Dream Wife - FIRE

This design for the song Fire by the band Dream Wife is part of the self directed music based brief I’ve been working on for 603. Earlier in the year I had some contact with bands about work, but I haven’t reached out in a while, as I’ve been focused on building up my extended practice portfolio with a greater range of work outside of the music based stuff.  

I’ve made a conscious effort to focus on the music of smaller bands with my responses, mainly because their music hasn’t been done to death or mined for ideas already, so it acts as a clean slate for me creatively, and I find it a lot more exciting to adapt something into the visual that might not have been adapted before. This, and also because the bands are smaller and thereby more likely of actually becoming aware of the work I’m doing.

The band Dream Wife liked this Instagram post, and made me aware they had actually seen it. It feels strange to talk about professionals responding to my work on Instagram because I don’t always feel like it's incredibly relevant, or a definite indicator of anything. However, I thought that each small development is still an example of moving forward and slowly becoming known by more practitioners and professionals moving out of uni, which is something I really want to boost.

Times Up thoughts

My research around feminism and the sexual harassment scandal happening in the entertainment industry right now has fuelled a lot of my work currently for 603. I wanted to make work that actually could have an impact, maybe raising money for certain causes against sexual harassment. Thinking about this, I chose to look into the Times Up movement, which was started in response to the slew of allegations that arose against several people across the entertainment industry, after Harvey Weinstein opened the floodgates.

I often feel like my work lacks permanence. As in, I make it, the brief finishes, and my work remains there as nothing really but a reminder of past ideas. I really want to change this about my practice and make things that have more of a lasting impact, and can be translated into different mediums and reach audiences it might not just directly coming from me. This is also why I’m interested in making work for Times Up, my work could take on a greater meaning and actually reach people outside the sphere it currently exists in.

International Womens Day

This is my response to the ItsNiceThat short brief for International Womens Day. Feminism is something that’s been cropping up a lot in my research and practice a lot lately, so it was a nice challenge to try to apply what I’ve learned to an actual brief response. This design is one of a few that I’ve been trying to adapt into a poster series or zine, so I enjoyed this brief as it gave me the opportunity not only to explore some more feminist themes within my work, but help me visualise maybe how these illustrations can work in context, be it as a series of posters, book etc.

Shy Luv - FASHION

This design was made in response to the song Fashion (if you couldn’t tell by the word ‘fashion’ in garish pink type) by the band Shy Luv. This is a band that we ran into basically by mistake at last years Live At Leeds day festival, they were playing an hour late on a delayed stage, we had gone to see a different band and unwittingly saw their set instead. It was a great experience, and another that illuminated me the importance of sometimes being in the right place at the right time.
Since then I’ve been meaning to produce work around their music for my 603 brief, but haven’t had any compelling ideas until now. Working again with animation just before christmas for the Hanbury project/trailer that I made, I started to think of these music illustrations in a more kinetic way. How would this image work alongside the song? How would the different instruments be represented? What colours are brought to mind by the song? How do the lyrics work in the context of the audi and visual mediums combined? All these questions really challenged how I would usually approach a design like this, and I feel like the final image isn’t even really complete without the song playing in the background. I’m happy with this outcome, as I sometimes find a disconnect between the start point and end point in my design process, but this time I can see all my decisions present in the final work and I’m happy with how I’ve tried to get my ideas across.

Being a small band with a still fledgling fan base, I reached out to Shy Luv to see if they may have any use for the design, and they sent back a response. They said they would be happy to feature the design on their Instagram, which I thought would be a really cool opportunity. Similar to the way I was featured on the profile of the band Ider, it’s just an engaging reminder of the way your practice can work when you see it properly in context.

Paramore - POOL

I’ve written this post over around four times because I’m trying to make it sound reflective rather than preachy and braggy. I wasn’t really sure of how this directly related to PP, but I was told that any example of work becoming known either in a commercial sense or regarding higher exposure is to do with PP, so I thought I may as well talk about it.
This is a design I made in response to the song Pool by the band Paramore, and it was featured artwork on the 29th of Jan on the Instagram account ‘Paramorespam’. Usually I wouldn’t talk about this in relation to my practice, but the post eventually got over 2500 likes, which is an overwhelming response to my work that I’ve not really experienced before. I think it exposed my work to a lot of people that have become part of my growing online audience, and I’m really grateful as it's a solid way to give some exposure to creatives with smaller presences online, and hopefully open up new eyes to my work.

Hanbury animation

This is a very rough and incomplete trailer I put together for our upcoming trip to London with the Hanbury Hall event, meeting professionals and those in the industry. The movie Justice League is out soon, and although my whole being knows it will be awful, the young version of me that read Justice League in high school still holds a small bit of faith. Some of the marketing for the film has actually been quite cool, musically and visually. Hopefully this carries over into the finished film and prove me wrong, because I never actively want anything to be bad, I just appreciate that some things definitely, definitely are.

The music here is taken from that marketing campaign, a hard hitting cover of the Beatles “Come Together”. I’m not a Beatles fan, at all, but I find the last few measures of this song to be really atmospheric and engaging, something that I think our trip to Hanbury can be and will be.
I’m trying to incorporate animation, especially alongside music, into my practice a bit more, following the Baby Driver trailer I put together over the end of summer. I really enjoy working alongside a beat, and instrumentals, as it makes me think visually in a whole different sense. Things have to move, grow, change colour, disappear or explode all at different times in different ways that feel organic, as if they’ve grown out of the song itself. I enjoy making work that can exist in this medium, as it adds a lot to the way I think about my work. Not sure what the final use of this will be yet, I’m just excited for the event, so I just wanted to make something that represents that and can hopefully arouse interest in others.

Hanbury Hall invitations

These are the final positives of the invitation sheets we have designed to be sent out for Hanbury Hall. The guests won’t receive a full version of this print, but rather a portion of it, cut into the shape of the university’s polygon logo. We thought this might be an engaging way to play with the expectations of our guests, as the invites will work almost as parts of a jigsaw puzzle, with no two people receiving the exact same image on their invite. We are basically screen printing the print at A2, and will cut it into smaller invites using what is essentially a cookie cutter method, ensuring that all the small prints are unique and distinct.

I really enjoyed working this way to make this image, as I made the digital design. The physical drawings were made by Bronte and Kieran, and I went through what they made, picked out what I thought were the most successful images and arranged them in this fashion. The inspiration was sort of a checklist of items that you might run through before going on a holiday or camping trip. Adding colour to these drawings was a good experience too, as it made me think of the work in a different light, as it isn't my drawing, so I had to consider how it works with colour in a whole different way, as I’m only receiving part of the picture. I’m happy with how these are coming out and we’re excited to get the screenprinting done with so that they can be sent out in time for January.