Media Artifact.

My media artifact for this project is a completed cover and a few leaflets for my band's new EP. I'm actually very proud of these, the album art especially. The figure on the front is me, taken using photobooth on the mac and then imported to Illustrator. The fun bit being that I wasn't actually wearing a suit it was just a tshirt and I've added the suit over the top. Everything drawn on the cover (apart from the False Ambition logo) I have done with the pen tool in illustrator. Including making the font. that you see on the front and back of the cover.

For the leaflets I wanted two different versions, something I could print when I was on a budget (white leaflets) or something a little more in keeping with the theme of the album art.

Ciao.

Wow, 20 posts is a lot more than I was expecting. But hey, I've managed it. It's been pretty fun to have an outlet for moaning about things which I usually just do to people stood closest. Especially about the damn Tories!

I thought I'd finish with something that I do a lot and never really look at, doodling. One of those things you do but never really look over. Over the first 2 terms of Uni' I've been doodling, scenes from starwars, cousin It as a pimp and various other strange little insights into my mind. The one that seemed most appropriate though is one I drew the other day. "Concerned Rabbit is concerned with the state of this coursework." Although I'm hoping it doesn't apply here.

To finish, here's a picture of my cat floating.

Ciao.

Billboards.

Billboards intrigue me. Mostly, because no one can seem to get it right. What advertisers never seem to get is that things need to be short and snappy. Jeremy Clarkson once made the point that as you're driving past you aren't really going to notice more than a few words. Which is a very good point.

So I was looking at a billboard wondering about how I'd do it. Well I have something that needs advertising, so I thought I'd try one. It's pretty easily identifiable as something I've designed because it's very, very minimalistic. I would rather see something very simple, but very effective, than I would see something over-designed for the sake of it. Some stuff that I always enjoy is things like packaging for Apple products and WESC headphones. Very simple to the point design but it looks really good and it certainly grabs me.

Advertising for me is something that needs a lot of care and attention. But no one seems to be doing it nowadays. I mean yes the average person isn't going to notice the extremely lazy photoshopping on O2's latest poster campaign (the one with the rubber ducks) and maybe most people won't notice that on the end of the Windows 7 advert (the one with the woman in the coffee shop) she knocks the cup off the table and you never hear it hit anything afterwards, despite there being time, or where they cut off people's lines just to meet the 7 second limit. This is stuff that can all be easily fixed but people just don't take the time over this stuff that they should.

Macro part 3

This is the set of images that set me off on Macro stuff. This is one of the photos I submitted along with my visual diary. I was sat with the camera outside and actually dropped it, and it landed by my feet. When I saw it pointed at my shoe I thought it'd be fun to take a photo from my shoe's point of view (I was running pretty stumped on ideas at this point) and it actually turned out to be a really interesting shot. Helped along by the flowery shoes in the middle of the grass.

What I really like about this is the single blade of grass that was captured perfectly pointing to the shoe, and the out of focus wilderness in the background. When I see it I always envisage these printed on large canvases and presented at head height, giving an eye view of the world from a perspective no one ever sees.

With photography I find it difficult to get excited about ordinary pictures, there are some that you look at and think "wow, that's brilliant" but it's only ever a fleeting moment for me unless there's something there to draw me in. A thing I'm big on is things from different perspectives. As an example, when I was in New York we were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, something that has been photographed many a time. But the thing that caught my eye was when you glanced up the way the different cables intertwined and crossed over crating a really interesting pattern.

24 Season 8

So I'm up to 2am on the new season of 24, and I've gotta say, I'm feeling let down. I mean, yes Keifer Sutherland is still awesome as Jack Bauer. Yes he's still taking down a terrorist threat. Yes he's still using questionable methods to do so. But it just feels, wierd. 24 always has a clear bad guy, one guy that you can really celebrate when Jack straps a car battery to his nipples but so far we've had nothing, a few generic villains but nothing to suggest that the plot has anyone behind it who's truly evil.

The only real enemy we have is a bunch of generic middle eastern terrorists. Which would usually be okay, apart from the fact that it's quite obvious that if they follow through with their plan to set off a dirty bomb in the centre of Manhattan that the US would decimate their entire country in a massive mushroom cloud.

So you see my predicament, the show is following a plot that I'm not so sure is working. Usually there's an interesting sub-plot in 24 as well but this time with CTU agent Dana Walsh's dispute with her exboyfriend just seems a bit, strapped on to me.

I hope that I'm just being overly cynical and the show is going to have some massive, awesome finale to this season. I really do.

CD Art take 2

Part of my media artifact for the final posts. This is the development and (hopefully) last version of the album art I'm designing. I progressed from the last after showing it to the band and them all saying that the positioning of the text on the front was a little awkward and that it looked pretty empty in the background.

I decided that I would go for a sleeve rather than a plastic cd case, because they are cheaper, less likely to be broken and greener.

Now I'm pretty much set on this style & design I think I'll start working on a myspace design and a poster for the EP release.

Banksy.

This is one of Banksy's series of artworks where he has taken a piece of work by another artist (more often than not stuff he finds at charity shops or things like that) and then gives them a going over in his style. I'm not 100% sure if that's how Banksy has done this image but I have seen work before this that's done that way.

