Summer '14 Leftovers

Here are pieces that I have made but for one reason or other didn't blog at the time of working on them. Enjoy!

Zine: "My Failed Youth"

After spending some time over summer with my friends and reminiscing about our wayward years of late teens/early twenties I've decided to make a series of zines about some of our stories, albeit greatly exaggerated.

I explained to my pals how I always over think my illustrations and try to make them something different to what is natural so my friend suggested I just draw; don't worry about making it amazing looking. Just draw and get my story done...

So that's what I'm doing. Here is a few examples of what I've done so far:

Gotta say, the illustrations look scruffy as hell but I am quite excited by the outcomes!! I Feel like I've really broken through a personal barrier!

Zine: "Red"

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a zine idea. After creating two pages for it I have to say I'm still not feeling the design or story as much as I'd like. I'm going to put it on the back burner for a while as I'm spending far too much time thinking about the style and aesthetic and not enough time enjoying the process itself.

Here are the pages and process thus far:

Although I am not entirely content with the style I've used etc I am quite happy with the colour scheme that I used within the pages. I hope to take this experimentation further in Level 5.

Early Starts

My girlfriend has now started working as a primary school teacher. That means early starts of 6.30am. To help get me ready for the new academic year I've decided to get up at the same time as her and wow, what a difference it makes! I forgot how much you can get done with an early morning start as apposed to getting up near midday.

Yesterday I managed to tidy the entire house before midday even rolled round so treated myself to an afternoon of reading comic books and doodling. I ended up making this piece of my characters Kate and Red looking all happy and in love (aww etc).

Zine: The First Page

So I've been working on the first page of my zine for a few days now and boy is it giving me a headache. It needs to really pop and draw people in as soon as they see it and my designs just aren't doing that.

Here is the page layout with quick alterations to give myself an idea of how it will look

Here is one of test ideas for the page. I think I need to lock down what style I'm going to use to illustrate before I push any further with it.

My girlfriend suggested I take a step back and leave it alone for a while. I'm going to heed her advice and leave it. I may work on some later pages first or work on character designs some more...

Rocket Racoon

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy last night and thought it pretty impressive. My favourite character was Rocket Racoon who to be honest I had the most doubts about going into the film (largely as I know Bradley Cooper was voicing him). I enjoyed his character so much I spent today making a piece dedicated to that performance.

New Macbook Pro and Wacom Tablet

My Mac Mini has been playing up for a few weeks now. It kept freezing and crashing, eventually to the point where I had to get inside it to have a look. One of the Ram ports appeared to be broken resulting in me having to remove the ram from that port completely. The Mac is now only really good for social media use at best. Sad face.

SO we headed to the Apple Store in the city centre today in search of Mac prices/deals. I found out that I can get my 15% student discount in store however I couldn't get my 10 months free finance there. They checked to see whether I could apply for it anyway which apparently I couldn't as I am an unemployed student.

I left somewhat disheartened until I remembered I have a credit card. I don't like to use my credit card for such large purposes usually but I need to work. So I brought a Macbook Pro and got a free £60 'student back to school' voucher with my purchase! With this I brought a Wacom tablet. Wicked!

I used my new Wacom as soon as possible an knocked up this page layout for the first page of my zine.