Sunday 20 February 2011

Book works -Further illustrations and ideas

Development of layout
First layout


Brown paper trial








Further illustrations








I wanted there to be an added twist to the book so looked at some play on words with the word red such as 'Spot the odd one out' red doodles, count the doodles What black and white and red all over.






Then it hit me Spot the red herring!  As I had used the word 'RED' printed on all the objects a really neat idea was to print the word 'GREEN' in red to see if anyone spotted it.  A further twist was to do this with an apple as apples can be red or green


After the progress crit I decided to experiment with different stock.  I had some 160 gram white card which worked weight wise.  The folds were clean and the hotdog book unfolded well.  I wanted the book to have some texture (like the bwon paper) so i went to an art shop and looked at a variety of paper.  I considered cartridge paper however I found some Canford paper which was 160 gram.  The paper looked matt, had  texture and could be used with inkjet printers.  There was a variety of colours to chose from although I liked the China White.  The offwhite offset the red well. 

I managed to use the brown paper on the belly band.  I added the belly band to asked the question Spot the red herring.  I used my stamps to hand print these.

Once I had scanned the illustrations in I used photoshop to make the red more vibrant and also to clean the scan up.  I used the magic wand to pick up the grey.



Final layout

As a final touch I had leked the idea of the red inner so to extend the design i included the image below.  I worked on this in photoshop.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Monday 14 February 2011

Design process - Photoshop postcards




Original photo


Used colour overlay and darken


Original ( yellow cellophane was placed over one light and green over the other) 



Original




Original


Original


adjusting hue and saturation




Mask and colour channel mixer

The light had a layer of blue cellophane



Original

Posterised and colour balance

Original

Desaturated and Tints

Sunday 13 February 2011

100 collection - Ideas for further development

I discussed with Jo and Amber the possibility of extending this work.  I have enough research to make this a box set of maybe five designers/photographers involved in album cover design which link to each other, these links could be demonstrated using one map. With more time I would have added:

Hipgnosis (Linked through sixties counter culture and mutual admiration)
Peter Saville
Malcolm Garrett
Keith Morris

I like the look and feel of single box sets, these are some we own:










The product would make more of a stamp and would be of wider appeal to more graphic designers and record collectors. 

In addition I was talking about the period in history the events were occurring such as MTV starting in 1981 and the fact the Apple was developed two year after Barney died IE to emphasis the hand rendered quality of all Barney's work.  Jo suggested I could have added these to my Bubble picture.  I think this is a good idea as although I have thoroughly researched the context of this period I have not put that across as much as I could have in the work.  I had actually started doing this on the original mapping of the links between album covers however this got forgotten moving forward.  In future I will remember to check back over previous ideas so anything relevant is not forgotten.





Saturday 12 February 2011

Visual langauge - Book Fair

Some ideas for my hotdog fold books.  Originally I was so saturated in Barney Bubbles that I was thinking of making a Red Pattern book based on the designs of Barney Bubbles. This is the first idea where I copied the design from the Damned Album cover ' Music is for pleasure' in Illustrator.(It was good to revisit the illustrator pen tool!)




We had a group progress crit on Tuesday 8th Feb which was useful as everyone else has found it hard to focus on this brief given we are so near a module deadline and have just had a final crit for the last brief! I was relieved to see that everyone in my group had moved away from the photographs we originally took and it was interesting to hear other people's ideas. 
On reflection I realised that I was overlooking my drawing skills and although I planned to screen print this to get a hand made quality it would still look 'digital'. 

So I started again by brainstorming what objects are red and using my photos from earlier came up with some ideas for illustrations.  A while ago I bought some wooden letter stamps so I also experimented with these.  The effect is really pleasing and also will be commercially appealing .  As below:





These designs also look more effective on Brown paper and a fantastic result for this brief, in terms of I need to reproduce this for ten books, is that  the illustrations scan in and print off really well.  I experimented printing off on brown paper on my Inkjet printer and it works like a dream.


I have been inspired by by the work of Linda Zaks and am planning to experiment with an idea based around spashed paint and cutting out letters as below:




Book works - initial development

I experimented in Photoshop masking off the red areas of photographs leaving the remaining image black and white.



Although the effect was quite pleasing I did not feel it was strong enough to attract attention at the book fayre.