This picture works in the rule of thirds, the bottom third being the foreground and the top being the skyline. I find my eye drawn straight to the middle third to the corner of the house, it is then drawn down towards the figures down in the foreground and then to the cart at the front and works backwards from there towards the horizon. At first glance the image feels wrong, then the brain catches up and you realize that there is all the graffiti on the houses & cart, it feels wrong because we're used to very tranquil, ideal scenes of the country side.

Banksy's work like this always intrigues me because I tend to forget he's a real artist and can paint this well. This piece looks like an oil painting from the way the colours are layered up over each other & wiped away to mix the colouring.

Macro part 2

So I was sat with my camera today looking at one of these blank blog entries and started thinking about how much time I spend sat looking at my keyboard for inspiration. But then I started to look at the keyboard itself, and realize that actually, it's a very nice piece of design. The keyboard itself is an artefact of modernist design, it's very functional but Apple have taken it upon themselves to spice things up a bit and the nice flat keys and neat grids really appeal to me.

So with this in mind I decided to point the camera at the keys for a bit and try to capture the neat design of the keys. I've started to notice that I'm thinking in Macro now, I like to look at ordinary things closer and some of the textures and fine details that are around us.

It's amazing how things start to take on a different lease of life if you start to really look at them properly.

Kick Ass? Too right it does.

Kick ass is getting a lot of rave reviews lately, but I always take these things with a pinch of salt (Twilight gets rave reviews for crying out loud.) But after I saw it I've got to say, they were right.

This was something I knew a little about before since Kick Ass is based off a comic strip of the same name. So I had a vague synopsis of the story but didn't know much more than that. I like to think of the story as a much more lighthearted version of The Watchmen. Crime is running amock and a few masked vigilantes take to the streets to try fight it off.

What I wasn't expecting from this film was the amount of violent deaths, I thought this was based around a Batman-esque superhero but the vigilantes do end up killing a lot of people.

What did I like about it? I loved the story line very fun to watch but still remains pretty tense at times. Nick Cage did a pretty good job at being a superhero dad which was very cool to see (this is also something I didn't like but more on that later..) I thought Aaron Johnson did a really good job as the loser by day hero by night, and you did genuinely feel sorry for him when he gets his ass handed to him when he first starts out.

What didn't I like? Well there wasn't much, but Nick Cage did have a tendency to go. a. little bit. Shatner. In his delivery of some of his lines. Which was strange but other than that he did a good job. That was about it actually, if I watched it again I'd probably start to pick up on things but that's just the media studies part of my brain the refuses to be quiet when I'm watching.

Holy first excellent game in the franchise Batman!

So here's the game that's currently running my life again. I don't know why but this is a game I can't stop playing once I start, the Xbox equivalent of Pringles. But there's a reason to my addiction! What's that you ask?

Mark. Hamill.

Mark's voice acting as the Joker is nothing short of amazing, he's really into the role. It's also nice to see him back doing the Joker after Batman: The Animated Series. He's very, very funny as well. Some of his little quips really come off with Mark's Joker voice that Heath Ledger or Jack Nicholson could never really pull off in their characterizations of the Joker. If Mark was younger, he'd be my first choice as the Joker, no doubt about it.

Well, that's not all that keeps me hooked. This is a very clever game, while it is a pretty standard RPG the puzzles are nice and innovative and some are actually pretty hard. The controls are all pretty standard so there isn't much messin about figuring that out and you can get straight down to it.


The art for Arkham Asylum is brilliant, very good artwork for Batman, with Arkham looking suitably dark and gothic but showing that there is an outside world to the Batman franchise. Little details like the security gates being made by Wayne-tech, or the Wayne tower visible in the Gotham skyline show that a lot of thought went into this with the art direction.

Were I rating this I'd give it a 9/10, because everything is so good (which is very rare for a batman game) but the ending just doesn't quite do it justice in my opinion and falls victim to the flaws which riddle most RPG boss fights, the repetitive nature of it, once you figure out how to hurt them you get it done pretty quickly.

(You might be able to tell from this that I really like Batman)

Frank Miller's Sin City

This is an extract from Sin City, a graphic novel series by Frank Miller. Which is one of my all time favorites and the series that dragged me into the whole comic thing. Frank Miller is a writer fabled for his prowess with writing dark storylines with awesome one liners but never being able to write a woman who wasn't a whore with a heart of gold (or just a whore..) but with Sin City he just takes all of that in his stride.

The story is based around 3 male characters who take their personalities from the very heart of American Film Noir. You've got the well meaning thug who is haunted by the thoughts of the woman he loved who was killed, the hero cop who was screwed over and is out for revenge and the not-so-white knight standing up for the women of the city. These various storylines all link up and cross over in various places, again this is told in the Film Noir style non-linear story telling.

But great storyline's aside what always grabs me about this run of novels is Miller's art work. The image I've included here demonstrates it. Miller uses black and white very well in order to create his world, you only ever see one colour in a frame where he wants emphasis on something. The black and white intrigues me because if you look at it too long you start to see what it really is, just a few indiscriminate shapes on a page, but (like Julian Opie's work) the brain jumps in and fits the pieces together to give a really striking image.

