Applied Illustration: Sticker Stock

With the intention of printing stickers alongside the rest of my work on the 6th of May I thought it best to visit James in Digital Print to make sure he'd have stock for such a task. James said that whoever is working Wednesday will run me through the process of preparing stickers in Illustrator, a simple process if you know how. Unfortunately he told me that he has been out of the paper sticker stock for some time now and all of his suppliers are out too. However he does have a fair amount of acetate like sticker stock.

I remember Adam had used this previously for his Thought Bubble stickers and was pleased with the result. Now, for distribution, I would have them printed on paper stock, but for the purpose of this module I suppose I'll have to settle for the acetate stock.

Here is an example of Adam's acetate stickers:

Applied Illustration: Character Study

Today I've been drawing images of Anne Hathaway and Mia Wasikawa's interpretation of Jane Eyre set roughly in the same time frame as The Scarlett Letter. This will help my understanding of what the characters within my leaflet will look like. I've decided that due to time constraints 8 pages is a bit ambitious so instead of creating a small zine for the event, I will instead create a leaflet that will be given away at the release of the film/tv event instead. It will follow two women as they head to release of Hester Pryne from prison (where the tale begins). I felt that this would work as it would whet the viewers appetite before the film - they would already have an interest when the film begins.

This leaflet will have four narrative pages within, and have the necessary logos etc on the exterior. I imagine a good size will be around A5 with glossy Digigreen stock that weighs 150gsm per sheet.

I also set about drawing some environments using digital tracing. These environments look somewhat static, ordered and straight. I'll have to find a way to resolve this issue.

Here is my process from today:

Applied Illustration: 'A' Stickers

In regards to product and range I've already established that I have these aspects pretty much covered now. However I couldn't help but think of the poor people that go to the cinema to watch The Scarlett Letter and don't receive a free gift. So I've decided to produce stickers with the letter 'A' on them also.  They will be purchased from Camaloon, a personalising sticker service. 74mm stickers seems like a reasonable size and if I order over 10,000 I get a 79% discount - this means that each of the 82 Cineworld branches would receive over 100 stickers for customers. These would be handed out with tickets once the t-shirts have all been given away. The cost for these stickers is £779.83 after VAT, there is currently no shipping cost given.

I went about designing the stickers and decided that to make the 'A' stand out on whatever colour clothing the customer is wearing the background needed to be white.

Applied Illustration: Peer Review

Today I had another peer review. It went rather well and I received some positive feedback. In the way of range and distribution I pretty much have sorted by the sounds of it. The only really negative point that I received was that there was still a lack of work for the zine aspect. The zine is the main draw of my project in my opinion and its a shame that I haven't had chance to work on it yet.

Applied Illustration: 'A' T-shirt

Today I spoke to Adam and we discussed how we'd faired over the easter period with our workloads. We'd both agreed that due to our CoP and Responsive modules being in soon, we hadn't had much time to concentrate on Applied Illustration, unfortunately.

Anyway, I informed Adam of my idea to create the cut out letter 'A' for customers visiting Cineworld and he suggested that it could be much simpler to produce t-shirts for customers. I agree, this was a good idea, however the costing of producing so many shirts would be high, so I would limit the free shirts to the first 20 or so customers. This shirts could be brought on mass from Jones T-shirts, a U.S. company. With 5, small, 10 medium, and 5 large shirts the cost would come to $35.80 with $10.95 delivery charge. That is $46.75 in total. With 82 Cineworld cinemas within the UK that would come to $3833.50.

I set about designing the shirt. Initially I placed the associated company logos at the bottom with the Scarlett Letter title below the 'A' but felt that this didn't work well, so moved the title lower, to just above the logos. This felt much more aesthetically pleasing.

Responsive: Evaluation

My approach to Responsive was a bit of a mixed bag. Whilst I struggled somewhat with developing my work to a degree I was happy with and juggling briefs around my other modules I did however develop several skills such as how to effectively create boards for briefs, improve my presentational skills and collaborating with others. I feel I have particularly improved in regards to presentational skills due to the high number of peer reviews we had. I found the group sessions quite useful in Responsive, specifically the early sessions where we broke down the YCN briefs. This allowed me to understand that the big scary companies weren’t big and scary at all, they were actually somewhat in need of me.

However creating work for such companies, and these kinds of briefs in general didn’t and still doesn’t appeal to me. The idea of helping to reinvent a company just left me feeling cold and I feel that this attitude ultimately resulted in me not asserting myself as much as I could for the Propercorn brief and to a degree the Yorkshire Tea brief also. However briefs such as Filmdoo and Hyde Park Picture house where I was creating posters, or Off Life and Thought Bubble where I was creating narrative stories were quite different in many regards. Largely because this is the area of Illustration I see myself working towards post graduation. These were the briefs where I feel that most of my better work took place and where my approach to image making developed most. I pinpointed that collage, a technique I have dabbled in before, and watercolour use were areas where my work looked most interesting. Whilst I don’t think the work I produced using these methods was of a particularly exceptional standard, I feel that I have developed enough as a professional to notice that there is something to these methods that deserves my attention. Beyond water colouring and collage I can see that there is a marked improvement with my digital skills, especially over the past few months. When I compare my Offlife narrative to that of my final Propercorn outcomes the skill is drastically improved in my opinion.

