Saturday 21 July 2012

Tuesday 29 May 2012

HE Fashion Show


Harriet Isaacs (a damn good graphic designer) and I were asked to make a font cover for the up and coming HE fashion show featuring Plymouth College of Art fashion student's work in Plymouth Pavilions. The brief was to use two image as inspiration:

We were also given the theme of 'Edwardian Plymouth' so we had to create something was quite old looking but also quite now and fashionable which was a bit of a tricky brief but we just slowly pieced it together starting with the top image as the main piece of inspiration then just working parts of the bottom image as well as things like a compass and light to show Plymouth/the sea. 
We were also asked to make a mood board on the same theme which again was tricky but interesting because we firstly needed to work out what needed to go on a mood board in the fashion world, but I was very please with the outcome and when we handed in both pieces it was praised which was good and I put my name as Bench Allen on it so it was a good way to spend the name out there. 

Easy Fold Book & Box


To make the ghost explorer more accessible to people and also so I could sell it at fairs and use it as a piece of self promo, I made easy fold versions of the hard bound book. I broke the book into three chapters, I've only made an easy fold version of the first chapter (which I have entitled prologue) so far for the deadline but the Plymouth College of Art Summer Show 2012 I want to make multiple versions of all three chapters.
For this project I wanted to find a new way of packaging my easy fold book so I asked Laura if she could show me how to make the boxes she makes for her Resin toys. I decided i'd use cream card for the top of the box and blue for the bottom because it looked like sand/rock and the sea which obviously works for the story of the ghost explorer. I then digitally printed the title on the top and put them together which ended up being very tricky and fiddly without nails but they were done.
I then completed the package with a business card. For the summer show and New designers I was going to make little goodies like laser cut badges and prints in there as well so that it's more of a promotional package.

Monday 28 May 2012

Tumblr

To get more people seeing my work I joined Tumblr, the good thing about tumblr is that I can put up my art work and other people can re blog it and therefore spend my work around and also I have linked all my images to my blog so more people can look at my entire work. Another thing is that I can re blog other people's stuff so I've been reblogging other people's work on the course (as you can see I've recently reblogged Kelly Walton's work) so that we can all help one another spend our work around.

Blog

I made benchallen.blogspot.com in the second year and therefore the whole thing seemed a bit dated with my old business card image as the banner and the colour scheme was black and white to tie in with the flash catalyst website I made in second year too. Firstly I changed the colour scheme to a nautical blue so that it worked with the work I was putting on the blog. Then to tie in with the new identity/ logo I made a new banner.
Though I didn't really like this banner for I had to use two teeth to fill the space and also because the background is white it didn't fit in with the layout very well.
The banner I tried next was to just have the tooth by itself with the same coloured background as the blog so it looks like it's just there by itself, the minimalist look. Though you couldn't see the tooth very well so I put a rough white border around it though it still wasn't working as a blog banner. 
  
The final banner I came up with was the tooth with the writing underneath (which I changed from black to white so it's more legible) on the same colour background as the blog, which I think works perfectly. 
 

Website



Researching into successful up and coming contemporary illustrators I can see and was majorly advised to make a cargo collective website. It did mean code had to be worked out to sort of the orientation of the work but because so many people have a cargo website most questions are answered and also I had help from Laura Jayne Weeks for she has already made hers and it look really good.
I was really pleased with how my website looks though there are still pieces of work that need to be uploaded and the logo added.

Animation

This is a rough idea of what I want the final animation to look like on the self promotional cd.
I wanted to use the imagery I made for the business card have everything tie in to this identity i've made of The Bazaar World of Bench Allen.

Sunday 27 May 2012

Business Card

For the business card I wanted to use the new shark tooth identity. I came up with 'Thee Bazaar World of' from thinking about what sort of what it would be and bizarre was a good word to describe the sort of world I have made as Bench Allen but then I thought because of doing fairs and selling things off my own back that my world is like a market bazaar.
I liked the font I used in the Ghost Explorer and thought it would be perfect for this part of the logo.
I kept the 'Bench Allen' the same as i've used before because I like the bold hand drawn look of it and I think it still works with the font of 'Thee Bazaar World'. 
For the web address and email I wanted to have a clear clean legible font that is easily read even when small.
For the other side of the business card I wanted to show something that looked like a globe/world that in the mouth of a sea creature and with the shark's tooth on the other side I thought it made sense that it's a shark though when I did the illustration I did it A4 and when I put it on the business card dimensions it didn't fill the entire page so I put the same writing on this side as well though I did want to change it so that it was only the art work on this side. 

It was then given to me that I could turn the head slightly and increase the size and this would fill the business card more, though once this was done it looked like the shark was coming out of nothing so I put a line across the illustration to look like the surface of the sea and made it Palincest blue to hark back to that project, for that work will also be in my portfolio. 





Identity

For this part of the project I wanted to create more of a world for Bench Allen to exist in. To do this I wanted to make some sort of logo/ identity.

After lots of different ideas a strong idea was create, the tooth of a shark because for as long as I can remember I have always been interested and scared of sharks. Also the tooth is a strong shape that stands out and obviously keeps with the nautical theme of my work. Though the first sharks tooth I illustrated was the same look as the one I drew in my sketch book and people said it wasn't obvious enough that it was a sharks tooth.

So I changed it to a more obvious shape which turned out better because there's space now to put writing under the arch.

