Hopes Fears and Opportunities Revisit

Last December I had several Hopes, Fears and Opportunities, and to be completely honest, I still feel similar to how I felt back then. For my hopes I wanted to create work that I enjoy making, not just selling out to purely allow others to enjoy my work, I illustrate and design to appeal to myself, with hope that others will also be appealed by what I design. As a child I always loved to draw, and to design, and to create. I feel I have always been creative and imaginative, and designing is a way of showing my creativeness. I think creative people have an additional need from other people, to use their creativeness, they have to do it, it's something that needs to be released, and I feel that finishing my degree course is slightly fracturing this, it will be the first time I have been out of education ever. It feels slightly depressing that we are all getting thrown onto the streets and have to find our own path. But hopefully what I have learned over the past few years will help me on my way.

This filters in to my fears, not being able to get hired, not being successful, failing are all, (and as I imagine, for everyone else too) my greatest fears at the moment. It has only really hit me that we are all on our own after the next few weeks are over. Life starts 'properly', we have to earn our own living, use it for what we need, and live our lives. It is a very scary thought, but everyone has been there, and everyone has to do their own thing to make what they want of it, the opportunity is in our own hands.

I will hopefully stay in contact with the college, and with Lord Whitney who have been supportive in the past, and the Little Brown Book Publishing group who have been helpful with the last project I did. There are always people that can lend a hand, you just have to reach out to them and not be afraid. Fear of rejection makes us reject ourselves, the worst someone can say is no, but showing you are interested shows you are someone who wants to work and be successful. Shaun from Little Brown said if anyone ever wants a portfolio review or to talk to someone, always ask (not just them but to anyone, any company etc) and about 80% of the time they will be helpful, even if they ask you to rearrange, they will mostly help out. They want people who can work hard just as much as they want to work. So don't feel put off as you feel embarrassed.

The biggest critic is yourself!

Business Cards Version 2 - Short update

I personally really liked my last Business Cards so I am keeping them more or less the same, all I will change is the website, as I now have a website once I have sorted out a problem with the domain. It feels good to have business cards, they feel quite precious!

Animals in Anguish Update 2

Some of the patterns used in my designs

 I have still been working on poster designs, On the left are two characters that will feature in one of them I want to make a series of these characters, merging humans with animals, to shock people into identifying the issue.

I have also uploaded some of my newer drawings from my sketchbook.

Squirrel

Bird

Website is up!

I now have a website set up. Currently the address is http://tom5550123.wix.com/tomshatwell but will soon change to tomshatwell.co.uk after the domain has finished processing.

I have put most of my favourite works in the gallery so feel free to have a look. It is still a working progress and I am gradually learning how to use all the tools, but more will come soon.

Little Brown Book Project - Marketing and Studio Visit

I have been to London to show several marketing directors my seven book cover designs for the Josie Dew Cycling Books project I have been working on. While I was there, I had a look around the building that Little Brown were stationed at. I was very surprised that there were so many employees in such a small company. It was a giant office with many people working on different things, some putting books together, others designing the actual books, it was really amazing to see! I spoke to one of the designers who was in the middle of designing a thriller book. 

They were working on Photoshop with one of those drawing tablets. She showed me some of the recent books she had designed and they all looked really different, yet intricate. Some had some funny illustrative characters, some were very dark and eerie, it was clear that most of the artists here don't have one particular style, they adapt to suit the content being made. She showed me a list of books that need to be made for a certain date (about two months away) and there were about 20 that needed to be made. I thought it would be very stressful buts he said she gets sent ideas of how they want it to look, the problem is that sometimes there are so many different ideas suggested, it can be difficult to understand which design they actually want. I asked her if she ever takes anything home or if it is all done at work. She said that luckily she never needs to work from home, it's all done during office hours, and that it is good to have a break from it as with anything.

As for showing work to the team, it was very scary! I assumed there would just be a few people but there was a giant roundtable and about 15 different people, they started saying "Hello I'm the marketing director for Waterstones" etc. I didn't expect this many, but I explained my work and why I designed them the way I did and it went ok. I was very lucky to get this oppertunity, but where it will go from here I do not know yet, but it was a really great experience!

Portfolio Review - Little Brown Book Publishers

I travelled to Blackfriars in London to visit the studio of Little Brown Book Publishing. (see separate blog entry). While I was there, Hannah Wood took a look at my portfolio. It was quite nerve wracking to go into an industry head-first with about 10 marketing directors waiting to see the book designs I had made. Hannah and a lady that was with her sat and waited for me to tell them about each piece of work. I'd never professionally explained each piece of art I had done until this point, it was even more scary trying to talk through the silence of them.

