Evaluation

Overall the project was good however, i felt that i had to facilitate my own learning in the project more than it gave me jumping off points to then go off and do my own research

• Less group work, forced group work is always a point of friction no matter how good or bad the end result is. 
• less random assignment of project briefs
• More talk on your rights as an artist, i have to do my research into how to protect my art and I'm still not very confident in it. i know not to steal art, how can i stop my art from being stolen?
• consider other artists and other conventions that might be available for artists that don't fit into the very child oriented London book fair. 
• do some more careful research when suggesting websites or services.
•    

Having this in mind i liked the opportunity to go to the London book fair, i liked being able to finally create a website and i liked that this facilitated me working with conventions and consequentially creating products.

Apprentice

My apprentice group was made up of:
Emma, Jose, Carly, Ollie and myself

Given the budget of 5 pounds we thought of how to efficiently take hold of all of the resources we can.

Going through our options we considered prints/zines, bookmarks, gift tags, wrapping paper and note pads.
We had some small set backs in our plan as the screen printing room was not available to us.

Ultimatly the group went forward with Note pads, and we went around several shops.
We had gotten the majority of our materials from wilko, being the place that we took large amounts of free samples of wallpaper, wilko brand notepads and we were able to find some double sided tape in wh smiths. 

During our time gathering materials we visited several shops and the Wilson gallery to see what kind of patterns are in the market right now and how we can compete with them.

 This was our process, we would un-spiralize notebooks that needed to and cover the front with wallpaper, re-hole the front with a punch and respiralize the notebooks. we where able to use a variety of of sizes to create different sets.

 finnished product.

Although this worked for the project in the long term it isn't a good business plan since it relies on free samples.

Artfinder vrs Degree art

Art finder and degree art are both websites very unsuited to my practice and are very unfriendly towards illustration, having no labelled sections for it. The two websites are very deeply in fine art however his is what me and casey could find on the website.

Artfinder

• you have a large delay in pay when you first sign up and sell your work
• it's free to list your work
• works are usually larger sums of money
• %70 of the money goes to the artist
• large community
• original art only 
• limmited edition capped at 150, must all be signed and numbered
• you have to go through a reveiw process first
• has a heavy viewer and water drop off thus resulting in a high turnover of users 
• partnered with moo and several interior design projects
• website is not compartmentalized very well

Degree art

• student and graduate oriented
• hand picked, £75 sign up fee
• has art rental services
• residencies
• aimed at high end investors
• focused on fine art even more, very little in the way of illustration
• has sponserships and partner programs

 Although i would not like to use any of these two websites i feel i would lean towards artfinder due to its more free nature, even though it does suffer from a high turn around. Artfinder did at-least have some illustrators, even if they were largely buried.

Christmas

Our brief  for the Christmas project was for a travel company that wanted specific landmarks and destinations for the project.

I was in charge of making the gif, I didn't want it to be too Christmas focused so I wanted a general winter themed landmark to set the scene, so I used the landmark the northern lights as a getaway location, as it's linked with icy areas such as Norway, Iceland and Canada.


Lydia, Beth and Jordan did the pop up card.

Here is how the pop up card would fold out.

3rd year collab

For the 3rd year collaboration I was in charge of the technical aspects of it
This included gathering all of the files from the class, sorting them into the right colours and getting them printed out and handed over.

The first step in this was making a hand out sheet:

 

(this design was pre-Colour decision, future alterations where done by Esther) 

Being in charge of arranging the artwork meant back and forth with other students, in emails, on social media and in the studio.

Here are some of the problems I encountered with working with other people.

  Sending the wrong types of file.

Having junk layers on the file, or parts of the image that are not properly merged with colours.

I also had to advise people that were previously unexperienced with the practice of screen printing.

Esther had been given advice that the work should be split into A3 pages and not A2 like the team originally planned.

However this split off fairly well, this is the first print off sheet that where used for the screen printing.

 Turquoise

Rose

 Payne's Grey

Although we had a few people that could not meet a deadline, they were informed what steps they should take next.

With all of the print outs finished and printed out i handed my work over to the screen printing team.

True belivers

True Believers was an overall good experience.

I booked a Table for myself, Jordan and Jasmine, the table came to £42.50 on may 30th when they first went on sale.


Jordan dropped out of the project, however Jasmine and i went forward with the table, fortunately we were able to use many resources from friends such as easels.

however there were small amenities such as bags, plastic sleeves, coin bags that came to £27.92.
This was split between the both of us.

