lucy irving

On Monday I went to St Peter’s House Library in Brighton to attend a talk by Lawrence Zeegen. He is the head of the Graphic Design & Illustration undergraduate and post graduate courses at the University of Brighton and is also a successful illustrator with regular illustrations appearing in the Guardian newspaper on the comment and debate page.

His talk was entitled “I draw, you draw, we draw, they draw.” and was about his influences as an artist as well as a workshop he had run at the Guardian HQ to encourage children to draw.

He mentioned quite a few artists during the talk and also provided some interesting quotes (some of which I have included at the bottom of this post). One of the first people who he spoke about was Keith Haring who apparently used to run around the subway drawing using chalk on the walls where expired adverts had been covered up with large black sheets:

He spoke about trying to get back to the way in which we all used to draw in childhood, which was so pure and honest and how as we get older, often through bad teaching we lose the spirit and joy we used to create drawings with.

The technique he seemed to use when creating a lot of his drawing was using other peoples (often amateurish) drawings, tracing these and creating something new using them:

Lawrence also spoke about Edwyn Collins the singer… (not sure if anyone else remember this song-I think I was about 13 when it came out!):

Edwyn suffered a brain haemorrhage a few years ago and to aid his recovery started drawing from a book of birds with his left hand. Apparently he was on his way to becoming a wildlife artist when he took a divergent path into music. An exhibition of all of his drawings is on at the moment at the Smithfield Gallery in London.

Lawrence believes that the goal of any illustration should be to communicate an idea as simply as possible and he strives to create images which contain the purity of childhood drawing. He believes that when we create a drawing we should not attempt to communicate everything but instead should simply encourage the viewer to use their imagination.

My illustration tutor, Sue Tribe, also spoke about drawing and honesty in last Saturdays’ Illustration class saying that we should repeat this to ourselves like a mantra whenever we are drawing “I want to make my drawings unpretentious and honest.”

Here are some interesting quotes from Lawrence Zeegens talk:

“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through the magic.”

– Keith Haring

“I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies”

- Le Corbusier

“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.”

- Salvador Dali

“I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood has ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing — without the traditional interruption of academic training.”

-Saul Steinberg

AND

“I am not materialistic, I believe in presents from the heart like a drawing that a child does.”

-Victoria Beckham

For last week’s project in my illustration class the brief was titled “This Is Me” and we had to:

“make an image to communicate/express something important about yourself. This could be something you would like to tell fellow students/tutors or just something you wish to express personally. This could be something straightforward like your job/family or could be about your character/taste. Your audience will be the rest of the group who should be able to recognise you from this portrait and gain some insight into your personality.”

I chose to attempt to communicate something about the way in which my brain works and some of the ideas, thoughts and interests which I have. The image is also about the connection between ideas and the workings of the left and right side of the brain as I’m very interested in the nervous system and the way we are all “wired up”.

During my working process I had created a couple of test pieces in my sketchbook, one of which, during the Crit people seemed to like better than the final piece because it was less refined and more free-flowing:

Sketchbook Image

Final Image

So, taking on board some of these comments, I’m going to try to be more experimental and raw with the next project entitled “This Is Another Me”, where we have to create 3 A2 pieces to communicate something further about ourselves. I’ve also bought some masking fluid and Indian ink, which I’m looking forward to having a play with. I will be uploading the final images (although they are not meant to be totally finished pieces) in a couple of weeks after I’ve experimented, shown the work and received some more feedback.

Last night I went to an interesting event in Brighton called White Night. It was all to do with the clocks changing, with lots of FREE events taking place around town all night long, some until 7am this morning. It was a really great event and well worth going to. We spent quite a lot of time in the Phoenix gallery and the Library as they were the only two which didn’t have massive queues!

The Brighton Philharmonic were playing inside the pavilion for free (massive queue). The Prince Regent swimming pool was open all night long-I think it also had some crazy lights and underwater music going on.
At the Phoenix there were talks, poetry and other performances going on every half hour or so. There were lots of artists creating real-time visualisations to music and also cheap beer! It was also the opening of an exhibition of photos as part of Photo Fringe event. The exhibition was called ‘Incident’ by photographer Sarah Pickering-lots of photographs o simulated fire-testing environments. Well worth a look:

Outside Jubilee library there was an enormous black sculpture of the word Love and they were allowing people to draw and paint all over this using the brightly coloured paints and chalks which they were dishing out:

Inside the library you could get a nice cup of tea (with a saucer-oh yes) and watch some local bands perform. There was also the opportunity to watch some films, but something seemed to be up with these as the kept cancelling screenings. The bands were great though. Not to mention the surreal experience of watching an indie/rock band thrash about in the library. The Burlettes, a 40s type girl group, were incredibly entertaining and very talented singers:

The highlight for me was a group called Way Tangent who took to the stage in the library at around 11:30pm:

The Unitarian church was hosting “a world of folk, electronic and percussion”, but again this event had quite a large queue and people were being drawn away from it by a couple of young boys (probably about 12 years old (my apologies if this approximation is incorrect)) who were playing the guitar and singing hits such as Wonderwall by Oasis. A large crowd had gathered round them and they were relishing the attention, they had even adopted some drunk teenage girls as backup singers. Watch out X-Factor.
Overall a fun night and hopefully they will do it again next year.

