Alphonse Mucha

I have recently discovered the work of Alphonse Mucha. He was famous last century, so I guess you could say I'm a little slow on the uptake, but anyways. I am a big fan of Art Nouveau, I'd say it was my favourite, if I had to pick, out of all the art movements. Bauhaus would be at the bottom of the list, let me tell you. I know, I know, that we wouldn't have so much of what we have today without it, and we would be behind the times or whatever. If you had to do an entire year of just Bauhaus with my waffy A-Level teacher, you would understand. Besides, I am not a fan on Modernism, not in the slightest.


Anyway, I'm going off on one, as they say. These three images are all by Alphonse Mucha, and I really do think that they are beautiful pieces of work. I love the colours used, pale and washed out, nothing that really leaps out and smacks you in the face. It just works as a piece, and is beautiful. I love how elegant the pieces are, with the curves and the flowing lines and the folds of draped fabric. They're elaborate, but not to the point where you think that too much is going on.

One of my favourite things about these Alphonse Mucha images, is the way that he does hair. It's not even that detailed in it's shading, and it doesn't look like realistic hair, but the curls and the way it flows often gives it a sense of direction. In the image below the lack of detail to the hair is most apparent. It's almost a solid colour, but closer inspection would reveal that it's more of a wash of colour, slight hues within it. I love how simple the hair and the clothing is in comparison to the detail given to the face and the rest of the body.

A slightly unrelated point, but I don't know how many of you have walked past a Clinton's Cards lately and seen the gorgeous 'Deco' prints and fullsize cardboard cutouts they have in there? Well, if you haven't, just know that they're beautiful. I was walking past today after buying Chipsticks from Poundland, and I saw this box of rolled up posters, and it said, 'Deco Posters 99p!' in rather large letters. They were full size posters too. Anyway, I got all excited and was routing through the box, thinking, they're cheap! I'll get two! And then I moved the posters enough, to noticing some little writing under the '99p!' that said 'when you spend £10 on Deco products'. Ugh. I got so excited, and then bam. Please, Clinton's Cards, make the font a little bigger so that no more people get let down like I did. I swear, you don't get owt for nowt these days.

This, frankly gorgeous, picture is by an artist called Stella Im Hultberg. A lot of her pictures are like this, made up of ink washes and stains, and are on tea stained paper, like the one above. I love that the image isn't on white paper, it really wouldn't have the same effect of it was. The colour of the background adds to the effect of the image, giving the whole thing a soft, almost hazy tone. It really does inspire me to try working on not just different coloured paper, but on top of washes and textures that I make myself. I'm going to use some of those that I made while doing mono printing, some of those turned out pretty sweet.

And this last point couldn't be further from the whole Art Nouveau thing, but still. I don't know how many of you have ever played this game. Pretty much, the game took a week to make, and is made entirely of white vector lines. You can put your own music into it, and the line rabbit has to jump over obstacles in time to the music. It's so simple, yet very entertaining. It's almost as simple a concept as Pong. Anyway, if you do badly, the rabbit, Vibri, will turn into a frog, and if you still do worse, she will turn into this kind of worm thing with a television for a head. If you do really well, she'll turn into a princess and dance across the obstacles. It's pretty cute. Anyway, I've recently got my PS1 routed out and hooked up in the flat, and I was thinking, damn I need to get this game again, so I go to ebay. And seriously, for a second hand game that consists of...sticks, really, £20 is the lowest I have found. It's such a low key game! I thought I would have been able to pick it up for about a fiver!

Another bummer is that I've lost my FFVII game :[ I have disc 2 of 4 and the rest has just gone kaput. I really need to get a new one.

- HJ x

Beautiful Type

Okay so, after surfing the web for a good while, I have encountered a good few examples of typography that is just, yeah, brilliant. I love it.

This one below is called Garamond Powerline and was designed by Daniel Adolph, at least, that's what I can work out from the rather unhelpful website that it came from: Here. Granted, I saw this picture below irst, and you can't tell exactly what it is because it's quite small, I sill found it loely and clicked the link to investigate further, where i found the closeups of each letter and wow, I really think that's it's amazing. I've never seen anything like it, it really is pretty original. I love all the wires leading off of them, and even though they don't meet, it still looks great when the letters are placed together in a word.

This image has been designed by SHCH Graphics Group and was found on here. I think that it's a beautiful piece of typography, and it was done entirely by hand with a pen. I think it looks all the better for the fact that it's silver on black paper. I think it makes it a lot more interesting to look at than had it been black on white.

