Targets 13!

As you can see, I was quite successful in the completion of my final sketches. That is not to say that it was not a stuggle. I beginning my creations with the sketch of the charcter George Smiley, at the top. The main issue I had to deal with during the entire week was that, when I was sketching in my sketch book, my fine liners were very tempermental, eventually just not working on the paper. This caused me to start several different attempts at the first character, eventually having to scrap the attempt as the pens refused to work. This set back cost me quite dearly. I then thought that I might as well try to complete the sketches on my printer paper that I have at home, and luckily, the pens worked perfectly and so I was able to complete each piece of the pieces of printer paper and then simply stuck them in my sketch book. In order to save both time and ink, for the other 4 characters, seeing as I would only be using part of each portrait, I felt it necessary to only the draw the corresponding sections. Natutrally, even though I would only be using a quarter of each portriat, I drew alittle bit more for each portrait just to be on the safe side.

Even though, as I have previously mentioned, I have not drawn portraits properly since mid 2011, I am very pleased with how these portraits have turned out. From the moment I saw this brief, I very much wanted to create a piece that had illustration heavily involved as it appears to be a rarity in graphic design and I have yet to recieve a brief that has allowed me to do so, and therefore I feel that this brief allows me to show off another aspect of my skills.

By next week, I plan to=

• Complete the fonts that I will be using on each cover. I will be creating 2 different fonts for the title 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' that will be placed at the bottom of each poster. Some experiementation will be needed as I am not certain what path to go for, but I plan on trying to use a font that bares similarities to the rest of the cover.
• I will also begin the creation of my final pieces, getting both documents prepared, ready for the rest of the week.

Targets 12!

Over the last week I have successfully decided upon my mdeia of choice for when I created my final portraits and I believe I have chosen two layout designs that I will take forward for my final pieces. First of all, deciding which media I should use for my portraits...

The two illustrations on the left are my attempts at using fine liner, and the two on the right, biro. While I was once reasonably skilled when it came to using pencil, I felt strongly that it just would not work for this project, once the image was scanned in, the tone just would not be varied enough with my skill with pencil. Beginning with the top left, I used fine liner to create an illustration of George Smiley, and found it to be a success. Thankfully after having not really drawn portraits since June 2011, I had not lost most of my capabilites. I found that the tone fine liner allowed me to create was beyond what I had hoped. There was however a downside, when it came to drawing the very dark areas such as the glove and his right eye, a lot of time was consumed. This is the major draw back to using the fine liner, dark areas take far to long to complete and the tip of the pen covers such a small area, hence I did not finish the image, not only were my pens being ruined, but I felt that the illustration had served its purpose. I then created the image in the top left using biro. As you can see I completed far less of this illustration. This is because I found biro to be a failure in comparison to the fine liner I had just used. I could not create the dark that I had achieved with the finer liner, whether it was down to the paper I was using or the quality of the pen, I was unsure, but fine liner seemed to work so well that I felt it was unnecessary to investigate other options. One thing I had noticed was that I very much liked the way the outline of the portrait looked when I was using the biro and so I decided, after another fine liner illustration, that I would use biro again to see if simply creating the outline of the characters would be enough...as it turns out it wasnt, while I do like the way the illustration looks on the bottom right, it is no where near as promising and the fine liner was and simply was not suitable for this project.

I then moved onto creating larger version of my best layout ideas to see which would be the most suitable. While I do like them all, I decided that the most promising ideas were the two top ideas. One being the idea of just having one charcter on the cover, keeping in line with the modern Little White Lies covers. The second idea is that of having four charcters form the shape of one portrait. In detail this idea will have the characters dubbed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Spy split into quarters, seperated by broken glass but organised in a way that they take the shape of one portrait. I chose these two ideas as not only are they the two most drastically different ideas, but because they both have the most potential. The first will allow me to create a greatly detailed illustrative piece and the second will be greatly eye catching due to the broken glass idea.

Now that I know what my final piece will look like, the next step for me is to begen creating them, starting with, the final illustrations using fine liner. This task will take quite along time to complete and so because of this, I am making the completion of the 5 character portraits my only target for this week.

Targets 11!

Now that I had completed my research for this project, I could alter my previously uninformed ideas into something far more suitbale for this project. I then decided too, having realised my previous initial ideas were not entirely suitable, create some more initial ideas, using both, my new found inspiration aswell some of the developments on my previous ideas.

After looking at Little White Lies magazine covers, as realising that most of the previous editions had only one portrait on the cover, two prominent ideas became apparent to me. The first of which is to simply have the character George Smiley on the front cover facing forward keeping in line with the modern editions of Little White Lies covers. Obviously, being the main spectical of the cover, the plan would be to make the illustration something special, for me, this would mean focussing heavily of the darks in the illustration as well as paying attention to detail and tone. So to create this idea, I would first all need to draw the portrait using one media I am more comfortable with, such as fine liner, biro or pencil. then scanning in the image and editing it on photoshop. As you can see, the text will be placed at the bottom of the page, being clearly visible while not getting in the way of the detailed portrait I plan to create.

