Contents A Bit About Me. My work Inspiration Recent Projects Online High Noon Show Portfolio Business Stuff Next Steps Exhibitions Competitions Useful Links
A Bit About me.
Communicating through drawing is something that most people will encounter at some point in their life and is the starting point for many designers, whether it is seen in the final stages of the designed piece or not. Not every drawing is the same and everyone will have their own way of using this tool, which is why I feel that this form of visual language is often the most honest as being able to show the unedited drawings in the final work is brave where digital ways of working could so easily create cleaner images. This is why being able to communicate effectively through drawing alone is a basis of much of my practice.
The honesty of drawing is something that I found while working with printing, it allowed me reproduce my drawings in a way that kept a lot of the qualities of the original drawing at the same time as allowing me to be more confident with the use of colour and image composition. Most of my work still heavily features the drawn lines even if they are replicated in media other than pen or pencil.
Growing up in London has clearly had a strong influence in my work with buildings and the city often being the subject matter. It’s a subject that is constantly evolving both in my work and the wider world, with studies looking at the city and the way that people interact with architecture in general. Architecture creates spaces for people to live and work while playing a subconscious but important role in the way people feel and act. This interest fuels a lot of my work wanting to explore the different views people have on the city.
My Work It took me a long time to realise the way I worked wasn’t as good as it could have been, I tended to jump straight into a final or almost final image without giving myself enough time to try out different compositions and potentially find a better image. This meant that a lot of my earlier work lacked something, and they often felt flat. I used meticulous pen strokes or scale to try and hide this and create a more interesting image, this in turn meant I had to start an image earlier to finish the piece while giving myself less time to experiment with the image. Creating images for printing means that I have to spend more time working out composition and layers to make the image work. Now I will usually start with a basic idea of what the image might look like before sketching out a few different compositions in pencil.
I will use either draft paper to pen in all the line work or draw onto a sheet of paper over a faint pencil sketche. The draft paper allows me to line up the layers while drawing them and means that I don’t have to rub out the pencil, which might smudge any line work. Having drawn out the layers I scan them into Photoshop. For me computer is a good way of enhancing the image rather than creating one from scratch. It allows me to quickly the add texture and colours that would take hours to create, however I don’t enjoy the process as much as printing or drawing this is because for me part of enjoyment of printing is in the very hands on nature and the finality of print that you don’t get while working on a digital image which could potentially never be finished.
To expose an image on a screen for printing the artwork has to be black and white as the screen wont pick up half tones, to get round this I have learnt to bitmap any gradients or textures, which basically turns the image into dots that thin out to give a lighter colour. In doing this you can chose the size of the dots you want to print which can range from a smooth gradient that you may only notice on closer inspection or bigger dots that become part of the design. This is something that I am currently experimenting with.
Inspiration If growing up the city wasn’t enough inspiration to get me interested in buildings when I was young both my parents were in the industry, my mum was an interior designer and my dad was and still is an architect, this meant that I was surrounded by architectural renderings that hung on the walls and was dragged to look at interesting buildings by my parents. At the time I didn’t love this but I find myself doing it now. This is undoubtedly where I first became interested in buildings as a subject.
StuartFranks
Chris Dent was one of the first illustrators I came across that focused on buildings as his subject matter. His work was the first to inspire me to use my interest in architecture in my work. Before seeing his work I hadn’t considered illustration as a viable career path and only studied ‘art’ at school as that’s what I enjoyed the most. He uses simple clean lines built up over large areas to create wide cityscapes that often feature only the buildings giving them character in his drawings.
Chris Dent
The work that I tend to be most inspired by has a lot of its focus on the drawn aspect of the images such as Daniel Danger, Kevin Tong or Mcbess this strong use of line is something that I have always tried to utilise in my own work, I enjoy being able to see the time taken over images that the artists or illustrators make. More recently as printing has given me the confidence to bring colour into my work I am finding myself drawn to artists such as Kevin Tong and Matthew Lyons or film makers like Wes Anderson whose work has taught me it’s value in an image.
Kevin Tong
Daniel Danger
Although I am constantly inspired by other peoples work and enjoy finding people who work in new and exciting ways, I think it is important to not spend all of my time looking to other people for inspiration but do things that interest me outside of the art world, things like climbing, both riding and building bikes and sailing. All quite physical tasks that take me away from a desk, I think this keeps my work interesting and fresh as I can go away and think about it rather than staying in one place and it becoming stagnant.
Matthew Lyons
Recent Projects During my pre major project I was part of a collaborative narrative project where each person had a day to continue on a narrative left by the person before. Before we started we set out the sizes of the pages and agreed that the work should be done in pencil with a limited colour palette, coloured digitally or if you had the right colour in pencil. As there were only seven of us it took a week to draw the pages and then another week to print and bind the small books. This project pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me try working solely in pencil with a short deadline which freed me up to try and focus more on the narrative. As we all enjoyed the project we decided to do it again in our FMP’s only this time with two days and slightly bigger pages, but everything else the same.
