Half a Century of Superstars

Well, I've done it! This is my final piece of all 43 men to hold the WWE Championship since its inception fifty years ago. I am very proud of this piece, and I think that all the differences in the characters and their appearances help the piece to stand out. If this piece were to represent me as an illustrator at the PCA Summer Show, I would be very proud.

Wrestling-themed Project

Over the past few years during the development of my artistic identity, I have become known for certain elements and traits in my work. One of the biggest traits is the use of my personal interests to produce ideas for pieces, including music, cartoons and humour, but I have never used my interest in professional wrestling as a creative influence in the past. At the same time, there aren't many other known illustrators that have produced wrestling-related briefs either. To quote one of my biggest influences in my artistic research, Rob Schamberger, "I felt that no artist had ever really approached this subject matter with any serious intent."(Source: http://robschamberger.com/wrestling-champions/)

For this project, I wanted to go all out because it's a part of my Final Major Project at Plymouth College of Art, so I've decided to produce a project depicting a history of the WWE Championship. Over the past fifty years, forty-three different people have held the WWE Championship and I plan on producing a possible poster design that features, yes, every single one of them.

Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock to Pedro Morales, Stan Stasiak, Ivan Koloff and even Vince McMahon himself.

I plan on uploading pictures of every single character here, so once again, watch this space!

Looking Professional

There are many benefits to spending nearly six years at an art college. One of the biggest, if not THE biggest benefit, is the different amount of people I have met studying different creative fields. A very good friend of mine, Lorien Matthews, is currently studying her 2nd year in Photography and, as part of her Work Based Learning, wanted to take photos of people connecting to their professional practices. I'm currently studying my Final Major Project, and one of the requirements is to think about self-promotion techniques post-degree. I thought it'd work really well to have some professional pictures of me and/or a piece of my work that I could use for this blog, my Facebook page and perhaps a new updated website.

After a range of shoots, in which I struggled to keep a straight face - I'm really NOT a serious person - I selected some of my favourite photos that Lorien took and she has just sent me the finished pieces, and I am VERY happy. So, without further ado... Ta-da!

Please feel free to check out Lorien's work:

Website: http://www.lorienmatthewsphotography.co.uk/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LorienMatthewsPhotography/

Tumblr: http://l-a-m-photography.tumblr.com/

She's a damn good photographer, especially if she can make MY ugly mug look professional!

Projects in the Pipeline

Happy belated New Year to everyone!

Currently working on a number of self-initiated projects, some of which have potential to be strong poster designs, and working on this year's Puffin Children's Prize - The Wind In The Willows!

Also, I've produced a piece for this year's Design Against Fur Fashion brief, and will upload an image over the next few days.

Watch this space!

Army of Caterpillars

Apologies for the delay since my last post, folks. This is a recent piece produced for an animal project based on collective nouns, my chosen noun being an 'army of caterpillars'. I was inspired by the thought of a repeated image style, and would like to think there's potential for this to be used in mousepads and other products that could possibly be sold at the Summer Show, or possibly New Designers next year.

Rex Pistols

This is another final piece of mine from my Final Major Project, and it's one of the ones I'm the most proud of. I think it's worked out really well, there's a strong punk theme throughout the entire image and I'm proud of the how dinosaurs have turned out.

Bald Eagle

This is another piece of work I created for my Visual Pun theme for my Final Major Project. It's the idea of a self-conscious sensitive bald eagle in denial about his lack of hair.

I am...IRON MAN

As part of my Final Major Project I'm studying at this moment, I'm producing a series of visual puns, and this is an idea I've had in my head for about a year, and I've finally got round to using it. First produced by hand, and coloured in on Photoshop. I'd like to think it's continuing a theme I'm looking to develop in future - a bold colour scheme, thick lines and a strong sense of humour.

Watch This Space

I'm currently studying for my Final Major Project for my FD 2nd year, and I've got some ideas based on the project I did last year which resulted in Give Peas A Chance. I had some ideas which didn't get used, but have a lot of design potential and will hopefully show a style of humour I want to develop.

I've got some projects in mind to complete over the summer as well, including a step into cartoon animation. Anyone who knows me knows about my sense of humour and my love of cartoons, so thinking about a future illustration career, I want to do something connected to cartoons.

As the title says, watch this space!

Getting my name out there

At Plymouth College of Art at the moment, there is an exhibition of work from artists from the Association of Illustrators, and throughout the exhibition, our course has been running "The Illustration Bureau", a stall that gives Illustration students the chance to promote their work in the local community.

At first, I didn't have anything for the Bureau, but looking at the success that other people were having with their work, I decided to put forward a pack of badges with a series of different bears that I've been working on in my chosen cartoon style. I've been selling a pack of four; panda, polar, grizzly and black; for £1.50. I made one pack to begin with, and it sold within thirty seconds, so I've made more before the Bureau shuts after the Easter holidays.

Badge pack highlighted in picture. I decided to go with a bold green background and a typeface with a hand-drawn cartoon style to it to go with the style of the bears.

Looking at the exhibit, I'm glad I submitted work for it. I didn't have any luck with competitions or work placements or commissions, but this was a great way to get my work promoted, as well as a chance to talk to other creative practitioners at the Illustration Stuff Fair. It's a start, but making badge packs is something I'd consider in future to get my name noticed as an up-and-coming illustrator.

Photos courtesy of Joanna Birkett

http://joannalucyillustrates.blogspot.co.uk/

Life Model editorial

Because my DJ editorial with the brain was named one of the top two in the group, I was entered in a competition to produce a bonus spot illustration for an editorial about a life model with the "What I'm Really Thinking" story.