The rest of my ideas play on my previous idea of having the four charcters that bare the names Tinker, Tailor, Solider and Spy on the cover. As I said, the previous Little White Lies magazine cover tend to have one character portrait on the cover, and so as I feel strongly about the four charcters idea, I felt the only way I could make this work would be to have all four characters split into quarters made to form the shape of one portrait. So my other three ideas are the most promising ways I could split up the four characters and form one portrait. These inclde, a broken glass idea, diagonal segments and horizontal segments. I feel this developent shows improvement on my behalf, not only showing that I can take influence from my research, but that I can only develop my own ideas based on new research. I feel the way I tackled the issue of my conflicting ideas (wanting one protrait and four characters) shows increased skill. Unfortunately, I am currently torn between these ideas so in the mean time I will solve other issues, therefore, my targets for this week are=

• Create character sketches for the purpose of both, getting used to drawing the film character and discovering which media I am most skilled with so that I can eventually create the most detailed sketches that I can.
• I will also sketch the most promising layout ideas on a larger scale, giving me a better idea of which ones I should take forward

Little White Lies

For the final part of my research I felt it was necessary to look at the previous Little White Lies magazine covers in some more detail. This has proven to be invaluable as I noticed one trend that most of the previous editions seemed to follow. It would seem that most of the covers use only one character from the film that they represent as the content of the cover. This discovery works directly against the previous idea I was pushing, of having all four characters on the front cover, those that have the nickname of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Spy. I now realise that I should perhaps simply focus on one crucial character for the front cover, possibly the character of George Smiley (played by Gary Oldman) as he appears to be the characters seen on poster and the like. One other important factor I realised about the covers is that, despite the Little White Lies logo being in the unusual place that it is, it does not appear to be an issue. This is because, all the more recent editions seem to place the portraits as though the logo is not even there, so the portraits are just placed suitably on the page with the logo happily overlapping some of the portrait. This has given my much less to worry about in terms of my layout if the logo can be treated as though it is not even there rather then treated as an obstical I must work around. The final aspect I noticed about the Little White Lies covers is that the colours they use have a clear relation to the film, such as the yellow for the Sin City cover. In the case of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy however, colour does not play a major part in the film, but instead, what I feel I should do, is perhaps use dark and dull colours to closer represent the dark and subtle themes of the film. Looking at the Little White Lies magazine covers in more detail has, without a doubt, given me the most inspiration, and new insight into how I should develop my ideas, namely, focusing on one portrait rather then four.

Targets 10!

Now that the Easter holidays are over, I am pleased to announce that I successfully managed to complete my To Do List. In the last week I complete some more research towards the project by looking at Juxtapoz magazine covers. I also managed to create some initial layout ideas, looking different ways to present the content of the cover. These layout covers were designed based on the idea that the cover would have the four characters that bared the titles of Tinker, Tailor, Solider and Spy respectively. Therefore my layout ideas focused mainly on separating the page up into 4 parts.

As you can see, I have tried to be somewhat diverse with my layout ideas while try to work around the Little White Lies header as well as giving each character a similar amount of space. Unfortunately, after looking at them all, it seems that none of the characters really have enough room where, once my illustrations were made, they would be recognisable.

Due to this realisation, my targets for this week are as follows=

• Complete more research on magazine covers, in particular, look at previous editions of Little White Lies magazines.
• Create some new/develop some initial ideas based on what I learn after looking at previous editions of Little White Lies magazine covers.

Juxtapoz

As part of my research for my Little White Lies Brief I felt, after look at the two artists, Matt Gondek and Olly Moss, that I should now focus my research on magazine covers in order to gain better insight into layouts and content. Looking at Juxtapoz gave me an excellent, refined sources of inspiration.

First of all, layout. Juxtapoz magazine covers do not seem to follow a specific layout except for the header. The header has remained the same for the past few years with only the colours and artist names changing. For my brief however, I do not need to worry about the header as it is provided in the exact place the client wants it. From what I have seen, most of the images on the Juxtapoz covers seem to be in the centre of the page, however, other then that, there seems to be nothing in particular that can be point out about the layout of the content.

The content of Juxtapoz magazine covers seems to be primarily focused on catching the eye as they display wonderfully bright pieces of graphic design, street art and photography. It is on this level that I have gained a lot of inspiration. Looking at Juxtapoz magazines, I feel strongly that I should experiment on making the content of the cover eye catching and now focusing heavily on the layout of the magazine. So long as the header stays where it is supposed to be, I should be alright when it comes to the layout.

Targets 9!

Now that I am half way through my Easter holidays, I am happy to say that I have managed to complete the bulk of my To Do List. So far I have managed to...

• Complete my proposal for the Little White Lies brief, managing to write 972 words. I will however have it checked when I return to college for mistakes and improvements as it is my first time writing a proposal.
• I have completely annotated my remaining Digital Skills lectures
• I have completed all 5 of my Assessment tasks for Contextual Studies. For this, I had to use the notes I had taken during several presentation and write a short piece of research on 2 subjects per presentation.
• I have also managed to complete my Contextual Studies Essay in which I wrote 1922 words for the statement 'Discuss the changing shape of contemporary design and predict where you think it will be in 10 years time.' I will be checking my essay at some point next week with a fresh set of eyes in order to correct any errors and add any improvements.

On top of improving my essay, I will also complete the rest of my To Do List which includes=

• Find another artist for my research as part of my main brief. For this, I will be researching magazine covers in order to conduct some more focused and appropriate research.
• Create scamps and initial ideas for my main brief. These will probably be more focused on layout rather then content as that is where my ideas are lacking.

I feel that it is worth noting that I feel Improvement in my work rate based on the amount of work I have done in the time I have done it. Whether it is down to improved motivation due to an increased work load or whether it is down to improved skill and time management  I am unsure, however my current work rate now compared to that of the beginning of the academic year is drastically different.



Targets 8! (aka. TO DO list)

As I am now on my Easter Holiday from college, I have created for myself a 'To Do' list full of different objectives to be completed by the end of this 2 week break.

TO DO=

• Write up my Proposal for my main brief
•  Annotate my remaining Digital Skills Lectures
• Complete my remaining Assessment tasks for my Contextual Studies brief
• Create an Essay plan for my Contextual Studies brief
• Create a first draft for my Essay
• Find another artist for my research as part of my main brief
• Create scamps and initial ideas for my main brief