Both of these smaller projects helped me decide that I wanted to create a full narrative for my FMP. Doing multiple storyboards through out the project really helped me as it made me work harder at my image composition making each image tell a part of the story with the aid of very few words. This also gave me the time to plan ahead and understand where the story was going before starting final images. The length of the project meant that towards the beginning I got the opportunity to try out a few different ways of working before finding one that I could carry through the whole project.
Online The internet is an important tool to use with a wide variety of platforms that perform different rolls in showing yourself and your work to the world. Websites can be used to display the best of your work often being the quickest and simplest way of showing your work to potential clients, while a twitter or tumblr has a more relaxed feel, showing ways of working, being used to contact people or generally showing a more in-depth view of your work.
During my final year I have created a website using moonfruit which has a simple drag and drop format to create the website, this was easy to learn but made an affective site to showcase my work in a clean environment. It has a handwritten title, with a simple navigation bar displaying the names of different projects or categories of work. Below that there is a section to contact me via the website and links to different pages such as my titter and blog.
To give my twitter, blog and website have some continuity I have chosen a colour that I have used for roll over link buttons and chosen titles or font that work across the different platforms.
High Noon Show Along with my own website I created the website for our end of year show, High Noon. This was a challenge as I had make something that could display everyone’s work in the best possible way. I learnt a small amount of coding so that everyone’s section reshuffles on the page giving each person a chance to be at the top of the page as well as roll over icons that change to display a small portrait drawn by themselves.
Portfolio A good portfolio is important as it must present you and your work in its best possible light while not distracting from the work itself. It should show a selection of your best work, but not be overwhelming . It can be tailored when shown to different clients, but it will give them an idea of what they could expect from you in a particular job. As much of my work is print based I have focused a lot on my physical portfolio as I think viewing the original prints is beneficial over a digital copy. However I also have PDF version to send to potential clients. For my portfolio I have used an A2 Prat Kraftfolio that has lose sheets allowing the client to feel the paper used for each print, which is an important decision made when printmaking, while keeping the feel of preciousness intact.
Business stuff Having a nice portfolio is only important if people see it, this is why getting yourself on people’s radar is a big factor in obtaining a job. I recently got a set of business cards printed from moo.com their service is really good with a quick turn around and really nice printing. I chose a couple of different images to put on the cards so people can choose from a selection. The back has my contact information and website along with my name handwritten across the top.
Alongside my FMP narrative project me and three friends got the opportunity to set up a stall and sell things for a couple of different events, one here in Bournemouth hosted at Sixty Million Postcards and the other in London run by Alternative Press for these two stalls I have been creating prints to sell. This has given me the opportunity to make prints with out the pressure of them being final pieces while giving me the opportunity to see my work in a setting outside of uni and with different usages like on t-shirts, seeing if and how my work sits in more of a applied setting like retail. As well as gaining a bit of experience in selling work this also gave me the chance to hand out business cards to people who I would otherwise not have contact with.
I am planning on making a pack of promotional post cards to send out to people, because although business cards are a good way to give contact information to someone you need to be able to market yourself and send things out to people that will not get immediately thrown away. The postcards will be a selection of my work different from the business cards with contact details on the reverse. I am in the process of collecting addresses to send these postcards out to, if I cant find a physical address I will attach the pdf copy of my portfolio. I am also looking into writing up contract and invoice templates, to do this I am considering joining the AOI to help.
Next Steps Looking back at my work over the course of the degree I can see how much I have improved and how much work has changed in just three years. Having enjoyed such a wide selection of projects with varying amounts of success I feel comfortable in knowing where my interests lie. From these I can continue to explore new ways of working as I have gained some much inspiration for projects that I would like to undertake.
Working with print this year has made me appreciate working in the print room with other people and facilities the uni has, I would like to continue working in this sort of environment after uni so I have been writing emails and getting in contact with a number of print studios inquiring about possible internships. This would give me the time and contacts to develop printing after uni as I wouldn’t otherwise have access to printing facilities. Along with applying for internships there are a number of print studios based around London that offer open access days if you become a member this is something that I will be looking more into. As well as pursuing printing after uni, a couple of us from the course are discussing the option of forming a collective, this is still in the early stages but I think this could be a good way to help each other out whether that’s just having a small group to talk to about current projects, a way to market all our work or work together on some projects. Either way I feel confident that between us we have the skills to market ourselves by setting up a website and organise promotional material and having worked together in the past know that we work well together.
Exhibitions 06-14/02/2014 ‘Explore’ at SIX Gallery, Bournemouth 7-14/04/2013 ‘Words & Pictures - Illustrated Narratives’ Bournemouth International Centre 12-13/03/2013 Open Space Gallery, Bournemouth 25-3/05-06/2011 Camberwell Foundation show
Competitions The Serco Prize for Illustration 2014 – TFL London Stories Unplaced Crowd Skateboard design competition January 2014 Unplaced Macmillan Children’s Book prize 2014 - Joint Third
Links
www.louiscraigcarpenter.com www.louisdraws.tumblr.com www.twitter.com/louisdraws www.highnoonshow.co.uk