Barcodes

Furthering on from my minor project I wanted to explore and further the theme of barcodes in relation to humans, due to much of my work becoming very linear and representing the bars within the barcode could I in fact make a human barcode? However I wanted to consider this idea within a publication format directed at more of an editorial audience as the photographer Ricky Guest.

Rick Guest, Wayne's World

Guest creates futuristic images of linear moving figures that I felt influenced by as a way of showing a scanned human through photography and his work is often editorial based. This also made me consider other editorial magazines such as 'ACNE PAPER' which is directed at a fashion audience to influence designers which is something  I need to consider investigating as a lot of editorial magazine are rooted in fashion.  An aspect that I really like about ACNE is that it has a single theme that runs through the whole magazine and is portrayed in lots of different ways. For example the latest issue is called 'The Actress' and it looks at current and old actresses and everything from costumes to the theatre. 

ACNE Paper Magazine, The Actress

One thing I really like about the magazine is the A3 size and layout working harmoniously with the spreads. These made me think of the artist Hammershoi because his paintings are clean, crisp, well laid out and these qualities can be translated into the ACNE papers' layout. In particular how they use negative space surrounding the images and text 'framing' each page similar to Hammershoi. 

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Interior With Young Woman From Behind

Drawing

I also wanted to get back to drawing again and so felt that this would be the perfect opportunity to practice my illustrative skills. I wanted my context for this piece to be an interior based surface, I chose to focus on pinecone and fawn illustrations which I intentionally moved towards a Scandinavian/folk theme within the Mid winter brief. I wanted these interior based surfaces to be for both children and adults. A company called ‘Love Mae’ particularly stood out when I was researching for my child interiors, it is an Australian based company that supplies adhesive fabric decals for the home and children.

Using this as a context directly impacted how I did my illustrations for the brief, I was also heavily influenced by children's books and how animals are illustrated when children are the main audience. In order to get interesting texture to the illustrations I decided to draw them on watercolour paper which worked well due to the colouring of the paper being off-white contrasting to the dark fine liner pen that I used. 

I also experimented using watercolour paint in some of the images but these were not as successful as I'd have hoped, so I decided to use 'Kurecolour' permanent ink pens used by graphic artists. The wide nib helped create curves and also added depth to the illustrations by going over certain sections more then others. The fawn illustrations I directed more towards a children’s interior creating a fawn and pinecone motif that would have been suitable for cushions that could be embroidered into with detail. For the wallpaper I went for a singular fawn within a snowy scene.

Live project

So far the majority of my work has been very concept based which I have enjoyed, however I was finding myself getting lost within my own thoughts and getting confused with what it was I was trying to say. Therefore I wanted my live project to be aimed at more of a commercial audience, to show my versatility as a practitioner. I struggled to find a live brief that I felt I could really benefit from and would challenge me. So I decided to enter the patternmash brief, which is set monthly based on a theme to produce a 30cmx30cm surface design. The brief that I entered was midwinter a theme refreshingly separate to my other work.