warmer now.

Happy festives, chaps.

oh the weather outside is frightful, and this flat is so cold.

So, we've been granted around two-and-a-half snowdays recently, so I took it upon myself to get some good essay work done. This did not work out the way I'd planned, and so I have decided that today I will probably stay in the flat and try and get the majority of it all down, good an' proper.

Dundee's had a lot of snow recently, you see, maybe not quite enough to merit almost three snowdays, but we do have a lot of tutors venturing from towns/cities that are out-with Dundee, so we will give them the benefit of the doubt. The snow didn't stop our creativity though! My flatmates and myself made a beautiful snowlady...

Unfortunately, she died the next day...


However, before all this snowy frivolity came along, we had been doing some real work at uni. We had a project that was to do a set of illustrations, to illustrate two ancient Chinese fairytales.

I was first given a fairytale called, 'The Moonfish' about a fisherman who is so poor that he tries to catch some silver fish, fails, cries on a fish, the fish turns into a lady and then BOOM, happy ever after. Here's what I made of that...

and the final silkscreen print:


My next story was 'The Ancestors', a man who is eaten by his dead dad, grandad and great grandad because he can't follow all their goals at once. Here's what I made of that...




...and the final silkscreen print:

and some other ideas that didn't make it on to the final presentation boards...



fin.

more&more&more&more birds.

This is from a wee while ago, but this blog isn't really in chronological order...

Basically, got a brief to do a CD cover for a choice of three songs; 'I'm Not Done' by Fever Ray, 'Birds' by Crystal Castles and 'Strange Form of Life' by Bonnie Prince Billy.

I chose Bonnie Prince Billy, because I already liked his work and thought that I'd best be suited to his style, however, I think this could be better.

Some sketchbook:







This, in reality, is more blue, when I uploaded it to photobucket it made it go green and I don't have photoshop on this PC to fix it, but yeah, here's the final piece:

toto, we're not in kansas anymore.

We had to do some digital collaging the other week. I have a lot of learning to do on the photoshop front, and I'm not great at collaging, but it was pretty fun?

I didn't do these on the computer. :(














I did this on the computer:

so it goes.

This is the outcome for our reading week brief, we had to illustrate a piece of text in anyway we saw fit. I chose to illustrate 'Slaughterhouse 5' by Kurt Vonnegut, as I'd just finished reading it so it was all fresh in my mind, it was also a fantastic book.

I chose to focus on two quotes in particular, which were;
'It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”’

and,
'The curves were smooth only when seen from a distance. The people climbing over them learned that they were treacherous, jagged things -hot to the touch, often unstable- eager, should certain important rocks be disturbed, to tumble some more, to form lower, more solid curves.
Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.'

This is what I got:

babel. oh babel.

Jorge Louis Borges; for three weeks our entire class hated you just a little bit. Sure, you had some nice prose, but, really, nobody wanted to do it.

Our first project of 2nd year was to create a piece for the wall of the Illustration Dept's seminar room, based on 'The Library of Babel' text by Jorge Louis Borges, and a particular wall-art period in time. We went up against the 3rd and 4th years to produce something for this, which sort of added to the misery.

My final piece was based around 'contemporary graffiti' and focussed mainly on the quotes, 'obviously no-one expects to find anything' (in regards to the librarians constantly searching for knowledge), 'young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter' and 'MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids.'

I also quite liked, 'for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences'.

In the end, I wanted to poke fun at celebrity and how some people mindlessly worship these people even though they haven't done anything particularly great, but I didn't want to take it too seriously, because, well, I was poking fun at it, so I threw in some bits of literal babel here and there.

I could have probably picked other celebrities, or spent more time getting a proper likeness, but basically, it's supposed to be Britney Spears, Jerry Springer and Bono.