Assignment 2 - Part 3 Autumn Fruit

OK I said I was going to do some of the other projects and come back to this but that was the impetus to start again. This time I decided to try and mirror my Summer Fruit image with apples which seem typically autumnal to me.

I did the dark background image first then the white one. Neither of them are as free and spontaneous as the strawberries but I think they are better than the vegetables. I prefer the white background.

Assignment 2 Point of Sale Display - Autumn

I guess the mythical client would like an image that is in the same style as the summer one, but there isn't any one item that represents Autumn to me so I chose to do a group of vegetables. I made some sketchbook studies;

and a preliminary drawing of some suitable vegetables!

This worked better than I expected though I would have preferred to start with coloured paper as for the strawberries I'm not sure what colour would work. The brown here is sort of meant to represent earth (freshly dug veg from the garden) because it was a preliminary drawing it was on A3 paper - not square. I printed it out and changed it to a square;

then tried tessellating it

Does this work? I'm not sure that it does and I'm still not happy with the background colour. I chose a variety of coloured vegetables to represent the variety of produce available but this makes it difficult to choose a background colour that enhances all the vegetables.

I thought that the background could represent the season;

but now my pencils are becoming wishy washy. The computer can fix this;

Which gives me a great image but its difficult to superimpose the vegetables without making them look washed out or unappetising, getting them lost in the background, or loosing the background itself (this is just a rough I've played with loads of arrangements which I didn't save at the time)

( I cut out the pictures from my preliminary drawing)

This worked a bit better maybe but the vegetables are overwhelmed by the background again.
I decided to darken my original leafy background and try regrouping my vegetables

I think this maybe has a bit more punch but still isn't right. It's become to tight and controlled, the Summer fruit was freer and had more punch. This is cobbled together. I'm going to step away from this project for a bit and have a think, do some of the exercises in the next section and come back to this afresh.
I know that I should plan my images better but I find they get static if I keep working into an idea, I need to let it evolve then come back to it in a few days to assess whether my ideas have any merit which I guess means I'm not really suited to commercial illustration with deadlines and expectations of clear ideas. However I suppose a real client would give feedback to preliminary ideas and would have ideas of their own which could be a bonus or a curse.....

Assignment 2 Point of Sale Display - Summer

It's winter and snowy and summer is a bit of a distant memory. To remind myself I bought some strawberries

 I liked the effect of the coloured pencil on red paper but thought the group should involve a sliced strawberry. I find it difficult to arrange still life to my satisfaction, "found" groups always look more realistic, but I guess for this brief it wasn't necessary to create realistic grouping as the image needs to be eyecatching and needs to sell the product so something that jars a bit could work better as long as it still looks edible.

I'm not sure that this arrangement works as well as the earlier ones. Maybe a bit too busy?

Possibly this is better but it may loose something by being cropped. 

Happy Christmas!

I've been delayed in doing my coursework for 2 reasons,
1) I was asked to draw some children for a Christmas present  which obviously I can't post here and
2) I was working on this year's Christmas card.
I always design my own card. Some work better than others but it's a good challenge to produce something suitable each year. The cards were originally done for our business which was sold nearly 3 years ago and always feature one or more of my pets.

I did some preliminary sketches of ideas;

 I was inspired by my dog Henry playing in the snow. I've tried to photograph him in action before but my photographic skills aren't up to catching him so I did lots of drawings from memory

 and selected the ones I thought worked;

 

I liked the idea of multiple poses in the snow but this looked a bit random so I had him prancing around a snowman

 

It still looks like lots of dogs and our printer insists on leaving a rather unattractive margin so I went back to basics 

and ended up with one Henry and a tree.....

It now looks to me that he may have just pee'd on the tree before dashing off but hey

 

Happy Christmas!

Visual Metaphors - Broken relationship

 I started with a series of simple sketches. It was difficult to come up with ideas at first but they did start to flow a bit after a while.














I think I liked this idea best .

 I scanned it into the computer & added colour. This design keeps things simple.

 But the clashing colours here add to the sense of conflict?

Visual Metaphors

Oh I've had problems with this. I don't know if the recession is hitting papers so they don't commission work or if I'm looking in the wrong places.

This graphic by Graham Hughes was used to illustrate a piece on increased regulation of Building Societies

This striking image by Lynsey Irvine & Peter Storey appeared in the Observer to illustrate an article about the use of the internet by radicals and activists. It appeared across the middle of a double page spread with the leads encroaching on the text.

Finally this image appeared in today's Times to illustrate a piece about the demise of the personals column in the London Review of Books. I think it is by Corbis. It is an interesting take on the broken heart theme (scanned at poor quality because our PC too a dislike to it & wouldn't reproduce the high resolution scan)