Saturday Morning Blogging Club

Last year I was the worst person at blogging. Jut awful. I hated it so much. I figured it would just be one of those things that eventually it'd just click and I'd blog without a problem. But it turns out you have to actually work at skills to develop them.

So me and Rosie Wood have started going into college every Saturday with the soul purpose to blog. It's been really great because now if I don't blog all week it's ok because I at least have a weekly splurge of posts. But I've found that, with having a specific time to blog each week that I'm thinking about my blogging more often and I'm taking pictures as I go along, to document my process. 

I do actually do some blogging before I leave college as well. Just recapping my day or just getting some research up for cop.

OutSTANDing

I made a stand.
So Thought Bubble is fast approaching and my aim is to look more professional than last year. Lots of the more famous practitioners had card stands to display their work on and it made it look really good, and it's an efficient use of the table space. I looked on ebay for one but they're like a tenner. So I built one out of mount board. I used four sheets at £1.40 a sheet so it only cost £5.60 to make. And I can keep it forever. Also i've customised it so that we have little boars with out practitioner name on. Because lots of the popular illustrators had their name displayed in big on their table. So if i have my name big on the table maybe people will just assume I'm famous too.

Fake it til i make it!

Leeds in Lines

My rough plan so far for an opening to my promo video is to have actual video of me introducing myself, because then people know what I look like and see who I am. I think it makes the video more personal. But I will be recording that in a photography studio because I want a high quality video. I want it to look professional. I youtubed illustrators promo video's to have a look at the competition and a lot of people just have either static pictures with their voice over or they just time lapse video themselves drawing something. I don't think this is very effective to show what you can do because being an illustrator they already assume you can draw at least. I want my video to be showcasing useful things in the way I work that makes me suitable to employ to do professional work. 

So back to the video: I will video myself saying who I am and that I'm from leeds, at which point I will pull up an invisible leeds. I'll draw leeds and layer the images so that it looks like I'm pulling the illustrations up out of the bottom of the video. 

This is my text because it's pretty much the only font I can draw, and do draw regularly. I'm going to redo the one with my logo in because the bottom one I did bigger the texture on the 3d bit turned out much sleeker.

This is my Leeds so far, I'm just choosing the most recognisable buildings in Leeds. So far I have the Leeds uni Parkinson Building and Leeds met's Broadcasting Tower. These are just roughs at this point because I'm not really happy with how they came out. I think there could be more detail and line quality. and also I think I need to trace just to get the placement of the doors and windows in line, note the horendously uncensored door on the Parkinson Building.

Goodbye Moonman

I've worked at the local Londis this past year. It's a particularly depressing job which I don't really enjoy. But my loan is too small to support me and basically only just covers rent. I've had to have jobs through out uni. First I worked at an 80's themed club on friday and saturday nights, it lead to a lot of useful things to draw because it was always filled with the kind of people who are too old to be clubbing but they do it anyway. But I had to go home every weekend to work at that job and I felt like I was missing out on the socialising part of the week so I quit thinking I could find another job in Leeds. At first I didn't and went back to wakefield to do another bar job in my old boss's second club, since then I've had jobs at Boar Lane Yates and then charity door to door fundraising and finally here at my current till girl job. And finally I'm quitting, it's great. I need more time for my degree and to get my personal practice set up better and to just make me generally happier. My parents are going to support me and I've only got three weeks left. This clip from Rick and Morty is what I think of when I quit

Once I've finished working my notice I will have more time and my monday evenings back
Things I'm going to do to make the most of my extra time:
1. Work on my promo video more
2. Make more things to try and sell and still make a bit of income myself
3. Handmake all christmas presents cause I'll be broke
4. Use monday nights to start my 603 brief to respond to a news story on a weekly basis
5. Have a hobby, preferably something that will make me exercise, maybe rollerblading

Salty Foreplay

This is my logo, I made it over the summer. I hadn't really thought about it too in-depth I was just playing around and since I was doing a fair I felt I needed a logo so I could brand my products. So I ended up being an  olive head on a burger, I had recently gone for a meal and my mother had an aubergine and bulgar wheat burger and she let me taste a bite and it was the most delicious burger. Then I had to go back to my dry, dry falafel. So this burger is in honour of that burger, may I one day have money to eat out again and I will get to eat one of those sweet, sweet burgers.

To make my logo fit in with my work this year I decided it should be accompanied by a poem, also its a way to justify my logo. The poem is as follow; 

I am an olive
I can make something gross look kind of gourmet
At a grand feast, I'm the salty foreplay
But in Illustration, when it comes to defining
I make funny comics and I dabble in rhyming


I'm going to include this in my promo video because it helps to express the kind of illustrator I am .

