before elevators became a standard addition, as evidenced by the four flights of stairs we all puffed up to reach our own front door.

The four-bedroom house, however, was ideally located smack-bang in the centre of town, minutes from our little slice of Mediterranean coastline, one street over from the central markets, and a short walk to the party neighbourhood. Plus, rent was cheap. Herein lay the attraction, the reason we all opted to call the flat home – those on short-term work contracts, the vacationers stopping by for a few day’s bargain bedding, and me, an Australian living a few months in this city and that as I tried to see as much of Spain as possible.

At some point though, I realised the small and rather grimy city of Alicante had worked its way into my heart and I desired to stay longer than the two months I’d originally planned. I wanted to make this cruddy flat home, despite its frat house-style horrors. Because, it turned out, location was not the only benefit. I had grown to like the few housemates who were staying longer term and enjoyed the miscellany of others who popped through. Of course, the grubby living circumstances weren’t confined to this house alone; near everyone who has lived with people who know each other only by the sheer coincidence of shared living quarters has witnessed how cleaning accountability can go so completely AWOL. Better the devil you know, I thought. Living with pleasantly likeminded people (cleanliness levels aside) who weren’t closet serial killers or reclusive hobbits seemed worth the mess.

Nonetheless, I began fantasising about a spick and span kitchen, dreaming of all the gourmet cuisine I would smilingly serve from atop its gleaming bench tops. A fumigation was imminent.

Four hours of my life slipped away while sanitising that cesspit. Four entire hours of scrubbing and scouring and trashing decaying unmentionables. I scraped layers of built up grease and grime off the shelves with a knife, ditched food that had expired around the same time as the dinosaurs and chipped ancient food splatters from what I discovered were actually white tiles. My housemates popped in and out, offering the odd word of encouragement, yet when I was done no one seemed particularly impressed with the extraordinary feat I had just executed. Life went on, a little more hygienically but otherwise unchanged.

I still live here in this crumbling old building, where forgotten food often quite literally takes on a life of its own and the drains block every few weeks. I have no immediate plans to move, which sometimes makes me wonder: perhaps its time to clean the bathroom?

Assignment 4

Assignment 4

Redesign the cover of the novel 1984.

Also create a book-mark which compliments your image.

Before proceeding to final art your rough sketch must be approved by me.

This is one of the great books of the 20th century.

Its cover has been redesigned many times since its release in 1949.

Look at the examples posted below.

Research the themes of the book.

See if you can find a new way of simplifying the story into one strong illustration.

Your illustration can only use 3 colours, black, white and another colour.

It can be as simple or as complicated as you want.

The dimensions of the cover are 200 x 130mm.

The dimensions of the spine are 200 x 25mm.

Your illustration should cover the front, spine and back cover.

The typography should be a part of your illustration.

Type should include:

Front: 1984 George Orwell.

Spine : 1984 George Orwell.

Back: 1984 by George Orwell – 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell’s prophetic nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were is becoming more timely than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of the negative Utopia (Dystopia)—a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing, from the first sentence to the last four words. No one can deny this novel’s power, its hold on the imaginations of whole generations nor the power of its admonitions—a power that grows with the passage of time. Essential reading for understanding the postmodernist world.

Bookmark
Your bookmark can either be part of your cover image recropped to fit the dimensions required, or a new image which compliments your cover image.

Bookmark dimensions 200 x 40mm

Before proceeding to final art your rough sketch must be approved by me.

Assignment 3

Create an illustration for a box of Shipton Tea.

The illustration will cover the top and all four sides of the box, so you will need to consider how it overlaps across them.

I want an illustration with lots of interesting things in it.

I also want you to look at the references attached and to try to make your finished illustration very graphic like them. Look carefully at them and try to incorporate elements of their style and design into the way you approach this assignment.

NO TEABAGS OR LEMONS!

There are three flavours to choose from:

Lemon Zinger - fun, bright and crazy

Traditional English - Traditional, old fashioned?

Soothing Blend - mild and calm.

The flavour you choose will influence the kind of illustration you do.



Your Design will need to feature the following typographic elements:

Shipton Logo - You design this as part of your illustration

50 teabags

Your flavour of choice

100 grams

You can design your own typography or use the Adobe typefaces

Use the template supplied below.

As you illustration should be covering the whole of the box there will need to be 5mm of bleed all round.

Due end of Fri 11 Apr.

Assignment 2

Assignment 2

In AI or PS create an homage to an illustrator who you find inspiring and whose style you feel is a strong influence on your own.

Study their style. Try to work out how they do what they do. How do they create the textures, colours, line-work that they use?

This assignment will be in two parts.

Part 1

Select a piece of art by your chosen illustrator.

For example, my choice is Michael Cho.

Here is the piece I like

http://www.optimumwound.com/artist-michael-cho-on-putting-in-his-time-at-the-board.htm

Now select a small section of the image

Explore methods which will enable you to replicate the piece.

It doesn't have to be an exact copy. You are just trying to find ways of working which will enable you to see how your favoured artist might work.

It might allow you to make insights into how they use line and colour, how they compose their images, how they choose what to put in and what to leave out.

Post jpgs of your research and experiments to your blog

Part 2

After you've explored your chosen artist's work it's time to move onto your main piece for this assignment.

Choose from the following themes:

Lost and Found

Walking in the Moonlight

The Hamster Wheel

Creepy Crawlies

Now create a work which pays homage to the style of your chosen artist.

Dimensions 20cm x 20cm.

1 Create a high quality rough in pencil.

2 Submit it to me for approval either in person or via email.

3 When approved, commence final art.

4 Export your art as a 300dpi jpeg and post it to your blog

Due end of class Fri 14 March.

The assessment for this assignment will take into account both your research work and your final illustration.