The blank canvas can be the scariest thing of all for any artist or designer. Learning to overcome this fear and realising a way of seeing which reveals that the canvas is never actually blank can help to get you started on any project quickly and efficiently. This blog post might help anyone who gets stuck at the beginning of the design process by pointing out a few things which I have learned the hard way.

It has helped me to learn to think of the (often metaphorical) canvas as blank on the surface but actually containing a whole wealth of information slightly beneath. This mode of thinking is essential for me when starting to create a plan or design for a piece.

How is the canvas never blank?

The brief will be full of clues from whoever set it as to what they want and how they want it; it’s up to you to figure these out. Scratch the surface of the canvas and break the skin to dig out these nuggets of information.

The brief or a discussion with the client will be full of their pre-conceived ideas about the final piece of work which is required. Try to listen carefully and pick up these (often hidden) cues and write them down as a starting point.

Look at whatever the client has already in terms of design. This can give you a very good indication of what they will expect you to produce. Whether it be; their current website, some marketing collateral, any websites or art/design pieces which they have mentioned. If there isn’t a client and you are working on something for yourself-look the work of others who have done something similar to what you are aiming to do.

Try to allow everything around you-from the books/newspapers you have been reading recently to the galleries and websites which you have visited or other experiences which you have had to flow into your ideas and inform your work in some way. This can often make the work richer and more interesting to the end user.

Brainstorming or spider diagrams can really help to get rid of these blank canvas fears. I personally find the traditional formation of a brainstorming diagram quite restrictive so I usually end up with a page and lots of arrows going all over the place from one idea to the next. Get your initial ideas out of your head so that you have room to think about other ideas or about pushing those original ideas further. Often my original ideas are the ones which I go back to, so I tend to get these out of my head do some more research and then go back to them. Get yourself a sketchbook or notebook for this-it doesn’t have to be neat- it’s just for you.

Einstein attempted to never remember anything mundane and instead wrote everything down in notebooks to help him free up space in his brain to really think about more complex ideas. So it might be worth taking a leaf out of his book.

I’ve finished my first illustration piece for the course. It was on the theme of Angels and Demons. I tried to convey the idea that angels and demons (good and evil particles) are within us all as part of our genetic makeup. I was also trying to convey how these entities are being constantly produced by us and tried to imagine how they are invisibly interacting with each other.

Lots of other references and ideas are included within the final piece including references to Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times:

Other ideas which informed the piece were the structure of DNA, human evolution, higher intelligence and cyborgs. Here it is:

Angels and Demons Illustration

I started an illustration course today at Grand Parade. It was really great to be back on a course and I‘ve spoken to some pretty interesting people already. For our first project in class we had to create an image to go with the theme “light lunch”. I decided to sketch out a few ideas but ended up coming back to an image of a waiter presenting someone with a sandwich which was being eaten by a slug (slugs are a big part of my life nowadays since moving into a basement flat). Not very original but I thought that I could try to present the image in an interesting way. I used a bit of mixed media on the piece (mostly coloured tissue paper and marker). I’ll try to get picture up next week as I left it in the room.

Our brief for next week is to create an image around the theme of our own personal Angels and Demons. I’ve come up with quite a few ideas to answer the brief but one of my favourites is a play on the idea of the Lilliputs from Gulliver’s Travels. Like in Army of Darkness when the main character Ash is being attacked by lots of smaller evil Ash’s:

I also thought that I might make the smaller people slightly robot-like in appearance as:

a) I like robots
b) to attempt illustrate higher intelligence/potential human evolution related to the idea of angels
c) I thought I might give them an electronic LED traffic light system to show if a robot is good, evil or neutral and each will have some sort of task so there will be lots of action within the piece
d) I like robots

I’m going to try to experiment with my working method and the materials which I use to create the piece. Hopefully it will turn out well. I’ll try to get it up here when I’m done. It’s quite refreshing to not have the option to use digital technology to touch up an image and I’m looking forward to playing with some old-school media. Get out the crayons and let’s rock.

This year I volunteered at the Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton (to avoid paying £500 to go to it as an attendee). This is what I got up to:

On the Sunday I was allowed to go and sit in on one of the workshops. I chose to go into the AS3 for Designers workshop taken by Rich Shupe, as my AS3 skills are pretty lame at the moment and I thought it would be interesting to get an overview of what AS3 can do. The other workshop was a Papervision3D workshop which I thought would pretty much go totally over my head. It was really interesting and although I only got to go along to half of it (which was really annoying) I understood most of what was going on in the first half, so I was quite impressed with myself.

On the Monday we had to register a load of people for the conference and hand them their passes, goody bags and drinks tickets. This wasn’t as hectic as I had been led to believe and I came out of it relatively unscathed. After that I went to see a bit of Dr Woohoo’s talk where he was speaking about creating sets of colour swatches taken from the colour content of Flickr photos and sharing them between CS4 applications. Interesting stuff but a bit too cody for my tastes.