The bubble pops

Last year me and Hollie had a table at thought bubble. It was a steep learning curve of an experience and although we probably looked a bit out of place in the main hall next to experienced professionals with our kids party table cloth. But we had a lot of fun and we were friendly and we chatted to lots of people. This year when we applied we didn't get a table which we've been pretending didn't bother us but it completely did, which is fine now because we got an email from them the other day saying there's been some cancelations and we can have a table if we want it.
So obviously pretty excited but it's now only a month away and all we can think about is that if we'd known over summer I would have done so much work. To combat it I decided to just do one new comic and then just do a product range around it. I still have other comics left over from last year, I think I'll just package them better and I'm sorted.
Things to do better from last year:
1. Have a business card ready
2. Have bags for people to use
3. Have a nice table cloth
4. Have a print stand
5. Chat to passersby more
6. If i do the characatures again make it so i just take a picture and their email and I send them it.
7. Neater more professional price tags
8. Clear signs saying who we are
9. Make clear who's work is who's to avoid confusion
10. Sort out a float before hand and not that morning
11. Have free sweets to give out
12. Brings lots of drinks and snacks
 and finally
13. Look cool , but we hardly need to improve on that

You spin me right round

To kick start my promo video I've made my logo spin so i can start and end my video on my brand. I will; also add my name and contact details. It took me three days to make this but I think  it could have been much quicker and smoother running if I'd made a model and photographed it spinning for reference like I planned. But once the clay I ordered for this purpose arrived I had forgotten and instead made a batch of tiny food. But onwards and upwards next time I'll just order double the clay.

The unneeded presentation

Since I worked on it anyway I'll post it. The slides help me to organise what I want to say anyway.

Slide 1: Big Ween. I've branded myself as Big Ween because it sounds silly and makes people smile. And I want to have humour in my work so I think it fits.

Slide 2: I don't want to be an animator full time but I do enjoy doing gifs and short animations. I need to  think of a way I can say this in my promotional work because I don't want people to assume I can do complicated animations that last 5 or 10 minutes.

Slide 3: Over the summer I did some fair selling my comics, I didn't do well and made a loss at every event. It kind of knocked any confidence in my work I had. But I can use it as a learning experience to better my selling ability.

Slide 4: I need a kick up the butt to get onto contacting people. I haven't really done it over the summer but that ends now.

Slide 5: Getting into illustrators heads; I'm going to work my way through my bookshelf of comics and message each author telling them I liked it and why and then ask a question. Just little questions to open up communication and so I can escape spam folders in future.

Slide 6: My fish comic is one of my favourite things that I've made and I found it really satisfying to make. I think illustrating things from my own life is a good thing to explore because I can draw my self and people I know relatively well which leaves me open to play with compositions and body positions.

Slide 7: Some Illustrators who do biographical comics; Sarah Anderson, Gemma Corell and Jeffrey Brown. I like the way they work and the style is playful and light. I think my work sty the moment fits into this selection and way of working.

Slide 8:But I would like to be more like my favourite illustrators; Michael DeForge and Jesse Jacobs. To do this I'm going to have to work on my colours and making my own narratives which is why some of my 603 briefs this year are creating narratives.

Slide 9: These are my favourite two publishing agencies but from the selection of work I've shown I think its obvious that my work would fit more into what Koyama Press are producing.

Slide 10: Promo Video. Because I struggle to straight out talk to new people I thought a good way to break the ice would be to make a self promoting video using animation and film. I want it to show that I can use humour, I work to deadlines, I can package my material and then just some stuff about myself as an illustrator. Then when it's completed I'm going to send it out on mass and put it on social media. Offering my services for a fee, and hopefully this will help me get some commissions under my belt.

Being the lamest in the flat

Since doing thought bubble I thought that one of the main issues with my work was that people picked it up, read it all and then put it down and left which I found really frustrating. So I decided to package my comic, I put it in A6 cellophane bags and put a sticker in with it as a free prize. But this time it went the other way in which people saw the comic and picked it up but once they saw it was packaged they put it down again and moved on. I think people like to be able to see what the comic is going to be like before buying it and in the past they read it all because it was so short but this comic was actually a decent size so in retrospect I think I could have left these out to be flicked through.

I was thinking that next time I'll package them so that you can read a couple pages but the rest are packaged together so that people won't get the whole story for free.

The fair was a bit of a failure for me because I only made £1.50. It was a big knock back to make a loss on a £2.50 table and honestly I stopped working for a while and had a small existential crisis.
I tried to sell my comics again at a table top general sale but sadly again I sold no comics whatsoever. So this summer kind of bummed me out on illustration. But I think once I got over the initial disappointment of not magically being an amazingly popular illustrator straight away I started seeing where I was going wrong.

First thing to change was sharing a table with my flat mates, although it makes sharing the time behind it easier and we can work as a team making things less stressful, I think it made my work just blend into the crowd. My 3 flatmates are all very talented Illustrators and their work is eye catching and commercial, whereas I tend to go down a more 'weird' and ugly route of drawing. My main aim is to make humorous comics and I think I sabotaged myself sharing a table with Hollie because she already surpasses me in her humour and comic skills. I let her work shadow mine, because when they are all on the same table next to each other you instantly compare them and I found that mine were drawing the short straw each time as customers were immediately picking up the others work whereas mine barely got a look in. So at the next fair I am going to have my own table to myself and then I can set it up specifically to showcase my work and decorate it with things that bring out the good qualities in my work.

Summer ups and downs of trying to be proffesional

So in the summer I moved in with 3 other illustrators from the class, Adam, Hollie and Becky. Living with just illustrators has been good because we can all encourage each other to do more work.The minute I see another flatmate getting on with some work i feel guilty that I'm not.
Together we did a zine fair, it was at a hall down the road and it was only £10 for a table, split between the four of us we figured that we could make back £2.50 each. I made a new comic for the event, I had recently bought some fish, and it turns out fish are hard to care for because I have no idea about how to tell if they are sick. So at this point I've gone through 7 fish, 2 are still alive. I did the comic when I'd just got my first 3, it is called the life and death of pork chop and george.