'Cute' Wallpaper.

Met up with Paul today, to show him some stuff, get his opinions and now I'm working towards final bits...

Picnic Design...

Some more drawings that I have been doing, which I hope to turn into images...

Below are hearts actually done with watercolour, I tried to re-create gingham with watercolours...

I've also been playing around with the idea of untensils and in one image trying to make a gingham pattern with it...

Below, attempting a Gingham pattern...

Artists Research, dealing with pattern...

I need some inspiration and a fresh outlook at repeat pattern!

So... here's a quick look into some artists who deal with pattern that I've been looking into...

http://abduzeedo.com/10-great-surface-pattern-designers

This is a webpage full of lots of pattern, there are only a couple which I particularly like though, they are:

Julia Rothman - http://www.juliarothman.com/ (nice website)

Julia Rothman, situated in Brooklyn, New York, her work has a simplistic, hand-drawn style, which is what I would like to portray in my work a little, although this seems quite hard to do, and keep it looking clean at the same time...although doing a piece which is completely hand drawn pattern gets me excited and was an idea I was going to try before. I particularly like the merky brown colour of the piece below and also the line work in amongst the houses...

Rinzen - http://www.rinzen.com/

I really like the design below, although it looks very graphicy, I think im a sucka for polka dot and also I really like the way they've used colour and also the idea of making the bear appear every so often...

Marian Bantjes - http://www.bantjes.com/?c=Patterns

She works with interlocking objects in some of her work, this is really interesting and makes me wonder how you would go about repeating something as intricate as that without hand drawing it all!

Artivism - Exhibition Opening at Armly Mills.

Today, was the final exhibition to which we received invites in the post, for the Artivism project, the sculptures had all been put up in a section of Armly Mills Museum, everyones hard work had pulled off and it looked pretty good and very biazare! There was drinks and nibbles, very civilised and Kevin had said that people which had visited the museum throughout the day and all been intriegued by the project and had enjoyed looking at it.

Above the work was a film Shari had put together, encompassing everybody's stories behind their work, in which my illustrations were featured, which got me a little mention in the credits of the film, which I took a photo of.

Below are bits from the film...

This film will now be shown in the Museum...

Shari had even put together a cute DVD for everybody, on them, - the film projected above the work, - the interviews documentary style piece shown at green generations launch and - a slide show of the work done throughout the project.

Finishing Artivism Project pieces.

Here are some photos of Chris Jodie and I getting our characters finished for the exhibition...Chris and I spent the morning searching the craft shops of Leeds, to find paints and things we didn't need but just wanted. The idea of my piece is a bear sat on a shelf with books...

I don't think my finished thing is something that I am overly proud of, but it was fun to do something totally relaxed and not really worry about what it looked like, although when I looked at the finished thing I did hate it and feel kind of ashamed that I'd done it!

'Cute' Wallpaper.

I have been asked by Paul to design a 'cute' repeat pattern/wallpaper for him to put up around Leeds, don't know whether It will be the finished design for the end of this brief, I'm going to start it and then will give Paul something in the near future, after the deadline.

This also ties in well with my 'Picnic' brief as picnics are pretty cute, and I have got this reaction from people when faced with the word cute:

I began playing about with origami, which also then seemed to form a sort of 'cute' patchwork picnic blanket idea, but from this, I then tried to put it in a digital format as the design will be screen printed.

These are the little paper/origami pieces I was doing, It felt nice too just play about with paper and folding rather than a pen.

Although they look a little bit like an advert for Thortons chocolate which is a bit shit...

Then I worked into them digitally on the computer, making shapes from the original origami heart I made on illustrator...

PICNIC - Research.

The work I will take to 'On The Wall', will be by the theme of 'Picnic', therefore I have started drawing and re-searching picnics!

There was an online picnic blog I found, which has pretty much everything you need to know about how to have a picnic and places to picnic.... http://picnictablechatter.com/

Online I found recipes entitled 'picnic', picnic equipment, luxury picnic hampers, picnic events that were being held, even sites where you can order already made/put together picnics!

http://www.justpicnics.co.uk/_site/samplemenus.php#

As expected a gingham background and I enjoyed the idea of the packaging they had used for their picnic boxes.

I'd been itching to do a bit of Origami and so I put together some little picnic baskets in this style, the first one I did was plain, but the second, I thought of 'The Teddy Bears Picnic' and used the repeat pattern I had put together for the Armly Mills project, as this was quick to do and I wanted to know what they picnic baskets would look like with a patterned put to them. I think it looks pretty cute...

But I also asked friends what they though of when they heard the word picnic:

From this I got a lot of inspiration and got some good drawings from each word and began drawing....