Category Archives: Craft

21/04/2013 · 5:28 pm

Pick Me Up 2013

Yesterday Jack & I travelled to London to visit Pick Me Up, the graphic arts festival at Somerset House. Last year Jack went with his sister Emma and her boyfriend Alex, and we met up with them to see what was on show this year. En route to catch the train I realised I hadn’t brought my camera with me – I was so annoyed with myself! Knight to the rescue – Jack let me borrow his iPhone but I hadn’t ever used one before so they’re not the best photos ever, sorry.

We hadn’t booked tickets online as we wasn’t  sure what time we would be going so had to wait in the queue for a bit but it was a gorgeous sunny day so it wasn’t so bad!

When we finally made it inside, the first thing I saw was Maricor Maricar‘s beautiful stitched typography which I’d seen on Behance. (This happened with a lot of the work – great to recognise something you’ve seen online but actually see it in the flesh!)

Around the corner was some great work by Hattie Stewart:

A set of magazine spreads overlaid with patterns and doodles – so much detail!

The room was full of people admiring the work and Daniel Frost’s people caught my eye as well as that of a little girl on a scooter…

Anna Lomax’s work caught my eye for a different reason:

A neon fry up and some fluorescent price tags – very British!

Fluoro was quite popular, also featuring in the striking risograph prints by Rob Flowers:

Striking for other reasons…

Malika Favre’s Kama Sutra alphabet for the Penguin Classics book. Some were a bit naughty but they’re simple, striking and brilliant!

We then went upstairs and the first thing I was was this lovely print by Dayjob – it was obviously the tri-dar in me:

A nice little range of prints.

Brothers of the stripe were showcasing some great prints…

… as well as a lovely eclectic alphabet.

Fatherless print posse were screen printing through out the day:

Awesome and colourful prints – I liked the overlaying.

Facestamp by Human after all provided an opportunity for you to do some printing yourself…

A variety of facial feature stamps with different styles by several illustrators – good fun.

Fun was a general theme throughout the room with portrait booths, fayre games including hoop-la and an ideas machine:

Then we ventured into the collaboratives and gallery side rooms off the main area…

…Puckleduster had set up a mini tattoo parlour offering temporary tattoos whilst Nelly Duff had an eccentric gallery with quirky frames and Anthony Burrill prints:

SOMA had some cool parcel tape:

and I loved Hazel Nicholls’ Nice biscuit design – ‘It’s nice to be nice’. I also loved Untitled’s alphabet candles…

…whilst Jack & Alex admired their prints – one of which was on printed onto leather.

In Handsome Frank’s room I found a lonely fluoro poster shouting FREE at me, so of course I picked it up (pick me up pun haha):

But it wasn’t the same story in the shop – I resisted buying any of these tubes filled with lovely prints:

I was well behaved, only picking up a few freebie leaflets and business cards and I signed up to a couple of mailing lists too:

As I’m sure you can tell, I had a great time! Saw so much, loved so much and even persuaded Jack to take my photo next to the giant Pick Me Up pencil (which I am amazingly colour co-ordinated with)!

Pick Me Up is open until 28th April and I recommend going if you’re around London. I’ll definitely be going again next year.

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04/04/2013 · 7:52 pm

Exciting Envelopes

I love the internet, social networking and email – it’s all so fast and easy. However, for me, there’s nothing quite like getting post. I love it! So  mix that feeling with the idea of receiving post from some of the best creatives in the world and you can just imagine; I’m like a kid at Christmas!

Auction 13 is well underway and exciting envelopes stamped with our 13 have been  appearing. It’s a brilliant feeling and it gets better when the envelopes are opened – the postcards we’ve received have been amazing. They will be revealed soon so keep an eye on the twitter (@auctionthirteen) and blog.

Whilst I love what’s inside the envelopes, it’s interesting to see the outside too. The postcards have travelled across the world in some cases (even by pigeon apparently!) and the geek that I am, I like to see the different postal marks and stamps. Some envelopes have been personalised too – top marks for that! I love the personal touch:

Who else gets excited about getting post? Do you appreciates postage details? A few months back, Lestaret introduced me to a new world of mail art. Basically people just make things and send them to each other – sounds great to me! The IUOMA (International Union of Mail-Artists) website has nearly 3,000 members all creating and swapping. If I had more time it’s something I’d love to get involved with. Maybe I will, one day…

Until then, I’ll be busy with Auction 13 – don’t forget to follow us for more information on the creatives involved and the auction itself. Get saving your pennies to make sure you can bid!

 

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01/11/2012 · 8:07 pm

Trick or treat: All Year Day

So yesterday was Halloween and Lincoln GD were celebrating in the way we know best: being creative. We did an inter-year design challenge around the end of last year and it was a good opportunity to meet some people from other years and just a great laugh. With it falling on Halloween & the 3rd years having been working on some skulls in mentoring, it made sense that we continued with the Day of the dead theme!

So, what happened? Well…

Here’s my group hard at work; Heather & Liam (brave first years) and Charlie, Sam & Becky (3rd years).

We decided to create a 3D sombrero wearing skull using some random bits and bobs that I brought in (tissue paper, feathers, string, flamingos!)…

Elsewhere in the studio…

… Emj & Emma were making sugar skull inspired masks…

… Amber’s team were using flowers and doilies….

… Laura was carving a marrow…

…. Joe was playing with a glove…

…. and Tom was doing his usual cheesy pose, whilst Glen was making skulls from our off cuts:

And ta-dah:

Our 3D sombrero wearing skull looks awesome!
I mentioned last week that we are going to start making more use of the window in TPH from now on, so it was out with the 2nd years’ book sculptures and in with the skulls:

I helped arrange the skulls in the window and it was great to see all of the teams proudly bringing their creations to be hung. There was even a contribution from  our lecturer, Glen:

And then the arranging began:

It was nice to have all the students come and watch the window filling up and it  attracted attention from passerbys too.