However despite the positive points of Responsive there are still negative points to address such as my time management. I felt that I failed largely in this aspect of Responsive. This is both partially due to my busy schedule and other modules I was working on, but it is largely due to my lack of self-management. There were multiply occasions where I’ll openly admit I put off Responsive work in favour of another module, this had a detrimental effect on my ability to research and develop concept ideas to a degree that I know I’m capable of. For example, whilst I am happy with my ability to create presentation boards, I am aware that there is room for improvement. Maybe this improvement could have occurred during the Responsive module had I managed my time better. The same could be said for my research skills. Research was an area that I tripped up on several times, without a strong research based work is never as informed as it could be and this is quite apparent in several briefs that I took on, specifically the Propercorn and Yorkshire Tea briefs. Had more research been done early on, I believe I could have produced much strong ideas and developed worked that I could be truly proud of.

If I could go back again this is one area I would definitely improve upon. I would also spend more time to recognise what illustrative technique is needed for a specific brief. For example; I could easily have used collage for my Filmdoo and Guardian briefs to wield much more interesting responses in a much shorter amount of time. Finally I would have embraced my work in the collaborative brief more. I allowed Hollie to do most of illustrative side of things within this brief as my lack of confidence in my own skill won out. Had I been more assertive we could have produced a response that may have been a better amalgamation of our separate styles.

Going forward, I plan to make use of the acknowledgement that my time management and research abilities have been a bit lax. It is integral to my professional practise that these areas improve as they are effectively what can make or break an illustrator. That and whether my work is winning material.

Applied Illustration: 'A' Cutout

With other modules taking up much of my time I've had little change to work on OUIL505 for a while now unfortunately. So, today I designed a cut out of the Scarlett Letter 'A' with the intention that this could be handed out to customers at Cineworld when they buy a ticket to the Scarlett Letter. They will then be able to pin the letter to their chests mimicking Hester Pryne.

The piece is relatively simple in design as I can't imagine Hester wearing an ultra elaborate, and nice to look at, marking of her sin. So why would the customers have that either?

Responsive: Project Report

Here is my Project Report for Responsive in which I discuss the briefs that I took on throughout the module.

Responsive: Studio Brief 2 - Yorkshire Tea Individual Boards

Here are the boards for the Yorkshire Tea brief I took on with Hollie. These boards focus on my role within the collaboration, collected together within and Issuu document:

Responsive: Studio Brief 1 - Propercorn Presentation Boards

Here are my presentation boards for the Propercorn brief I took on in Studio Brief 1:

Responsive: Studio Brief 1 - Presentation Boards

Here are my presentation boards for the briefs I took on throughout Studio Brief 1, collected together within an Issuu document:

Guardian Political Poster

Over the last few days I've been working on a political poster for a Guardian competition aimed at art students. It was a relatively simply brief that was quite open in the respect that all was asked was for an election poster to be made that was in the same vein as the anti-Labour posters of the past.


I initially went with an idea of highlighting several of the Tory elite (Cameron, Osbourne and Boris Johnson) from their Bullingdon Club days, however I thought that was too silly and wouldn't work very well as an election poster. I created these images using watercolour and found that I quite enjoyed doing so.



I chose to use watercolour again for my second attempt at a poster. This time I decided to go darker, much darker by likening David Cameron to Hitler. Hitler believed that he needed to find a 'final solution to the Jewish problem'. Using this phrase I spun it around to reflect the working classes instead.

I am rather happy with the final outcome for this but feel that perhaps I could have found a way to merge the digital and hand made aspects of the poster more effectively.

On a side note, I didn't receive an email notification for this entry just a thanks from the website which was a bit odd.

Filmdoo Poster Competition: Submission

After some minor adjustments to my poster I felt that it was finally ready for submission.

I have probably spent more focused time on this one piece than I have anything else in a while and I am very happy with the outcome. It probably won't win but I don't care at this point. I found joy in creating a piece of work and thats all that matters to me.

Filmdoo Poster Competition

I've decided to take on the Filmdoo Poster competition. I decided to make a poster for Marvel/Disney's Captain America: The Winter Soldier as I have recently watched that film and it is fresh in my memory. Before I started I also made note of the dimensions of the piece being 282 x 1020mm or 726 x 1020mm. These are dimensions usually associated with film poster sizes of 'one sheets' or 'quads' and aren't the generic 'A' format size. Had I not took the time to review the brief correctly this could have potentially caused problems down the line.

Initially I played around with layouts that mimicked a generic film poster with a character or two in the foreground whilst additional characters/scenery filled the space in the background. However I thought about the source material of the film being a comic book and decided to make a poster with panels and such whilst also appearing to be poster like (see below).


I made a collage in Photoshop using stills from the film and preexisting film posters before tracing over the work and colouring it digitally. I initially wanted to stick to a colour theme of three colours. However when I came near to completing the piece I really felt a fourth colour was needed to help make the poster stand out a bit. I had used a subdued blue, brown and black so the introduction of a bright red was very welcomed.