Benjamin Zephaniah

Work i did illustrating an article about the rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah for the Great Editorial Race. This was done in a very short time and i feel like it coud have been developed a lot further but unfortunately the race has been very fast paced so to avoid a late submission fine it was submitted as it was. I may develop it further in the future as a portfolio piece.

Camila Final Entry

And here is the final outcome that i submitted. i'm really really pleased with it, and feel it is one of my strongest pieces of work recently. Definitely a portfolio piece. After submitting it to the GER i received some further feedback on removing some of the bolder lines to soften the image. I will upload that version too when i can get hold of it.

Camila Batmanghelidjh

The next article for the GER was an interview with Camila Batmanghelidjh, who is a prominent charity worker. She wears fantastic outfits consisting of brightly coloured fabrics of all colours and patterns, and this unique sense of style makes her a fabulous subject to illustrate. I really enjoyed researching her as i found her very inspiring and so i wanted to work hard on this piece, and really do her justice.

Above is the original pencil drawing i did of her.. 

And here is the block outline i created from scanning in my drawing and tracing it in illustrator. Below are the first digitally coloured outcomes i created.

 I call this technique 'digital collaging' because that's effectively what it is. I selected the fabric areas of the image and used the clone tool to colour in the areas with real fabric that i found in various google searches. I tried to have some sort of colour scheme in each image and yet make it quite abstract at the same time.

After placing one of these designs onto the article, i received some feedback from my tutor about how it didn't quite fill the space as well as it could. This led to me extending the image vertically so that it would fit better.

I then asked my team to vote on which colour scheme they preffered, and it was agreed that the green image was most effective. I then spent some time developing the face, as i felt it was a bit weakly coloured. Below are some of my experiments.

Xmas cards have arrived!

My xmas cards have been professionally printed and i am now in the process of selling them...
email me for details : mary_rawlings@hotmail.co.uk

Great Editorial Race

We have started a new module which is basically one big game. The class has been split into small groups and we have all been set the same 10 editorial briefs to distribute as we choose between the members of our group. There are staggered deadlines over the next 3 weeks as each brief is due in. All the entries for each brief will be judged against each other by the powers that be, and then the group that submitted the winning entry will win hypothetical money. There are fines for any group missing a deadline without submitting an entry. The group with the most money at the end of the 10 briefs will win a prize.

Here is some of the work i produced for an article on artichokes:

I started by drawing the outline of an artichoke by hand in pen, and then scanned it into illustrator to get a bold outline, which i then coloured digitally using photoshop. I spent hours colouring it. I am still fairly new to photoshop, and am building up my skills and knowledge of the program slowly. It still takes me a while to achieve the effects that i intend to, and to create the complexity of colours and shades in the image below took a loonnnggg time. I coloured each leaf individually and used a reference photograph to pick colours up from in the hopes of making it very true to life.

Above is my original outcome, then below are edited versions with different filter effects. I was unsure which of the versions i preferred, and so posted them all on our team's blog and they made the final decision by vote. 

The filter above gives a very 'graphic' feel to the image by separating the colours into sections. It looks quite comic-book like. 

Final Entry.

This was the filter that my team liked the most, although i'm not sure if it is my favourite or not. Overall i'm extremely pleased with the outcome of this brief though. I surprised myself with how much patience i had to experiment with photoshop, and how quickly i could turn out an illustration.

I'm Sick of Christmas and it's October

Yet More Christmas Cards

As you can see for this series i've been looking at repeat patterns...