Reflective Post 2

Around the same time I started working on the two posters briefs some fellow students started a sort of creative enterprise/collective called 'Gross studios', and set up an exhibition at Hyde Park Book Club with an open call for people to submit work to it. The theme was 'Gross', and I thought I would submit something as I was still only really taking on short briefs to get myself back into the swing of things and this wasn't anything too serious and was a pretty fun and very open theme.
I quite quickly came up with the idea of making drawings from the warnings on cigarette packets which are obviously fairly 'gross' a lot of the time and which I often think are darkly humorous, particularly the image of a baby with a cigarette in its dummy, and one of a mother blowing cigarette smoke directly into the face of their crying child.
The drawings turned out really well and as I was doing them and I decided I would try and collate them as a big A2 screen print for the exhibition because I never really do any screen printing and then I might have something to sell after the exhibition ended.
Unfortunately I discovered that screen printing really doesn't agree with me and I only really got one serviceable print, which was fine for the exhibition but I was also saddled with a load of unsuccessful ones which I had to cut down to A5 to try and salvage the bits which came through OK.
I did still have a lot of fun making the work though and ended up using one of the images to print some t shirts later on in the year which came out really well.

I entered the Penguin Student Design awards last year and enjoyed making the work for it so I thought I would enter again this year as I do often find that my work sits in a narrative/publication field. After doing a bit of research into each book in the adult fiction category I decided I would find 'Norwegian Wood' by Haruki Murakami the most suited to my work, so I started reading it and making notes of any significant imagery or concepts in it.
The first idea I had was actually based around the first chapter, and it involved me basically creating a sort of abstracted depiction of the landscape described in it. I tried to keep the imagery quite delicate and minimal in keeping with the tone of Murakami's writing.

 
I had been playing around with some monoprint in some keyholder print sessions and incorporated some of this in to the imagery in this design. For the second design I simplified the design further and used only the monoprinted textures and shapes as I thought they worked so well in the first design.

I really liked this design but it took me a long time to figure out to decide whether i thought this use of type worked. In the end I decided it did and this is the entry I would have submitted if I hadn't stupidly missed the deadline. I had actually carried on making some designs after this one but I started to go off the boil. I was spending to much time on what should have been a fairy short brief I think.

Early on in the year I also entered a competition by SoYoung Magazine, which was simply to make a piece of illustration based around one of a big list of musical artists or their songs. I picked Johnny Cash and made a fairly straightforward portrait which didn't take long and was all analogue, which is how I best like to work. it ended up coming sixth in the competition and the top 10 entries got a shout out on SoYoung's instagram so that was a nice bonus.

Second 7x7