Betrayed By Your Shadow Editorial

Another editorial I chose to produce an illustration for was for a story about being "betrayed by your shadow". Once again, mainly due to time worries, I chose to produce something simple but still effective.

Brain Editorial

Sorry about the delay in posts.

For a project in the second year of my degree, we had a project that involved producing editorial illustrations. For one of my editorials, I had to produce a spot illustration for a story about a local DJ to explain "what he's really thinking".

I took the story on board, and I tried to take the "thinking" side literally, so the idea of a brain listening to a pair of headphones just made sense, and I tried to use a simplistic style mixed with a bold colour scheme. Out of the editorials for this chosen story, mine was named the best. Result!

Blueberry Fields Forever

What started of as a photo I took for a photography project on my National Diploma mixed with a bit of Photoshop experimentation has turned into one of my favourite pieces of work. I was working with Photoshop to get used to it and testing it on some of the pictures I took for my project, and I just started working on this one, and just seeing the bold colours stand out on here has worked out really well, I had a few of the "trippy" songs in the Beatles' back catalogue in my mind when I first saw what the picture looked like the blue fields and orange sky. It was quite a simple piece to produce, but I'm really proud of it.

The Trees Fight Back!

This was a really simple and quite quick piece I came up with for a project last year where we had to produce a piece of work showing the evolution of trees and what they might be like in the future. I had a few things in mind, but I loved the potential of the idea of having the trees standing up for themselves against a lumberjack.

The image caption: "You were gonna chop US down, eh?!"

Octopus Editorial

This is a picture of a piece I produced last year for an editorial illustration project. We each had to choose one from a variety of newspaper articles to produce an illustration for, I chose the story of the conspiracy of the death of Paul, the German football-predicting octopus. It was early in the first year, and I didn't feel overly confident in my hand-drawn skills to produce an editorial by hand, so despite not being an expert on Illustrator and having limited time to produce the piece, I decided to produce a piece on Adobe Illustrator, based on the story of an Argentinean chef placing an octopus dish on the menu of his restaurant after Paul (correctly) predicted that Germany would beat Argentina in the World Cup Quarter-Final last year.

I know it's a simple design, and if I had more time to do it again, I'd love to gain enough confidence to produce a hand-drawn design in the same style. It's not the best piece of work I've done, but I quite like the simple idea and I'd like to think of it as another example of me looking to develop a cartoony style.

Illustrator Experimentation - Bear

For one of the projects we had in the first year of my degree, we were introduced to Adobe Illustrator and what we could do with vector graphics. I'd already used it for my National Diploma, but I had never really learned how to use it in great detail, I'm still looking to produce some more complicated pieces for my 2nd year but for this project, we had to use Illustrator to produce an animal of our choosing. I felt like I didn't really have enough time to produce anything complicated, but I had been wanting to produce more of a cartoon style for quite some time, so I decided to try and produce a cartoon bear. The shape of the body may look quite simple, but I'm pleased with the detailed shape of the fur and the style of how the face turned out. If I get time, I'd quite like to produce some similar animals in this style sometime over the next year. Maybe a series of animals with the same facial features.

My Postcard Project

The following pictures show some postcard designs I thought of during a project in my first year of my degree. As part of a task I had to do for the first stage of a typography project, I had to experiment on Adobe Illustrator to produce postcard designs that express a certain emotion whilst mixing imagery with typography. Out of all of the emotions we could choose from, I thought that "Fear" was the emotion I could think of that had the most potential.

I thought about producing a series of theme with the same style, mixing a black background with cartoon-styled "scared eyes" and a "creepy" typeface I found on DaFont. This was a simple idea I had in mind with the phrase "You can see the fear in his eyes". It's a VERY simple idea, but it's quite effective.
Out of the three designs I produced, this one is my personal favourite. I stuck with the idea of the eyes as the main focal point of the design, but I quite like the unique idea of moving away from having the word "fear" on the postcard, but instead having things people are scared of, I got a random variety of suggestions but I think all of them go well on the design.

This one was an extra one I came up with as an experimentation, keeping the eyes but having them in the corner instead, and incorporating other things people are scared of, such as blood and a spider (which I really enjoyed designing! It was really simple, but I really like how it turned out.) This one isn't my personal favourite, but I'm quite proud of the really simple spider.

Give Peas a Chance

This was the last piece of work I produced for the first year of my degree, I had a lot of different ideas for the brief (I chose one to work with words and imagery to produce puns) and I've got a lot of others I might produce anyway and upload to the blog, but I liked the idea of "Give PEAS a chance", and after experimenting on Photoshop, and learning how to produce the psychedelic backgrounds thanks to an internet tutorial, I really like the effect of the peas in the peace symbol and I think the typeface looks quite effective as well. Like most of my work, it's quite simple but effective.

Pop Art Phone Piece

This is another piece I produced for a project on my National Diploma. We were each given a random object from a certain time period in the past 100 years and we had to produce a drawing (magazine/newspaper advertisement style) of said object in the style of the time it was around. I was given a classic telephone (I can't remember the exact name, but I know the type I was given was invented in the 1960s), so I went with the first style that came to mind.

I love Pop Art, I love the style of Andy Warhol, so if I had to represent the 1960s, I had to go with the style of one of the most iconic artists of the 1960s Pop Art genre. It was a simple sketch of a telephone I drew and used for the piece, but it seems to work really well, and even though I handed in the piece with type in the middle of it, looking back at the piece, I think it looks better without it. Less is more, as they say.