I love that this image has been printed onto paper that has just been found, all creased and stained, it is so obviously recycled and makes me think of art that is eco friendly. I really do like eco art. I guess I would kind of call myself a bit of an Eco Warrior. Ths image was designed by debruehe on DeviantART.

The same story goes for this image, I love the whole recycled feel of the image. Personally, I love working with texture, so this image stands out to me. This was designed by fabianohikaru on DeviantART.

Finally, the image below was designed by DryBones90 on DeviantART, and I think that it is a very interesting use of typography. I love to see images maeup entirely of type, and while I've never tried to use this technique myself, I would love to give it a go someday.

For some reason, the journal is cutting off half of my images, so if you want to see them, you'll have to click them to see the full image. Sorry about that.

- HJ x

Carl's Font

Okay! The latest project lasted two weeks, and we had to design a font based on the personality of a partner that we were asigned. It's pretty interesting project to say the least. Anyway, I got paired with the lovely Carl, and the words I had to work with were: (His) Perfectionist, Shy, Understanding, Camp and Videogame Geek. (Mine) Easy to talk to, Video gamer, Friendly, Cheerful, and Meticulous.

His style of working is the complete opposite of mine. Whereas my work is very messy and thrown on, I work with a lot of paint and inks and love to get really hands on with my work. I love traditional media. His work is very precise, and neat, and perfectly aligned. I can see why he calls himself a perfectionist.

My first idea was to try and combine our two styles, trying to create a controlled mess within a perfectly aligned space, but it simply wasn't happening. Another idea was to use the word shy, and to have Carl's name in small letters, in the corner of a block of bright colour. But during the crit we decided that that wasn't Carl at all, so the idea was scrapped.

Inspiration struck at the fact that video gamer was on both of our lists, so I decided to go back and look at the pixellated fonts used within videogames, especially retro ones.

You can't get much more retro than Space Invaders.
Tadaa. Personally, I love it. I know that it can't be seen all too well in the photograph but the Illustrator version will be up soon enough and you'll be able to see it in all it's true glory. I wanted to fill in the blocks, but I wasn't sure what media to use. Pen would have left it too streaky, and I spent far too long aligning it all dead centre and tracing it perfectly to ruin it with paint. That and my sucky time management skills came into play.

Also, I actually did the wrong glyphs. I forgot which ones Amber drew up for us to do, and just went with it really. I know that the @ was supposed to be included, but it doesn't easily translate into pixels. I'll work on that one some more and maybe have it as the Mother Monster at the top of the Space Invaders game. Oh the ideas.

I wanted to show it as a part of the game itself so that the theme became even more apparent. Pixel font is generally associated with video games, especially older ones. Besides, who doesn't know what Space Invaders is?

I did do a coloured version on Illustrator, but it looked a lot more like Tetris, and went along that line, but you'll see that later because that's a whole other story.

Carl's font for me. Personally, I really like it. It was completely different to everyone else's in the fact that he hadn't used actual letterforms. It's almost like a Dingbats font in a way, still an alphabet, but almost entirely unreadable. Except to Carl who spent so long staring at it he claims he can read it now. Crazy world. Anyway, I love it, and really think that it shows me. That is my kind of style, only more messy and uncontrolled. It's almost like he tried to combine both of our styles into one, like, a controlled mess. Whereas I didn't achieve that, he really did and it just works. I love it, though a key would be useful, especially when it comes to the punctuation.

Shoddy quality picture I know, but mine and Carl's typefaces together just after the presentation. We had to go first, but according to Tom we 'set the bar' so I guess it wasn't a bad thing.

X

Stencils

My scanner really wonked out on these scans. I mean, look at that A! What even happened there? Kind of cool effect though. The point of this is to just say that I noticed that the recent printing had left some pretty sweet patterns and colours on my stencils. Thought I'd share them with you all.





That's all x

Mono Printing and Screen Printing

So most of these are pretty basic, it was my first time with mono printing. We didn't exactly have the facilities at my last college, it was pretty good fun though. Although the colours and patterns always looked way more epic on the sheet than it did on the paper. I suppose it depended really on what press you used. Anyway, as you can see in the image above, I just wrote the alphabet onto the slide using my fingernail, though I didn't think about how it would come out backwards and all that, so I had to flip it on the computer. Lack of judgement right there.

This was actually the first one I made. You can't see from the scan, but because my stencils were made of cardboard and not paper, they were embossed into the print, which was a pretty neat effect, although it did leave a white space around each letter where the ink couldn't touch the paper, so the stencils weren't as crisp as I would have liked them to be.


These two were what was lefton the newspaper from the back of the sheet, which got filthy. Seriously, it is impossible to get them clean, because you're hands are dirty and just ugh, mess everywhere. Not the good kind of mess either, that kind of greasy grossness.