In the time between booking the table i made my merchandise, i have previously described my experiences with printing services.

I worked with the event organizer Stuart Murlian as well receiving official copies of banners that i could use to advertise my presence at the convention.

 I received my table placement on Janurary 19th.

Checking into the table was a very easy experience and we had no trouble with last second changes with the table.

I would of liked to set up the table prior, however i was able to work out how it would look, Although in the future I would invest in more in vertical space as i could grab more attention that way

 

My Charms were my most popular item on the table and i feel like they would be a good direction to take in the future as i have had a lot of feedback from my own userbase about wanting phone charms and key chains.

It was lovely being able to talk to other artists about how they run in the convention circuit and how they work, i was able to meet the artist behind Birch Please and she talked about her own practice in particular before the convention and many others in passing about what kind of things they did to make their tables more appealing.

It was a long, and a very quiet day, unlike the the last year that I attended, however it was overall a successful day, and it was lovely interacting with other people artists or not and selling my work.

Business cards

Here are some of my first Business card designs

Here is some research i did into business cards, these where some of my favourites.


The majority of them are based on my pixel art.

 This is only Portrait scaled business card design.
I did like this however the pixels can be a bit too big, and might loose their charm when printed.

The "MS Paint" business cards where some of my favourite, i went ahead with the top design, however if i did the bottom design i would like to use a more cohesive colour pallet.

 Cakes was another one that i wanted to bring forward, however unfortunately with the printing service the pink backing would of detracted from it. Perhaps in the future i would use this design if i was going with a website like Moo.com

  I liked this design however it's a bit too bland for my practice.

 I also did a small series of line drawings, reflecting more on my graphic novel practice.

These are my business cards for true believers, they are little more refined having larger fonts and more deco.

.
They where printed by vistaprint, it had a good turn around time of a week and it was the cheapest option i had (at the time there was a sale.)

I went for a very plain and standard kind of business card, and while in the future i would consider different finishes and other aspects, for this particular design i wanted to push the "window" aspect of it.
Authough in the future if i where to work with Vistaprint again, i would enlarge the image a little more as i think i would get closer to the edge with the design without going into the bleed.

designing my own website.

Having wanting to build my website from scratch I first needed to look at how other artist had displayed their own work.

My main influence is bitmap dreams.

 main page

 artwork page

 another type of page she does
She is very heavily targeting a femminine crowd with the softer colours, creating interest with the book shape, the header is animated and creates a lot of interest even though it could be largely considered older looking and its navigation could be a little clunky.

This gives the main display of her website, we can start to break down how it is structured

 Main navigation from page to page

How work is displayed and how things are integrated throughout her portfolio.
Overall everything is correctly sized and clear, however it is very large, having to expand my window from websites that are usually fine on regular social media.

Other websites i looked at:

Kyle Sun

While Kyle sun's portfolio looks very impressive it has it's own faults, it's layout it very inventive though and full of small animations

 Having drop down menus is a nice idea however:

 In actual display it is a overlay with the background animations still moving that distracts from the art, while in preview the pixels are constrained but in larger viewing it's blurry and has seemed to be blown up in html.

 Drop down menus change size depending on how big the window is, while this can be good this can also result in thumbnails being way too small.

the biggest example of this is how i had to decrease my window to the links.
making sure everything is properly sized and doesn't shift too much within the window is very important.

It's important to keep in mind how websites will look in all window sizes.
Most social media websites minimally are around 1000px
my Portfolio is around 900px

Kicked in teeth was made with my business card mind as I wanted it to be cohesive with some part of my branding. So i tried to use the same kind of retro aesthetics, and a similar pastel colour scheme.

The overall aesthetic of the website compliments my work well, it is a format that many people can understand and it reflects well with other work i have done.

This is the breakdown of how the website works
 Navigation, is a straight line through my portfolio, and I have a home button on every page

 my portfolio pages have concise descriptions, though i feel that the way that bitmap dreams was laid out allowed social media to be more easily shared through more direct links than just opening up a profile.

Unfortunately i did not have time to create a mobile version of the website however here is a mock up of what it would look like.

My domain name is kickedinteeth.com, i bought it though 123 reg. I chose to go with a .com just due to it being more likely taken due to my brand name.
(website not working? Try the backup website. 123 reg have failed to update me on changing policy and have terminated my domain name usage at this current writing i have sorted it out, but yet to get my domain back.)