Thanks to everyone involved – the tutors for arranging it and the students that bothered to turn up and have a bit of a break from the seriousness of our assessed work. The window looks brilliant and everyone really got into the spirit of things – It’s amazing what you can achieve in just 2 hours!

You might have noticed that I haven’t included a photo of the final display? That’s because I’m going to take photos of the final display later tonight – it will become clear why! So check back later tonight/tomorrow for a (trick or) treat!

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21/10/2012 · 8:41 pm

Experience Design: Linonophobia

So the first project of 3rd year is over – that was quick! I’ve posted about my trip to the London museums for research and the talk about magic & tricks of the brain from Stuart Nolan, but I haven’t really talked about the brief yet.

The brief asked us to choose an object from an existing museum and improve the experience; thinking about the audience, use of technology, innovative ideas and the design(graphic bits).

When I visited the Science Museum in London I was interested in the Who Am I? exhibition. The exhibition consisted of several glass display cabinets containing objects, as well as some touch screen computers with questionnaires and other interactive applications.

I was interested in this cabinet:

What are you afraid of?

It contains lots of jars with items to represent fears and phobias, ranging from the common fear of spiders to the more unusual fear of chopsticks. I chose to take the phobia of string, also known as Linonophobia, to create my experience with. I decided to keep the same audience as the original exhibition (8 -16 years) and create an experience to help the children understand the phobia and hopefully teach them not to be scared later in life.

To the average person, string is not a scary object and many would laugh and say ‘Why would you be scared of string?’. Linonophobics are scared of string because it can trap and restrict you, leaving you without an escape. It causes confusion and panic, so I decided a maze situation would help to create the experience and emotions that linonophobics suffer when in contact with string.

So that’s the basis of the idea. I’ve produced a model to show the layout and scale, and I’ve been taking photos throughout making it too:

Perspex for the base of the walls…

… wrapped in string. Different variations of thickness and density to create interesting shadows and distort vision. View from the exit:

…and view from the entrance. I decided to have the name of the phobia as the first thing you would see when you entered the room. I cut these letters from foam board and wrapped them in string but decided I didn’t like it in the end. View from above:

No time for tidying up – I made an ‘organised mess’ applying my optical illusion style stripes – because fears are illusions of the mind!

Things are starting to look a bit more interesting now…

Type on acetate!

Adding the interactive activities on the outside walls…

… and the type to the maze walls and floor.

And finally, doing the beauty shots!

So what does it look like now? Here’s some close ups of the details:

First impressions.

Interactive typography projection.

Interactive string pegboard.

Break the string for the emergency scissors!

Twang – o – meter!

Complete the tasks, scan the triangles to collect points and gain a certificate at the end of the exhibition.

Imagine a world without string: no kites, slip on shoes and no stringed musical instruments.

Escape the maze through the stretchy, elasticated wall.

My crit went quite well; my tutor Isil said that she thinks it’s an interesting concept and she would like to go and visit my experience. Just a few tweaks with my portfolio and finito!

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how my experience turned out considering I was completely clueless at the beginning of the project. We get a new project tomorrow…. magazine design! I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some kind of twist, so it’ll be interesting. After this project, I’m ready for (almost) anything – bring it on!

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08/03/2012 · 6:51 pm

Stamping with Stephen

On Tuesday I attended a rubber stamp workshop ran by the lovely Stephen Fowler. I blogged about it earlier for the course blog but I still have plenty to show you here!

I had heard of rubber stamping before as Lucy had one made professionally for her Limited Edition project, however I hadn’t really thought about using one. You’d be surprised what you can produce from cutting a rubber though…

Stephen showed us some of his work and the different possibilities achievable  from using rubber stamps. There was some really playful results from combining different stamps, different colours and over printing different shapes. A lot of the work reminded me of print making as it has the same kind of effect – it’s essentially the same process as linocut but you don’t need the big Albion press.

Stephen is such a character! He started to get really passionate about rubbers (WHSmith own brand are Stephen’s top tip!) which reminded me of us Graphics geeks and our discussions about typography. Who knows what outsiders think when they listen to our conversations!?  I don’t care though :)

After watching Stephen demonstrate the process, we were all keen to give it a go ourselves:

Sunjay with his Sun and Lucy with her moustache looking excited!

Amy’s feather came out really well due to the lovely detail…

… and I really liked Tom’s illuminati inspired pattern (It’s triangles, of course I liked it!)

For my stamp, I cut a triangular pattern into the edges of the rubber and chose a bright orange ink  called Tangelo! The inks had some great names with my favourite being a light green called Pear Tart – as Philippa said, it sounds good enough to eat!

I had planned to try and form some letterforms from my triangles but it didn’t really work as well as I had hoped.

Meanwhile, Jack was creating accessories for his smiley face and Heather was planning an alien invasion…

After a little play around with our stamps and the combination of inks, we all made little booklets and collected each others stamps(such a sweet idea!). I chose to make a concertina style book…

Amy stamping her feather in my book.

I decided that I would create a pattern using my stamp to create a cover for my little booklet…

… and topped off with a matching belly band:

Talveer Uppal & Jack Kingham

Amy Sellers & Heather Scott

Lucy Perkins & Aaron Remedios

Sam Dowse & Sunjay Morar

I love my little book. A lovely reminder of the day and something that will hopefully be worth a lot in a few years to come when we’re all famous Graphic Designers! ;)

Thanks for sharing your skill with us Stephen! You can see more of Stephen’s work on his blog. He taught 4 groups over 2 days, so for more work from the other groups have a look at Emma and Dave’s blogs!
Get your rubbers out and get stamping away!

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