What always gets me is how he can include this level of detail into his work, using only black and white. I mean, everything looks amazingly well drawn and you never find yourself looking at a scene trying to work out what's going on (which can happen a lot with full colour comics.)

Self Portrait

Well after I looked at a few of Julian Opie's images for the last post I decided it'd be fun to do one of my own, since I haven't done it for a while. I think I've been fairly successful. Some of it is a little blocky but as they say, bad workmen blame their tools, and this is no exception! I would like to place blame on the built in laptop mouse because it's damn hard to get a smooth line with such things.

But anyway! Excuses aside I think this is a fairly good crack at it. The thing with Opie's work is that as soon as you try something in the same vein you realise that actually it's not so simple at all. This portrait taking me the best part of an hour sat clicking the mouse away and a few hundred points of the pen tool on illustrator.

EDIT: Man, my hair looks a mess O.o

Julian Opie.

Sung Jin Arrives In London. 1. 2009

Julian Opie is one of my favorite artists and a big influence on me stylistically. The way he does his portraits like this is something I've been practicing for a while now since I discovered his work. The thing that interests me most is the skill in which he creates an image with such simple shapes. At first glance this image seems very detailed but when you start to look at it more you realize that actually it's only made up of a few colours in blocks. (The background of this one is much more detailed than the other's of his I've seen)

Blur's Greatest Hits, Album art. 2000

This is the kind of thing I'm more used to seeing from Julian Opie. Very basic, very simplified human figures. This is what really drew me into his work, because when you look at it, your brain fills in the picture and lets you know it's a human face, when really it looks very little like a face and is just a 2D image with some black lines on that resemble facial features.

Macro exploration pt.1

Something that intruiges me with photography, and does more the more I learn about photography. Is how you can make ordinary things look very different and visually more interesting. This image is an extreme macro closeup on my cat's fur. Now I see this everyday and I never really look at it in this way. You just see the cat as a whole you never stop and consider the fur or things like that.

The thing I love about this image is how sharp and focused it is, the individual strands of fur all stand out very well. This concept of ordinary things in new ways is something I do enjoy playing with and will probably continue to do so through the blog and other bits and bobs like it.

I was sat looking at a blank blog page wondering what I could post. While playing some guitar. When it occurred to me, that I could really post some guitar thanks to the wonders of the internet. So here we are, me playing some guitar.

Album art

I was recently tasked with creating some artwork for my bands latest EP. This really came about after I re-read on of my favorite series of graphic novels ever, Frank Miller's Sin City. I love the way Miller uses colour so sparingly and gives this really harsh black & white feel (but more on that later!)

This was created in a method that I have now become very comfortable with, I take a base photo to work on and then in Illustrator using the pen tool trace the shapes I want. and then colour them. I discovered that I was quite good at this after spending an entire GCSE art project looking at the pop-artist Julian Opie. His very basic style of imaging is a big influence on me and the way I approach the digital artwork.

Other things to note, the font and logo are also of my own design, the font is based off of a free font called "Birth of a Hero" which was quite a messy grungy font that I've tided up and tweaked into something that really appeals to me and is quite versatile.

Too close for comfort.

I was sat looking at a Conservative leaflet that came in the post while I was having breakfast, doodling on the paper as you do when I noticed something. (Mostly that I am really immature (: ) Good job I wasn't voting for Cameron anyway.

Then again, the choices at the moment aren't that great. I think Labour get my vote, but picking between the parties is like choosing a straw as a small child, they'll both do pretty similar things because thats what you want them to do. It's just a choice between a curly red straw and a straight blue straw.

I always liked curly straws though...

Another of my own photo's here. This one was more of an experiment that I really love. I've always been a massive fan of long exposure, light trails photography. I took this photo when I was in the car on the way home down the motorway. It's very bumpy because really for these exposure times you need a tripod and a flat surface, where I was using the dash of the car.

I really enjoy how the lights form the perspective lines on the picture and draw you down into the center of the image. The eye starts on the right of the image and follows the brighter lines of the street lights down, as it travels down you start to notice the other splashes of colour on the left of the image. Which assists with pulling the eye off into the distance of the image where the perspective lines meet.

MC Lars

Here's another one of my photos from a gig I've been to recently. This one is from an MC Lars show. The thing I love about this one is how the exposure of the camera has captured how he's moved leaving the movement trails. Usually I would have discarded this pretty quickly because of the blurriness but I think it gives a very interesting effect.

Unlike the shot from Motion City Soundtrack this one is more about the energy than the composition and the pose. (However it is safe to say that it would have been pretty well composed & timed if he hadn't moved ~.~ )

Motion City Soundtrack

One of the things I really enjoy doing is photos from gigs I have been to. This is from Motion City Soundtrack. One of the things I try to do is capture some of the energy on stage, which is damned difficult with the constantly shifting lighting. I think this is one of the best from my set of photos. The thing I like most about this photo is the pose. A second earlier or later and this shot would have looked completely different and wouldn't have as much impact in my opinion.

(On a side note, I love his guitar.)