RANDOM UNIVERSITY EXCITEMENT

I have random University excitement!

Again!

It better work out this time or else I'm fucked.

Hooray!

The Book continues apace

Sample pages from the book. All the illustrations are done now (thank god), and I decided to go with general impressions of form for the backgrounds, as they are mainly to emphasise the pale greyish-white of the Ammonites and so don't need any real level of detail.

Now all there is is for the printer to break or run out of ink, or suddenly refuse to print on parcel paper, as I have ONE WEEK LEFT.

Also I'm paranoid about the binding falling apart as the show is before the marking, so quite a few people might be handling the book before the woman who does the marking for our course gets to see it. Might be best to make two, and save the best one for the marking bit.

So tomorrow is tedious hours of cutting paper to size, printing and then hoping that the glue I use doesn't seep through the parcel paper and wreck the ink like it did on the sample I did on white paper. Then after all that, the braille. Might, possibly, get the basic bind done tomorrow, then I can work on what I actually want to do with the cover.

Mo' Ammonites

Because even if I haven't done the work I was meant to do today, at least I've done something. I promise (to the whole load of nobody listening) that I'll do it tomorrow.

I like the shadowy eyes. I shall retain them for l8rzzzzzzzz. Yeah, I'm down widdit. Bidniz. Yeah.

Now I just have to not fuck up the book!

YAH!

My home printer, while officially a bitch 90% of the time, has come up trumps! In a late-night vague haze of risk, I decided to try and get it to copy onto parcel paper, and ta-dah! It did it. With aplomb, if anything. Didn't even have to fiddle with the settings. Thank you Hewlett Packard. You are officially my god for the next three to five minutes.

Sigh

I don't get why it is that recently when I go to do my sketches on any form of public transport I can't see anyone at all! Tres ennuyer.

The crux of this is that I ended up drawing my foot. Twenty fucking minutes and I didn't even get round to shading of any kind. Granted I probably would have been concentrating and the train would have rocked, leaving a mahoosive line across my Moleskine. Yes, I am aware it is crap, but I had stuff to say and didn't feel right saying it without some kind of artistic input.

On the plus-difficulty side of things, I finalised the story for my illustration FMP book, all nicely storyboarded (not on here because I drew them in small boxes with a really big fat marker. Also apparently the college photocopiers copy directly on to parcel paper, so I'm nicely set up for a nice flat book rather than a deliciously hand-painted, yet lumpy, panic ridden, one-chance-only book.

I fear the presentation thereof will be a shooting-in-the-foot kind of event, as our tutor wants us to present in odd ways. I was planning on a nice set of photo frames, but now I'm constructing a corner of a room, complete with wallpaper, a window, a bookshelf (for the book, logically enough), picture frames, skirting boards, ACTUAL FLOORBOARDS, and possibly a desk, because I need some kind of surface to keep sketchbooks on. ARGH.

Oh, and also, I have a poltergeist, it would appear. Stuff keeps randomly moving, I keep seeing stuff out of the corners of my eyes, and, weirdest of all, I was telling my mum off because she knocked over a pot of paint in my room, and she claimed that she had knocked it over, yet cleared it up. However, the big mark on the floor where she'd wiped it up was gone, despite the fact there were a bunch of paint-covered rags from the cleaning process.

Weird.

Actual college stuff! Granted sideline based stuff because I got bored doing anatomical research on nautiluses... nautili?

Also my tutor Peter went a bit ranty about type incorporation, especially as the final thingy is going to be a book, despite the fact I keep on telling him that if anything the book may well be in braille, so it becomes multi-audience.

I really need to work out if printing directly onto parcel paper is possible, or else I need to factor in hand-drawn illustration reproductions into my time frame fo' this shizz.

And yes, I am aware that Nautili (I decided Nautili sounds better) have much thinner tentacle with go-go extendo bits in them, but I guess prehistoric ammonites might have been different, so artistic license abounds. 

Tuffen Up! T-Shirts

I designed some tees for Tuffen Up! Clothing a short while back, and they are ON SALE NOW! Yaaaaaay!

I'll post up zee photos. Here:

"Tuffen Up! Promotions Logo"

"Tape"

"Card"

"Cloud"

"Ghost"

On the off chance that anyone sees this and wants one (and as such gets me a second run and more money and get to design a new run with more creative freedom), they're £10 each plus P&P from Tuffen Up! Clothing. The websites are: 

Tuffen Up! Clothing's Bigcartel

and

Tuffen Up! Clothing's Myspace

Or if you live in Bury St. Edmunds and know Ryley Tuffen, she owns the company, so you can buy them from her.

So, more things that I've done at various consecutive-day-based times.

I got addicted to stamps. Luckily my mother is one of those people who collects them for charities even though I don't think there's any who take them anymore.

You can insert your own jokes about bee-day and tits here. I won't insult you by doing them for you

This one was a bit of a rediscovery of acrylics after my NO! I LOVE OILS AND NOTHING ELSE! phase, which was pretty all-consuming for a bit. The thumbnail is small, so clicky.

Sketchbook

So, things upon things. This post will possibly be massive, or if I get really lazy it will just be lots of little posts.

It's lots of sketchbook stuff that I've never really done anything with. I do some kind of sketching every day. Sometimes stuff works out well, sometimes it doesn't. Obviously this is going to be the good bits.

Most of my stuff for the teeny books is done in the wee hours because of my habit of only getting about four hours a night. It also tends to cater to my recent addiction to gumstrip and brown paper.

My hatred of white paper in any of what I do really is a killer. I even bought expensive handmade paper just to stick down and kill the expanses of white I am completely incapable of working with unless it's some kind of hyper-clean font stuff that I never really do.

Huzzah!

So it beginssss

Kate made me blog, so I shall blog.

Also as it seems unlikely that anyone will ever read this, I can be slightly evil.

The blogging will happen when my SD reader complies, so the teeny book I just made as a tryout for later things can go on here, but that is only in the event that any of the photos come out, as I am an awful photographer using a terrible camera. Not a good combo.

Got it!

I'm quite proud of a first attempt that involved tea-towels. I'm learning, ma!

God I feel so modern.

I'll put some stuff up from my sketchbooks later.