Art crushing on Saul Steinberg's drawings.

As talked about in previous posts, I've looked a little at Steinberg's work over the course of this project as his prime was most definitely in the 1950s. His book catalogue has been floating around the studio this week, and even though i've seen bits and pieces, I hadn't properly sat down and flicked through it until today. I've been completely seduced by his mark marking and line work and how the little details in each add so much character to whatever he's applied it to. It has definitely inspired for the last couple of weeks before hand in and shown me how I could use my own drawing techniques to add a little depth and feeling to my images as I had previously hoped.

Here a few of my personal favourites in this publication!

Promotional matieral

With self promotion on my mind, I have been thinking of ways to get me noticed as a creative practitioner and get myself out there a little more. A lot of my peers have been making badges to sell and promote their images. As lovely as I think this is, the more people I see with the badge maker out, the less am inclined to use it. A lot of my work this project has been intricate with a lot of attention to detail. This I feel has given them a bespoke appearance to them and lends well to limited edition postcards as seen at galleries and events. It also gave me the opportunity to put my image of the ladies on the beach onto something functional. I have designed the postcards so they can actually function as a postcard rather than just having my details on the back. These I feel emphasise my interests in coming up with creative solutions, a quality i'd like to advertise to potential employers.

Unfortunately, these didn't arrive back from the printers until today, so I didn't get to show them to Gina Cross at my Portfolio Review. However, her positivity and interest in the approach I took with the location papercut photography (i,e. the ladies on the beach), has really encouraged me to carry on with these after final major project has finished. I see potential for these as something to sell over the summer and perhaps approaching some art and local shops in Bournemouth and Boscombe to see if they'd like to see them. My other idea is approach Bournemouth Tourist board to propose a project to revamp their tourist information a little. I think especially as the town is celebrating much more since the Arts by the Sea festival started. This overall would be a great way to self-promote myself and gain more work experience. 

The other idea I have been stewing over the past week is to have more self-promotion items in the form of branded sweets. I envision pick 'n' mix as the chosen sweets due their obvious connection to childhood and going to the cinema/theatre. In the future I would like to get sweets made especially whether it be sweets printed with my logo or shaped sweers designed by myself. These were a little far fetched and expensive for the time I have left on the project and I'd rather spend money on more important parts of Professional practice such as portfolio and buisness cards.

Portfolio Review with Gina Cross

Despite my nerves, I felt like my Portfolio review went very well. It opened my eyes a lot about the foreseeable future and which direction I should go in. Whilst looking through my portfolio, Gina was particularly positive about the papercut characters I have been working on during my Major project, as she said that they stood out from the rest. The only issue she had with my portfolio was my logo as she didn't fully comprehend what the image was, therefore I had to explain it. This is was an eye-opener for me and a little crushing considering I have just spent the weekend revamping my logo. However, I must rather be told now than have the same awkward conversation during a job interview or client meeting.

I was particularly nervous when she asked me where I could see my work in the Industry. I was completely honest and explained how I really wanted to work in the Theatre Industry as a scenographer, however I was adamant about going straight into it with no traditional training in drafting ect. I half expected an awkward smile in reply, but instead she gave me a HUGE compliment by telling me that she thought I was good enough to apply for theatre jobs. She told me that my practice most definitely reflected theatre when she looked through it and that I could use my background as an Illustrator to my advantage giving smaller theatre companies a different take on stage productions. The fact that someone in the industry had been so supportive of my dream career has really boosted my confidence and I now feel determined to fully invest my time in job applications and sending press packs and letters to smaller theatre companies and prop and lighting designers to gain more experience to work my way up the ranks.

Update on my website

In relation to the influence of the Theatre arts in my practice, 

As emphasised in my previous posts about building a website, I stressed how I wanted my website to relate to a theatre experience experience. I felt like moonfruit limited me with its simplicity. Therefore, I started to enquire among my peers to what website builders they'd been using and Squarespace and 4ormat seemed to be the most popular. I was immediately taken by 4ormat for its extensive options for slideshow pages. The option to have images on a large scale on the screen really appealed to me, as it certainly gave more a 'performance' than a page full of thumbnails.

As you can see in the above images, I focused on a clean white white space to avoid distraction from the images themselves. I toyed with the idea of having a black background to created a darkened space similar to that in a theatre or cinema. However, it became evident that dark backgrounds can often deter visitors to your websites and at the moment i'd rather attract people to my site than focus too much on a concept. That could be introduced later on.

Since moving over to 4ormat, I have decided to split my work into categories by technique rather than by project. This is because it occurred to me that once I start getting more involved in various projects, the navigational bar will get far too busy and ugly to look at. Instead, each category has a drop down menu that reveals projects related to each technique. 

I have been a little difficulty with the size of my logo on the website. Due to its slim header, I am only able to have the logo fairly small. This is particularly difficult as my name is within my logo and obviously this needs to legible for the visitor to the website, especially if they've come across your website by chance. As a solution, I decided to edit the original logo composition on photoshop increasing the size of the type. Now, even though it is small, my name can be read with ease. STRESS OVER.

Another website quorum has been getting my domain name to work. I have purchased both emmasears.co.uk and emmasears.com, however the only one that works is emmasears.co.uk and thats only becuase it redirects to emmasears.4ormat.com. I don't mind this at the moment, but without trying to sound selfish, I don't want visitors to my website to be distracted by the website builder name. I have since contacted the 4ormat help team and received back the following email....

