Local groups

Recently there was a Illustration cafe at Plymouth college of art, where people were welcome to join in on a game of Exquisite corpse of making monster like characters. If I had the chance I would of joined in myself, but due to travelling problems and timing I couldn't.

Here's a list of other groups I've found that sounded interesting.

Chinese Brush Painting Society
Information:	Meet: 1st Saturday of the month 10am-12 noon. Venue: Swarthmore Centre, Mutley. Painting group discusses, paints and sometimes demonstrates all aspects of Chinese brush painting techniques.
Contact:	B Vallance
Telephone:	01752 671168

And The Plymouth Arts club. Which meet up mostly Tuesday evenings for sessions. But you have to pay for membership then for each session.

Blog Layouts.

I keep thinking of how I can make my blog look more visually pleasing and creative. I keep going back and looking at the mosaic layout which I find fun to look at.

Gloss Gallery

 In the Gloss Gallery in Exeter, my A-level experimental photography work got featured in the Rising Stars event and also on their website. My work was shown to be sold, but sadly no one brought my work. The piece got featured at the gallery through association with my secondary school, so I'm not too sure how I would go about it by just being a individual, though I think you would have to hire a venue if the gallery wasn't offering me free space.

While looking back at the Gloss website I noticed that they had a Christmas Event. The Christmas print show, by a collaboration of print makers, where I assume you could purchase their works as well as viewing them. Maybe next year I'll have a look around to see if I could get involved, or sneakily slip my Christmas card design into an important persons pocket..

Animation

These two animations always inspire me and I just absolutely adore them. Before I took my course I was thinking of taking either Animation or Illustration. These two animations made me want to choose animation so badly, but I figured that I wouldn't have it in me to actually achieve the time consuming dedication that would be expected of me in a Animation degree. Instead I choose illustration as I thought if I did want to go back to the animation side of it, I still could.
Again, these two animations cover the mood and themes and style's I'd love to achieve .

Finally a workspace

You know how I said one of my weaknesses from my SWOT, was not having a workspace? Well I thought I'd finally sort that out. This is the best I could do for now.

This is not a book

I'm loving Keri Smiths "Wreck this Journal" so much, that today I brought her "This is not a book"

Unknown

 

Designs for my Boo! stage 2 poster

A view into the mind of Kadi

Why did I choose Illustration? 

My love for obsessing over nice looking things and thinking and being inspired excessively about theories, stories and concepts, made me want to continue being in Art education. I had been doing very well in Art since GCSEs then followed up to my A levels, seeing also more creative subjects such as Imedia and Photography to expand on my creative skills. I choose Illustration instead of subjects such as fine art, animation and games design, because all in one package it gives me the creative license, hands on and independent work that I feel I'm more suitable for. Illustration was obviously the "comfort zone" subject for me to pick.

What area am I most interested in?

I have a lot of love for many different areas of illustration, but the main areas that keep coming up for me are concept art, abstract portraiture, connotations of art, digital art, and traditional art. I mostly love art that is stands out and is  inspirational, emotional, magical, and heartwarming. My relationship with illustration, art, whatever it be is very unclear and I keep questioning it and viewing it in different ways. 

I'm not entirely sure what I want to aim for or do as a illustrator (maybe a children's illustrator?), but if it was up to me right at this moment I'd have a wall all to myself to paint and create abstract portraits and just be expressive. 

What skills do I have already?

As I said earlier I have Alevels for Photography and Imedia, which gave me the skills of knowing a fair amount about photo editing and manipulation in Photoshop as well as the basics. I also learned the basics of Adobe Flash to create animations. I'd like to say that my observational skills are good as well as using traditional materials, but have been practicing digital painting more recently.

Am I assertive?

I filled out the form for this quiz (http://www.trans4mind.u-net.com/assertive.htm) to find out if I am assertive. I scored a 13, which means that I'm more submissive than aggressive, but still close to the balanced area  between aggressive and submissive. Although, personally I think I tend to get passive-aggressive at times. I think what I've learnt from this is that I need to maybe have a bit more confidence in my life, and take a stand for myself.

Body language also shows if your'e aggressive, submissive, or confident.  If I want to achieve a career in Illustration I must be able to have a good body language so people will hire me, and so I can pitch my ideas and showcase my work well. This can range from moving habits, posture, hand gesters, speech formation, eye communication etc.

The habits I personally want to get rid of is fidgeting with hands, avoiding eye communication or staring intensively at people, and to remove the "ums" and "errs" in my speaking.

Body language can also be used in illustration to portray characters and their personality, actions or mood.

First Impressions

I did some doodles and wrote a bit on my first impression of Beth

And this was her first impression of me. Makes me wonder what other people think of me ...

A work space

This is the one critical thing I've felt the need for, been planning months for, try and struggle for whenever I have the chance. But have a managed to sort it out? No- "Why?" I might hear you ask. Because that's another thing I need to get sorted out- Me sorting out things. ( In other words, I have too many weaknesses to work on)

This has been a slightly irritable and impulsive blog entry. I bid you Good day.

Riusuke Fukahori

"ICN gallery proudly presents Goldfish Salvation by artist Riusuke Fukahori from 1 Dec 2011 - 11 Jan 2012. 

Artist Riusuke Fukahori's London debut exhibition "Goldfish Salvation" transforms ICN gallery into the world of goldfish. When struggling with artistic vision, Fukahori's pet goldfish became his inspiration and ever since his passion and lifelong theme. His unique style of painting uses acrylic on clear resin which is poured into containers, resulting in a three-dimensional appearance and lifelike vitality. 

This video gives you a glimpse of his amazing painting process."

                                           This absolutely blew my mind.

Water colour portraiture

Ever since I found this artist just by searching for music by WEG, but finding this instead- I've been attacked with the urge of trying out slightly haunting water colour portraiture in a slightly abstract way. So, I've  finally been attempting a similar technique for my second stage of the Boo! project.
Here's a preview~