Penguin Design Awards 2012 Entry: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The brief this year was to create a cover design for Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which is probably more famous for the Jack Nicholson film adaptation). I tried to make the title of the book the main focus of my design as people are probably more familiar with the novel than with Ken Kesey the author.
The text is meant to resemble a stamp, and the images in the background are based on Rorschach tests, but I tried to make them more obviously resemble faces than just blobs.

The Penguin Design Awards competition is open until the 19th of April and you can enter it here. Tweet

Experimental Ink Work

Some ink experimental sketches from working on my previous project.

This beast was based on a manuscript illustration:





















This was based on a traditional Russian icon:

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One Day Workshop

These images are part of a one day workshop from my project on The Master and Margarita.
The task was to produce a series of A5 images developed from storyboarding visual descriptors.

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V&A Student Illustration Awards 2012 Entry

I've submitted some of my work to the V&A Student Illustration Awards, which you can see on the V&A site here.

The images (which I'll post below because a blog post just isn't a blog post without images) are from my current project, but the ones I selected are more related to my research than the actual storyline of the Master and Margarita novel, because everything is in storyboards and up in the air at the moment.

The colours in this one weren't this garish when I pressed save in Photoshop, I swear. Tweet

Shoebox Project

These illustrations are part of a mini-project we were set early on in the semester. The task was to create a 3-dimensional narrative within a shoebox and to produce a series of illustrations telling the story. We then had to set up a pop-up exhibition in uni, whi is all quite a lot to do in just a week. My projects ended up being a million miles away from this in terms of style and content, but I liked the images I produced in it anyway. My shoebox was filled with a mix of 3D cut-outs and some illustrations from an old biology textbook.

 

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The Master and Margarita: Two Day Book Project

This week we were set a two day book project by visiting illustrator Maureen Valfort to create book spreads and a cover combining our existing illustrations with type. These are the spreads we were asked to create using digital type, I tried to pick extracts from the novel The Master and Margarita that fitted well with the images.

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Some More People of Moscow

These are a continuation of me studying the photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson for research. I've tried to make them a bit looser and done the ink blob portraits thing that is a bit of an illustration student staple, but I've tried to make it my own.

This second set is a bit more of a worked up version of the faces, but I'm not sure if I prefer the simpler ones.
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The People of Moscow

As part of my project based on The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, I've been looking at some of Henri Cartier-Bresson's amazing street photography, in particular the from the book The People of Moscow. The portraits I've been drawing in response to the photos have started to shape the style of my project so I thought I'd post them up here to give an idea of what I'm up to.

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Edgar Allen Poe - 'The Lake'

Open publication - Free publishing - More illustration

So for everyone who isn't coming to the Follow Me Maidstone Exhibition this week, this is my final book in digital form. I'll take a few pictures when I get it back from uni, because it looks a bit nicer as a concertina book than it does in digital form.

Artist's Statement:

Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, The Lake, describes a remembered place from his childhood, and his own connotations of death that he associated with it. Through an abstract narrative based on a similar location from my own childhood, I attempted to recreate the feelings and mood described in the poem. The location featured within my book is Embsay Reservoir and the surrounding moorland. Tweet

Obsession Project Work: Edgar Allen Poe - 'The Lake'

These were designed to illustrate Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Lake. The landscapes are based on the countryside in the Yorkshire Dales. Eventually some of these are going to be incorporated into a concertina book, but at the moment, they are quite initial and I will probably work them up to give a bit more contrast.
(They aren't really that red, that's my awful scanner.)
The Lake

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less-
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody-
Then-ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight-
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define-
Nor Love-although the Love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining-
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

THE END Tweet

Obsession Project Work: Graves

So these are some initial drawings from the direction I'm hopefully going to take forward to my finals. The first set of graves are drawn from life in Maidstone Churchyard. I used an expensive looking carbon pencil for these, which gave strong blacks and didn't smudge much.
The second set were drawn without reference using a spongebrush and inks. The spongebrush was probably a bit too big for small scale drawings.


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