Hopefully this means that it will get fixed soon!!!

Preparation for portfolio review

When it came to deciding on the type of portfolio I would use, a portfolio book seemed like a better option compared to a portfolio box for example. In general, I want my portfolio to be accessible for clients looking both illustrative and theatrical techniques. Also the end product of each piece is usually a photograph and presented in a print publication format. I want to present to Gina Cross and  other future clients, my ability to consider how my images could be printed on a page successfully and effectively.

With the lecture from Joel about Presentation and Portfolios still in mind, I decided to purchase a Pratt Portfolio book with 20 pages. I don't intend on presenting 20 images, but Its nice to the option to have more insert pages if needed in the future.

I've made a title page- This makes it recognisable as my work without having to stick anything on the front of the portfolio. This is in case of me having to leave my portfolio with a client ect.

My images are very varied. I think this is a good thing as it shows the variety of skills I include in my practice, but i needed a strategy to create a consistency throughout my portfolio. This i did with white borders above and below the image on each page. 

I managed to get a quick overview with Joel. Before having this discussion, I had ordered my portfolio chronologically. I was advised that I should put my more theatrical work together at the front, followed by my paper cut art and then ending with my drawings. I had originally also put in a much looser drawing, however I felt like it was a little lost among the bolder papercut and installation pieces. Once I had made the changes to the final order, it was evident that the images flowed better and complimented one another.

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I prepared this for print using indesign and then saving as a PDF. This can now also be used to send to potential clients via email. I am also working on a smaller example of my work to send via post. 

Building my website on 4ormat.com

Re-designing my logo

Over the past few weeks I have been trying out my logo over three different web building websites, including moonfruit, squarespace and 4ormat. These all have offered their own benefits. 

Moonfruit was perhaps the simplest to navigate around. It was fairly similar to using a blogger, with a simple uploading and editing system. However i felt that it was far too basic for my online presence. I wanted something that reflected the performance quality to my work, with the option to have a slideshow of my newest images on my homepage. This was something Moonfruit couldn't offer me....

As I started to try out squarespace, I started to become very aware of my logo as being a bit of an eye saw next to my portfolio images. At times, the logo did compliment the work in my online portfolio but specific images such as the red Jesus and Mary clashed against the logo. Colour is an important element of my practice, but I didn't want the logo to intervene with the presentation of my images. I felt the combination of colour and expressive texture in the logo were far too distracting to the eye.

On Squarespace.com I discovered that, unlike how it appeared on moonfuit, the top of the logo floated away from the top of the page. There was no way of changing this on the slideshow template I had chosen. It became apparent that perhaps I should have a shape for the logo to lie on the make the image stand out.

Some experimentation with the logo and my name in different compositions.

Firstly I tried to change the logo using the adobe suites. I usually use these programs for touching up images rather creating them, so I found this particularly difficult. I realised what I was trying to do on photoshop would take me less time with traditional methods. Therefore I set about printing out a copy of the original logo on a bigger scale, tracing it and then re cutting a new logo onto white paper. This would could then be easily selected by tools on photoshop. On the previous logo, a shadow had appeared under the papercut. This was a happy accident, but the consequence of bad photography. I wanted to recreate the shadow, therefore I cut the logo shape out of a light brown coloured paper.

I also re-drew the typography my font as I felt elements of the previous type were a little illegible. This time I also tried to be more consistent with the letters. This resulted in the type below, which I am much happier with.

Photographing white one white- Emma Sears type didn't show up as well. On reflection, I realised this probably wouldn't work as there wasn't enough contrast. When put against the black (as seen above) the type was much clearer. My main intention was prepare the images, as well as i could, for photoshop.

The black circle came in after experimenting with photographing the logo on black. The papercut appeared to be lost within the space as it had on the squarespace template. Placing it on a circle focused in on the shape like a spotlight (...a little ironic). The new logo was born!

I have played around with a few ideas on how to brand myself. As I plan on pursuing a career in the Theatre industry, i didn't want to label myself as just an Illustrator, however I couldn't yet call myself a set designer per se as most of my 'set designs' were mainly small scale installations. Instead I've decided to call myself an 'illustrator and maker' for the mean time to portray me as a practitioner that includes a variety of techniques in their practice.

I experimented with making the photograph I took monochrome, but decided I didn't like the flat texture of the image. I really wanted my logo to reflect the tactile quality of my practice, therefore decided to paint paper and scan it into the computer. As planned, I wanted to stick to a colour palette that wasn't distracting from the imagery on my website and gave an overall professional look to my self-promotional material.

To be able to select the circle behind the logo, I used the elliptical marquee tool. I then put the selection into inverse and saved the selection. Next, I loaded the selection and then deleted the background. This made it easier to also select the main white section of the logo.

Similarly to how I created the original type for my website, I created a textural circle by copy and pasting the circle shape from the textured paper. The shadows and light were created from the lighter grey swatch which I edited in photoshop, changing the levels.

I decided to make the type different colours, as I felt it necessary to make my name stand out the most. 

The finished logo....Tada!

 I am much happier with the result of this logo as I feel the combination of the theatrical image, paper cutting technique and painterly texture reflect my practice clearly and successfully.