Overall they seemed to like my work, there was a tight schedule, and my portfolio review overran so I had to make haste, keeping it short but sweet. They said that it was a good idea that I chose to put drawings into the portfolio, because far too often do people slam all their best final work into a portfolio and sometimes it can be difficult to see where a certain brief could have gone if they had done things differently. Showing some decent rough work allows them to see the foundations of where a project could potentially go.

They thought my Animals in Anguish characters were a little "extreme" but I explained that it was because I was trying to make an extreme point and 'shock' the audience. They saw this with reason but I do acknowledge that some people could seem offended or shocked by these characters, but this is what I wanted them to feel.

Animals in Anguish Update

For my final project, I have been working on my Animals in Anguish posters. I am thinking that for my final show I want to showcase a few posters petitioning against cruelty to animals. I have a poster I am currently working on which will be an illustrative conveyor belt, going down the page, with chickens getting turned into meat products. It will exaggerate the processes of the production line, and be slightly humorous, but at the same time, sticking to the point that they start off as chickens and end up at the end as meat products.

Another poster I am working on is a series of character models which are humanoid animals. Combining the things which we overlook happening to animals and reiterating them as humans, where we would be very disturbed to find someone 'processed' in the same way. One character is a man on a plate, with legs sticking out, just as a chicken is presented at a classic dinner table. Another is the man with antlers, who has fur and antlers, appearing to be some sort of moose character with his tie being his red tongue. This is stressing a point that he is wearing the animal, we don't think about how our clothes are made, but we are technically wearing an animal, almost like you skinned them yourself without thought to how these are actually obtained. Ethically?

I am still working on some different ideas but they are all sketchbook work for now.

Lord Whitney

Deborah Wigglesworth Visit - The Paper Passionist

A 'Paper Passionist' talked to us today about paper, different kinds of paper, the processes of constructing paper, the different effects and styles of paper. She really lives up to her title! She had brought in many packs of paper with lots of different examples of styles of paper. It was very quirky of her to organise so many packs for us to take away. I now have a basic understanding of the process to make paper and how simple it actually is, she was very helpful and offered support if anyone needs help in using or sending off for any particular paper.

I was shocked that paper can come in infinite varieties. When you think of paper, you think of boring white A4 pieces, but they can be so very different. One piece was almost like a brick! She also showed us special types of business cards you can make that are very thick pieces of paper layered on top of one another. The most interesting piece was a stylised black piece that looked like metal sheeting and had holes in it, that was very nice, you could fit paper for any purpose at all, there is always a style that would work.

Deborah also showed us her archive of favourite pieces of work that she had done with many other artists, she seemed to be very knowledgable of people in the industry. This visit was probably the most interesting of all the visits, and I'm glad Deborah spoke to us about something so overlooked; paper!

Portfolio Review - Fig Taylor

I was lucky enough to get a portfolio viewing with Fig Taylor, writer of "How to Create a Portfolio & Get Hired" She had a look over my portfolio and assumed I wanted to get into Poster designs, probably for charities. She obviously looked over what I had and thought this would be the direction I am headed for, which would be right since a lot of the work in my portfolio is for organisations such as RSPCA, AGE UK etc. I think she assumes what she sees is what I want to do, which may sound obvious, but a lot of people seem to throw their best work in their portfolio without thinking about who it is that is actually looking. For example, if a book company was to look at your portfolio with hopes of hiring you, you would probably put mostly book designs to show you are capable of that medium, or for a poster agency, you would show them posters you have done. But my portfolio at the time was an average of all my best and personally favourite work, so maybe it was confusing to see where I actually stand from an employment perspective.

She thought my Age UK work was "the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life" which is agreeable, since that was sort of the point of it. It was still very nice of her to look at my Portfolio since she is very well-known in the industry, and I have heard of her a few times before. From what she has said I do want to maybe do work for charities, but not necessarily posters and not necessarily just charities.

Animals in Anguish - My Project Drawings

I have started my final project and have decided to make it about Animal Cruelty, maybe lead into environmental issues that are affecting animals, I have started out by drawing animals just to get my head into the project. Here are a few of them:

Duckling

I feel that it is important to get into the project by just drawing and drawing and drawing. If I am going to feature birds or reptiles, I need to know how they look, how they position themselves, how they move. So I have started by drawing them.

Mouse

Kitten

A few attempts at birds

Next I am going to think about making posters and how the drawings I have made would factor in to them.