Book Binding & Finished Book


Firstly to make the book  I trimmed all the pages so that they lined up with one another and then I sewed all the pages together adding on the title page and the hand made marbling paper end pages.
One difficulty with this was that I couldn't trim or sew the book like you normally would because of the fold out pages with the quadruples on, in the end though the book sewed together fine although they could have been a bit tighter though the quadruple sewed in fine. 
I then cut the screen printed calico to size to make the hard back front cover. I then measured the card that makes it hard back, about 1cm longer and 5mm wider than the bound pages and worked out by the thickness of the bound page the size of the spine. I then laid out the card on the backside of the cover to work out where I was going to glue them, I then rollered out a thin layer of PVA glue on the card and stuck them to the cover, the corners of the calico where then cut and the extra material was wrapped around the card, this needed to be done ultra quickly so that the glue didn't dry. I then put a thin layer of glue on the card and stuck the marbled paper to it, the book was then pressed under the weight of a pile of books. I was then done.


Challen-ging Drawing

For this project I wanted to challenge myself to drawing people and not only people but beautiful women and other such lovely things.

Printing

I was a bit worried about printing the pages because the front cover was exactly A4 but then I realised that when you print there is a good enough boarder around the page so that it would work. Firstly, I did a test print on the black and white printer on normal paper and it came out looking good so I decided to put in the hand made paper I'd acquired in Totnes.

Unfortunately, because of the texture of the paper some of the images came out unclear and even more the ink didn't stay on the paper and smudged therefore I was unable to continue using it. So I decided to just continue using normal printer paper but this made the page look cheaply printed which I didn't want so I then bought some nicer thicker paper.



Though still in black and white the image looked quite cheaply produced and another thing was that because I was flipping the paper over in the printers the two middle lines on each side of the page didn't line up. So I went down to Bretonside printers to get it printed on the same paper but in colour so that they could line up the pages better and also I was going down there to print out the A3 quadruples anyway. They came out really nice and I was really pleased with the end result.

Planning & Storyboard

Before making the illustrations for the book firstly I wrote the story out working out how many pages I needed to have to fit everything I wanted in but also the right amount of pages to fit in the book for they have to go in groups of 4 double page spreads. I then worked out a story board for the story.


The Drawing Process

The first thing I did was story board what I wanted the image to look like.
Then I had someone photograph me in the position of the image.
Then I printed out the photo and light boxed around the outline on my shape.
  
This was then scanned and taken into photoshop and filled with black. 
I then using the outline as a guide, on the light box, I hatched around the line to make the aura.
  
 This was then again scanned and taken into Photoshop and put around the silhouette then coloured an off white to make it look like light. I then put the colour underneath to make it stand out more and obviously to illustrate that he's in the sea.

I then turned down the opacity of the silhouette to make him look more ghostly and put the lines in the background to show he's in the depths of the sea. I like that you can see the lines through the silhouette. 

 

Adding in Words

For this project, unlike projects i've done in the past, I wanted to add in words to tell the story so that the illustrations didn't have to tell the story by themselves. Though once I started adding in words to the illustrations it ruined it slightly or the words were too illegible. The answer I came up with and was backed up was to put all the writing in the beginning of the book as a sort of poem/sea shanty, which works a lot better for me and for the book in all.

Front cover

For the front cover I used the iconic image from page 6 but simplified it because I wanted to screen print the front cover so I just made the lady a soft silhouette of cream which I thought really worked because the ghost explorer is a harsh black silhouette.

For the font I wanted to have a quite hand drawing font which looks like it's been written with a quill and ink but still legible and the font I found worked perfectly for that though I was a tad worried about how it was going to come out when screen printed.

When mixing the ink colours for screen printing I realised the cream I wanted for the lady/aura was a tad too light for I wanted to make my front cover out of calico because it was close to material I used in the book binding day. So I made a more golden colour so that I still showed up when printed.

Unfortunately because the print was a three colour print the lining up wasn't perfect although the images themselves came out really clear, even the type which was good.

The Quadruple (Part 3)

For this page I wanted to show the same four illustrations again but with all the images looking really happy with the ghost explorer and the lady. Though it was said it would be nice to just see them hand in hand going off to the next chapter of their life.

Though I then realised because of the issue with printing A2 that i'd have to decide whether to have this image or not and in the end I decided not for I think it's a weaker image than the page before which was the other page i was debating to lose.

Page 13

In this image I wanted to show that the lady was now dead and had found the ghost explorer so that they can be together.

Page 12


In this illustration I showed the lady throwing herself peacefully because she wants to be with the ghost explorer, I got the idea for this from the Twilight New Moon film where Bella tries cliff jumping and almost kills herself. I also wanted it to be a beautiful death without blood or breakage and that she does just die almost in her sleep with no pain.



Page 11

For this illustration I wanted to show the lady mirroring how the ghost explorer's feeling also mirroring his pose in page 10. At first I was going to have her sitting on the same rock she first saw the ghost explorer on, but that would mean the next page won't flow on as well so I had her sitting on the edge of a cliff.I was then told that it looked like she was sitting right on the edge of the cliff because of the creases on the dress so I removed the creases and it looked better and less on the edge.


The Quadruple (Part 2)

For this quadruple I used the same four illustrations but with slight changes to each one to show that the ghost explorer is sad, in the mountains and walking on water the whole image is darker, in the Cancinos and the Chimera they're sad with the ghost explorer. Another thing I was told would be a nice idea was if I made the fold out come out downwards because when he's happy the page folds out upwards so when he's down the page comes down.

Page 10

In this page I wanted to show the ghost explorer sad and just thinking about her. I used the same layout as the first version of page 6 but it worked more because he is in a different position.

But then I realised that if i used this version then i'd have to change the rock texture to the sedimentary rock. Once I did this I think it worked.

Page 9

For this page I wanted to make an illustration which was like the scene in the little mermaid where Ariel saves Eric and lays him down on the beach, though this is the beginning of the ghost explorer feeling sad and realising that he and the beautiful lady can't be together, like a nautical Romeo and Juliet.