THINGS ON FIRE

I feel I must apologise to possible readers of this blog for the radio silence of late. I’ve been busy I assure you, starting up printing businesses, creating personal work and work for clients, and generally trying to talk to people a lot.
I have exciting work to show very soon, so if you do read this blog, expect something new soon. Sooner than since the last post at any rate.

Hello people of the internet, it’s been a while since I last posted as I’ve been busy working on various projects and getting our cellar print studio more organised and giving it a lick of paint. Here’s a round up of the things that I’ve been getting on with since I last posted. First on the agenda, I made a T-shirt design for Mondo Cane for a competition. We didn’t win, but I like the idea enough to show you here.

I had a little chat about my inspirations and my work to Katie from a blog called The Young Creatives which you can read right here.

I also did a few personal illustrations that I’m hoping to be putting into a little mailout in the future. I’m trying to explore keeping my colours limited at the moment, and keeping the texture to just add character to a piece rather than become too much of an obvious focal point.

I’ve just got back from a trip northwards to the seaside town of Whitby, a town steeped in history and folklore, not to mention excellent fish & chips shops. It’s also a nice place for spying a few examples of nice typography and lettering. Some of the shop signs remain hand painted or are based on hand lettering, and there’s many a shop with a quaint little open/closed sign. Here are a few examples I managed to snap on my recent trip:

On the 25th of November in the US and the 26th in the rest of the world, there is an event that everyone can take part in called Buy Nothing Day, the basic idea being to spend a day not spending money. I designed a couple of posters for the event last year and decided to have another go this year. It’s interesting from my point of view to compare my work from a year ago and my work now and seeing how different my work has become.

I decided to focus on what I believe is an important aspect of Buy Nothing Day, which is to support local and independent businesses so they don’t sink and go under, especially during the tough economic times we’re going through at the moment. So if you have to buy stuff on the 26th November, try and make sure it’s local & independent!

I was recently asked by Ben from Belleville to design a poster for an upcoming gig he was putting on at The Packhorse. The turnaround was quite quick, and the brief quite open, my only real limitation was that it should reflect the “old music played well” line that Ben used to describe the style of the evening. I wanted to avoid creating a pastiche or an imitation of a 1930′s poster, but still wanted to get through a touch of the class that seems to be associated with times gone by. I put forward a few concepts to Ben, and we agreed on the above design. I had quite alot of fun on this project and hope to be doing some more gig posters in the future.

A short while ago I made a post about setting up a small, DIY printmaking studio in my girlfriend’s cellar. You can read all about that here. Since then, our screen-printing equipment has arrived (squeegees, inks, screens, coating fluid etc) and, after a little bit of a false start and some practice, we had a short printing sesh today to try it all out.

These hinge clamps didn’t come with the set, but they are a lifesaver in time and effort terms. Well worth the extra money.

A photograph of my girlfriend taping up the screen for me while I prepared some ink. Sadly, as I had the duel duty of printing and taking photos of the occasion, there aren’t any photos of the actual printing process, but here are some of the resulting prints, hanging up.

We thought the last one would make a nice wrapping paper design!

Anyway, that was my short blog on today’s screenprinting spectacular, which we were very glad succeeded as it means we can keep on being more adventurous with what we can make down there. I’m busy with one or two music related projects at the moment, but I’ll hopefully have some images to show for something quite soon.

It’s been a while since my last blog post as I’ve been sorting out getting work (both freelance and part time), but I’ve tried to keep busy and try out a few experiments in drawing to brush up and improve on my illustration skills. Below you can find a few of my recent self initiated illustrations.

I’ll be updating soon with a few details on upcoming projects I’ll be involved in which I’m excited about taking on, and of course there will hopefully be some updates regarding the DIY printing room mentioned in the last post.

Well friends, this is a first. In fact my first blog post as a graduate, no longer a design student, now officially a design professional (eep!). In an effort to make sure our creativity isn’t allowed to take too much of a break, me and my girlfriend have spent part of the summer planning and setting up a makeshift print studio in her kindly donated cellar. It’s early days yet, we still have a way to go in making it look pretty, and the screen printing supplies have yet to arrive, but we’ve had fun making linocuts and monoprints from the comfort of our own home.

It’s been literally months since i’ve updated this blog, and i feel like i should take some time to bring anyone reading up to speed with some Things on Fire goings on.
My time has been taken up with working hard at completing and organising my work for the Bradford School of Arts and Media degree show, which had it’s opening night last Friday, and continues this week. The opening night was great fun, and i had a few nice conversations with people about my work, and design in general. I might get some photos organised to show here at a later date.

One of my final projects before the show was to design a book jacket for Jack Kerouac’s classic “On the Road”, which is due to be released in glorious cinema-vision next year.
This outcome came to me after i began trying to avoid any obvious solutions by taking my inspiration from the jazz album covers of the American 50′s, the period and country the book is set in. After creating a few dozen ideas using simple geometric shapes and colour, i was inspired to tackle a more illustrative cover, and this was the outcome, which i am quite happy with . I also created some typographic posters using quotes from the book and a typeface i created. You’ll be able to see more by clicking the image above.

Another large project for me was of course the screen printing of the 250 envelopes for the degree show. We (by which i mean I) christened them “Grab Bags” and set to work on getting them printed. They were printed with two custom mixed colours on both sides, which works out at around 1000 pulls on the screen bed, which isnt bad going for my first major large run of prints. I had lots of help from my fellow students, and without them i would never have done it in time, so it was truly a group effort that i was glad to be a part of.

And so there we are. This is my last blog post as a graphic design student, and i hope to see you for my next one as a professional. I’ve got a head full of ideas for projects i’d like to get going, so i’ll hopefully be able to share some of that in my next post.

It’s time for another update again, this time concerning the course end of year show catalogue i mentioned in my last post. We have decided as a group that it would be too obvious to do what all other places might do and to create a bound catalogue compiling all our work, not to mention expensive to produce.

So with that in mind we began looking at alternatives. What else could we do that would look good and be interesting, but also would be relatively within our small budget. Various ideas and options we’re tossed around until we settled on an idea and format we were happy with. Our plan is to create a limited edition printed 12″ square envelope,  featuring samples of work from us all inside. We’re all going away to come up with a striking cover, and here are the examples of ideas i’ll be submitting:

Both concepts try to communicate the collaborative nature of the catalogue. The top two play on the phrase “many hands make light work” , whereas the ones below that are based on the idea of a “hive mind”, in this case a creative hive mind, which of course should be made of eyes on a graphic design course.

I have tried to limit the colours in both as my intention was to have them screen printed onto the envelopes, which would work effectively for a large run. It was alot of fun working on these as i decided to try and treat them like record covers due to the size. Hopefully someday i’ll be able to work on an LP cover for real.