Three variations of the same slide, on different kinds of paper. You can kind of see the embossing on the last one, if you look closely. As you can see, the ink got fainter the more times I used it, obviously
I love the colours in this one, and kind of wish I hadn't scratched the A intto the ink behind the stencil. Kind of ruins it. Oh well, you learn from your mistakes and all that jazz.

This is my favourite one. The stencil was left green from a previous print and really stood out against the purple. I printed it onto tissue paper as well so it came out pretty vivid.

I did stacks of prints, no joke, but a lot of them didn't actually include the letterforms, just some pretty sweet colour blends and grungy backgrounds that I can use in photoshop at a later date. Anyway, onto screen printing.

My last screen printing experience wasn't fun, seriously, resulting in an angry Scottish dude yelling at me for something that totally wasn't my fault. It kind of put me off and I never returned to the Westward Ho print room ever again. Plus I thought that he might eat me or something if I ever showed my face there again. Very scary for a small man.

ANYWAY. We had to take our favourite mono print, which I pointed out, and photocopy it twice and all that. On one of them we had to edit it, like, really make it pop by blacking out areas and adding white highlights. The image above is the result of my editing. I love the tree roots, they're pretty sweet.

We did a load of prints of the unedited one after putting it onto the screens, using magenta, which looked pretty good. I wish we'd kept one sheet of the prints as they were when they were just magenta, but we didn't. We then put the edited version of the print on some more screens, and then mixed up some cyan, and laid that over the top, obviously the edited parts leaving different marks and standing out against the magenta in places.

And this is the result. Unfortunately, my tree roots didn't stand out as much as I would have liked, but I really like the overall thing. It really looks like one of those pictures you have to look at with 3-D glasses, it's got that slightly unfocused, fuzzy look to it. I enjoyed screen printing much more this time around, even though the screen beds are huge, and you kind of struggle to reach if you're a short-arse like me. Really glad I did it though, and I'd like to go back for more printing at some point.

Orange

Continuing on from the last post, we had to pair up with another orange person and find two people from our complimentary colour, in our case, blue. Combining the two colours, we had to make some compositions up, not including white at all. Needless to say, we tried our best and these are the best of what we could do with what we had.

While this next image actually has noo blue in it, I really like it anyway. Despite taking it with the shoddy camera on my phone, I love macro photography and love how the texture shows up in the material. It would have looked much better had I taken it with my proper camera, but I forgot it, so, no dice.

I'll leave you with Tom being, well, Tom.

Orange!

So I've done loads and I haven't posted in a good while, so I'll try to keep things seperate. Hopefully and in order. In seperate posts.

We had to collect at least ten coloured objects, my colour was orange which, surprisingly, is kind of hard to come by. Managed it though. We took all the items and in, and in our group with all the other folks with orange, we had to arange them, from most orand to most red and most yellow and all that kind of stuff.


We had some kind of strange objects, that was for sure. Including a rubber chicken. And a mouldy orange courtesy of Mitch. Joy.

Anyway, then we had to put them in a line in the floor, and the most yellow fed into the yellow objects and the most red fed into the red objects, with the most orange ones in the middle. All six colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, connected together to create a bit circle that went in one door of the classroom and out the other, connecting in the hallway, making one big colour wheel. It was pretty sweet when it was finished.

So, yeah. It worked out pretty good in the end, it looked really nice and turned out pretty interesting. This last one is my favourite image.

Craptastic typeface

So I'm here again, still don't have the video that I said I'd upload. Oops.

Since then I've completed another weeklong brief, though this one was really not fun. Not a good piece of work. I actually thought I'd produced something good until I pinned it up and looked at everyone else's. Yikes.



The idea was there, and had it been printed on brown paper, it would probably have looked more like the garment pattern that it was supposed to. I'll probably do that before I have to hand it in with the rest of the module. And add a tiny pair of scissors into it, so that it's a little more obvious that it's there to be cut out.

I had a really good second idea for this project, so much better than this one, but it only occured to me about an hour before the deadline as I was filling in the design sheet. Oh well. I still have time to run with the idea before I have to hand it in with the rest of the module. Type is actually kind of interesting.

I got yet another brief given to me today, though this one's much more interesting, to make a font based on the personality of someone else in the class. I got a couple of ideas right now, but time will tell. This is really stepping out of my comfort zone for me, because my work in the past has been very messy and grungy, and the person I have to design for it really neat and precise when it comes to his designs. Just have to wait and see what I come out with really. I'm off to play with some paint now.

Laters x