Printmaking

Been doing some printmaking experiments this weekend for my current Uni project called Language. The brief is to brand/ celebrate/ promote language, my line of thought brought me to Shakespeare and to Shakespeare's use of slang in his works. I then took this further to our own use of slang and symbols and decided upon emoticons and then to explore Shakespeare with emoticons as they in themselves embody emotions and work very well to convey the meaning within Shakespeare's plays.

I experimented with lino printing and mono printing using emoticons and a blocky aesthetic and generally getting very messy in the process!

Click for more;

Design updates:

Website design following the same brand style as I used for my business card.

Letterhead design for a covering letter.

Tweaks made to the wedding invitation me and Amy have been working on, cleaned up the typography and drew the heart accents properly. Planning on screen printing a limited amount using silver and mint green inks.

The beginnings of a re-brand

Initial ideas for new self branding, working currently on the business card and getting some kind of logo sorted.

Eventually will have a business card, website, CV, covering letter and maybe something extra.

Currently working on...

Working on a small side project with Amy to design her sister's wedding invitations, going with green and silver colour scheme and a minimal design as this is reflective of the couple's tastes.

Then with the heart at the top of the design we will be having two thumbprints from the couple which fit together to form the heart shape. Little personal touch

Forgive my hand drawn hearts, better ones will be designed!

Have you been swapping?

Here's what me and Amy have been up to recently, lots and lots and lots of work for our community project.
Made interactive posters, gift tag leaflets, regular leaflets, small viral presents and screen printed giftbags for people who have swapped to take away!
Been crazy busy, stay tuned for the final video edit of all of this.

Screenprinting!

Last Monday we had a screen printing introduction, crazy as I’m a 3rd year. Such a shame we’ve not had access to this before, or been aware we have because we had great fun making some simple prints using simple paper stencils and luminous green paint! Now myself and Amy want to frame this baby, lovely a2 print goodness.

Community

Sneak peak of mine and Amy's community project!

CV: self promotion

CV time.
Here's my design for our recent CV project, I decided to go big but simple in the design... and by big I mean 2 meters.
Printed on the plotter double sided, which was a nightmare but I got it to work with a lot of help from the technician, so all in all worth it.
The design is on the front, my CV: about me, qualifications, experience, contact etc etc. Then on the back is a kind of wallpaper design, as the size of it reminded me of wallpaper and could then be something that the recipient could put up, the design became a play with typography saying "employme" repeated in an op art pattern down the length of the paper.

Click through for more photos:

Studio View Work Experience

I recently spent a week at the design agency Studio View based in Lincoln. While I was there I was given a project to produce illustrations for songwriting.
I decided to use a collage approach and choose famous songwriters as the basis for them. I chose Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Patti Smith and Robert Smith of The Cure, the collages then became inspired by a song of theirs I felt showcased their songwriting skills best. For Ian Curtis I chose Transmission and the collage shows the industrial style and the idea of telephone wires all connecting together. For Patti Smith I chose Land and the collage shows the imagery of the song, which the horse and the flames and the boy with a butterfly coming from his mouth. For Robert Smith I chose Pictures of You and the collage shows an underwater style, with aqua colours, it consists of an image of a woman floating underwater and then behind it is green card and a piece of scourer, then over this I placed a grey film to give a more murky effect.

Mail Art: University

This was in response to the question "should university education be free?" I chose the idea of sending a statement of the debt that they will have after 3 years of university and I then expanding this further by thinking of the packaging and making it so it was first wrapped in loads of brown paper and then wrapped in string and then wrapped in sellotape and finally more string. It shows the idea of working so hard to get through university and what you finally get from them is a huge debt.

Mail Art: World Population

 This was in response to the question "how many people should there be?" I chose to go down a more symbolic route and started thinking about the idea of something that is ever expanding and then the idea of this expansion being restricted, like the earth is restricting the limit of population expansion. From this I came up with the idea of placing an elastic band around a balloon which when blown up restricts the user and makes blowing up the balloon near impossible.

Mail Art: Aliens

This was in response to the question "does it matter if there is life on other planets?" I chose to write a letter from the government as if aliens were invading Earth in the format of a telegram. I also included a piece of foil saying to use it to make a hat in order to combat alien mind control, this came from the idea of cliches involved with aliens. I then wrote on the back of the envelope "the truth is out there" which is again a cliche term that everyone would recognise as being about aliens.

Mail Art: World's Economy.

Here is my response to the question "Who is to blame for the economic crisis, bankers or politicians?" I chose the idea of representing the ecomony as a piece of moldy bread, which also works to symbolise bad money. The idea came from a project I did in my 1st year called Excess where I again used the imagery of moldy bread to convey my message.
I then stuck a sticker on the front of it saying "contains world's economy" to further communicate the idea.
The last photo shows how moldy the bread got in the 4 days it was in the mail system.

D.I.Y Screen Printing

This is mine and Amy's first attempt at screen printing. We made the screen using a cheap photo frame and a mesh fabric stapled over it and then covered each side with the emulsion and exposed the image onto it using the sun (which took several attempts to get the timing right)
For a first attempt I think it was a great success, needs more work to get the timing just right, also the material we used was a little too thin so it let ink through even with the emulsion on it.

Stay tuned for the 2nd attempt!

The Devil and Daniel Johnston Title Sequence

My title sequence for the documentary film The Devil and Daniel Johnston. I was influenced by the way Johnston he recorded his music onto cassette tapes, so I decided to put the titles onto cassette tapes. Next I was influenced by his artwork and how he drew on his cassette tapes, so I made small stop motion animations to go over the cassettes. Then I cut this will footage of Johnston, to give the viewer a clue as to who he was before watching the film.

The music is True love will find you in the end by Daniel Johnston.

Showreel

Showreel of my work from 2008-2010.

New Website Design

New website design! http://www.louiselawlor.co.uk/ Using a bowler hat as my logo with javascript drop down menu links.
Next step- showreel homepage.

I'm Not An Artist

Yet another gif post.. obsessed..... maybe

Uploaded a gif to http://www.iamnotanartist.org/index.php , which is a brilliant website of gifs people have submitted, ranging from amazing to hilarious to a little weird. Mine's a gif of me and Amy morphing into each other.

http://www.iamnotanartist.org/gif.php?id=247 See it here

www.louiselawlor.co.uk

 

I now have a website! But don't look at the design too much as I'll be designing a better one in summer. But yeah go check it out http://www.louiselawlor.co.uk/

Alphabet Animation Tests

For our new project in which we have to create an animation of an alphabet using practical methods. I began by looking at this example of an animation using unexpected methods, they used a speaker and a mixture of cornstarch and water into which he dropped the letters and with the vibration of the speaker they were engulfed into the mixture.





I then started experimenting myself and I came across effervescent tablets, which reacted in the water to fizz and hide the letter

From this I experimented more, using 3D letters in a bowl of water which i held an effervescent tablet in to make it fizz over the letter and mask it.

However, this was very unpredictable so I decided to try using a bowl of lemonade and adding bicarbonate of soda to it to create the fizz effect over the letters. This worked a lot better and produced a more violent reaction.