After that I didn’t really get to see much for a while as I was stuck on the registration desk until Chris Orwig’s talk which, annoyingly, I was only allowed to see half of as all of the other volunteers wanted to see this one too. I came in to the second half of his talk about his photography and how to take great photos, which I must say was very interesting and inspiring. I especially liked the quote he mentioned about a student asking how they could take more interesting photos and a famous photographer he had in as a guest lecturer (can’t remember the name) snapped back “become a more interesting person”.

After this one we all got to go along to the brilliant Erik Natzke’s talk about his artwork and how he creates it and comes up with the ideas for it. Stunning stuff and I was really impressed that he was happy to share all of his Flash files with whoever wanted them.

Rust from Erik Natzke on Vimeo.

Tuesday was a really interesting day and I got to see many more speakers which was fantastic and put me in a much better mood! First off I went to see Jeremy Thorp who was talking about emergence and how he creates experimental systems. One of his systems included giving a pixel within an image the ability buy and sell colour tickets. Each pixel would also have a set of values which would determine who it was going to listen to more-the oracle or the analyst. This allowed each pixel to make a choice on what colour it wanted to buy or sell producing some interesting results with the morphing of the image.

Then I went to a talk by Carla Diana about robots and things. I am a big fan of anything to do with robots so I was really looking forward to this one. She has lots of fun stuff on her website (www.carladiana.com) including www.repercussion.org, which I love! But the main thing she was talking about was redesigning the shell for a robot which was perviosly called LEO. Here is LEO in action:

I think she said something about someone like Jim Henson’s studio making it look like a gremlin. It has real Yaks fur on it and leather bits for the nose etc but children ran screaming from it! Her re-design for the shell is much more robotic-like. It’s going to have a white shell with a black fabric underlay-a bit like a storm trooper but hopefully a bit more friendly! She also showed us an art installation she had done at Dora Maar House (one of Piccasso’s mistresses) based on an armadillo foetus surrealist photo taken by Dora Maar.

After that I went to see a talk by Hoss Gifford who spoke about general design and had a costume change in the middle! He was meant to speak about narrative but ended up talking about simplicity and how nobody reads the manual- games companies renamed the tutorial level, level 1. He also mentioned a few things about Apple products including how he wasn’t able to adjust the height of his Apple monitor and he had been to design studios where people were sitting on piles of books to be able to view their monitors correctly! (thought you might like that one Colin). Meow. Anyway he also mentioned a designer who Steve Jobs ripped off called Dieter Rams who worked for Braun in the olden days:

Some other things he mentioned were to be bold and never fear failure when designing something new. Also to do lots of testing but to not always trust that your user totally knows what they want (the iPod user testing was really bad apparently).

Anyway this is Hoss’ Spank the Monkey Game (which I bleive he is pretty famous for!):

www.addictinggames.com/monkey.html

Finally I went to see Rob Hodgins talk. Wow. Amazing stuff with processing. I loved his work, and it made me want to learn more processing. He also spkoe about his experiences on LSD which Erik Natzke had also spoken about! They both seemed to have been very inspired by their experiences on the drug. Here is my favourite piece which was shown by Robert:

I’ll end with a quote from Chris Orwig’s talk “There’s one thing left which a man can still do better than a woman, and that’s grow a beard.” Nice.

I thought I would add this YouTube video as I found it really interesting when I first saw and I’ve been thinking about it ever since!  It’s a threory about the future of communication-rather scary I think.

I’ve been working at Kwiqq for 3 weeks now. For those of you who don’t know who Kwiqq are they are a small (but growing) team of clever people who build bespoke social networking websites based in Brighton on the Sussex University campus.

Whilst I’ve been at Kwiqq I’ve been working on a project to create a social networking website called GazetMe which Raj (Operations Director at Kwiqq) has blogged about here.

The project is currently requiring lots of thought and discussion between us focussing on how to make the process of interacting with the website and adding your information as easy and straightforward as possible. Dan (the Lead Designer at Kwiqq, who I’m working with on this project) reminded me of an interesting statistic which I had found concerning the usage of web content when reading the book “Killer Web Content” by Gerry McGovern (Dan had found a similar statistic whilst reading another book), stating that according to research on one of the world’s largest websites, 99% of people only accessed 1% of their content and 35% of their content had never been read.

Overcomplicating an interface is never a good idea but stripping it down to the bare minimum required is a much more difficult task than I suspect anyone who has never undertaken such an activity may imagine. Anyone who is interested in such things as may enjoy the following publications by Donald Norman:

The Design of Everyday Things

The Invisible Computer

I’ve just finished a flyer design for a funk/soul/hip hop club night. The illustration was a bit tough to come up with as the brief was so open. In the end, as the night was called Diff’rent Strokes I decided on a cat (strokes-cat-get it?!) dressed as one of the RUN DMC guys with a large bit of BLING round its neck with funk, soul and hip hop written on the medallion. I kept the colours quite striking-white, red and black, and played around with a diagonal layout. Anyway I had fun designing it so please take a look, and I hope you like it!

Diff'rent Strokes Flyer Design