Monday 31 March 2014

Ordered Chaos Needs Your Help!


We need your help, as part of our graduation project Ordered Chaos is putting together a magazine on the future. We want to include all areas such as fashion, film, science, product design, transport, life anything and we need your help. We want to hear about your thoughts and insights and this gives you the opportunity to be featured in magazine and to be credited of course.
We also have a survey HERE that you can fill in instead, it all helps us out! 

If this sounds like something you would love to do or know of someone who would be perfect for this, send us am email and we will fill you in with the details. 

We would very much appreciate it. 
Thank you! 

Thursday 27 March 2014

Back Track // Ordered Chaos // Exhibition


Whilst I'm still recovering at home from being ill, its given me a little more time to do some blogging and means that I can finally get around to doing some posts I've had noting down for weeks. One of which is about the exhibition that Ordered Chaos (myself & Gemma) put together. It seems like such a long time ago since we did it, but back in January/February we put together an exhibition for our final year project. I did do a little post about it a while back Here about the event but I thought now was a good time to finally upload some of the photographs of the night. I know its very late and if you follow any of social medias such as tumblr, twitter or facebook you might have already seen some of these but I though I needed a little post on here about it. 


So we managed to get the space by simply asking, we got an email about some available space and without even thinking we would get it, applied and within a week got a reply telling us the space was ours and that we would have the space for a week. This was a complete surprise but with this started working on exhibition, branding it and getting our name out there. We made posters and leaflets, put them up around Sheffield and got to building our project. I won't go into complete detail about the premise of the project as that can all be found here but we basically asked a bunch of very talented illustrators to produce there thoughts and ideas of the future for us to make and create into 3D models and sets. We got a brilliant response, some brilliant illustrations and got to work. 
The trickiest thing I think about putting together the whole exhibition was the fact we branding it, got out illustrations, build everything and put it all together in a week. A very stressful but fun week. 











 We got a really great response from the exhibition and we're hoping to put together another nearer the end of the project. There are more photos and behind the sense stuff of course on our Blog and any updates on our social media's. It was so much fun to put together and to see everything come together at the end, definitely something I would do again.
Sorry its taken me so long to get this up but I hope you enjoyed it!

Wednesday 26 March 2014

Quick Craft // Boredom




As well as making a huge mess today, I decided to try out some pompom makers my mum bought me, raiding her wool collection and ended up with this pompom garland I suppose you would call it. I completely blame it on having no human contact for the past week (I've been back home ill)  and getting rather bored; but hey, now I have something on my bedroom door to brighten it up a bit.

Print Making or Mess Making?



Today I started working on some mark-making and printing on to fabric, this was more of a tester than anything, testing out paints and inks, and by using some already made shapes to create simple and basic designs.  This is obviously something that needs work and a little more tweaking with media and patterns but hopefully this will lead to some cool designs.

Tuesday 25 March 2014

Collection // Patterns #3



Mark-making 

As part of my development on this pattern project I'm working on I looked back on a sketchbook from first year and revisited mark-making as a technique to help me with my pattern designs. The way I like to work is definitely by going down the messy route and revisiting this technique reminded me that I didn't need to stress about on illustrator trying to make messy, free hand looking designs and that I could actually just take it back and make that mess. 
With this said I'm going to be spending the next few days doing some mark-making and hopefully coming up with a few basic designs that I can either work up or just use. 

Collections // Patterns #2


Wallpaper. 

Whilst still on the look out for inspiration for an upcoming project I took to B&Q for wallpaper samples. It seems like a such a simple thing but I always manage to find some really interesting and weird paper designs. As I'm looking to design my own pattern and produce a series of them, I looked into wallpaper as a media I could use or make my designs into. As well as design I've been looking a lot into colours and themes I could use within these colour pallets for example, plants, decades, seasons, fruits etc.

Pattern on Pattern. 

As well as colours and wallpaper patterns I've been seeing a lot of photographs of pattered clothes on patterned backgrounds and I've really grown a fascination with it. Blending into the backgrounds, camouflage and the crazy over use of one pattern. A couple in particular I've found are that of Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (Left) and this picture of Jacob Sutton (Right).  I think this makes for such great photographs and cannot stop looking at them.


Monday 17 March 2014

Lord Whitney // Lore of the North // Exhibition & Book Launch


All photo credits to Lord Whitney 

I'm not sure if I had mentioned it before but near the end of last year Lord Whitney Came into our studio and did a few sessions and workshops with our course about redesigning our studio. Lord Whitney (Amy Lord and Rebekah Whitney) are two art directors and set designers from Leeds who have a very unique and comical essence to their work. 
Since then and seeing all the amazing work they produce and great people they have worked with, I have been completely sucked into their work and find them a huge inspiration. 
As myself and Gemma (Ordered Chaos) were working towards set designs and putting together our collective, we contacted them a while ago for some tips and tricks and found them to be very helpful and such lovely ladies. 

Over the past few months they had been working on a project named 'Lore of the North' a publication based around Yorkshire folklore. (You can see some behind the scenes and more information on their tumblr) 
Last week myself and Gemma were invited to go to the exhibition and book launch of Lord Whitney's Lore of the North book. As huge fans of there work we were really excited to go and see it and for me a chance to go visit Leeds a little more.
The exhibition and launch consisted of photographs from the book as well as page layouts and sneaky peaks of the books content. Sadly I didn't get any pictures but again, if you follow their Tumblr and Instagram @lordwhitney you will find plenty. The photography and sets used were very simplistic and subtle and still managed to create the atmosphere of something hauntingly beautiful. The simple use of paint used to show water and depth in one of the photographs was one of may favourites (seen here)  its such a simple idea but really works on so many levels. I think the exhibition is up from the 13th March until the 25th at the Munro House Leeds More details can be found HERE. I'd very much recommend going down and taking a look or even going straight ahead and getting yourself a copy of the book, I know I will be.

Friday 14 March 2014

Collage Crazy // Back in the Game



So now that dissertation is over, this week I've been putting in the hours and making a hell tone of mess. Now I don't have thousands of words to concentrate on writing I've been able to go crazy and get back into some creative mess making as I like to call it. 

Lately I've been thinking about a couple of concepts that I wanted to test out and I'm really happy with how they've actually turned out. 

The first thing I started working on was placing people from a particular scene, in this case the beach and placing them in a background/surrounding that wasn't compatible. I can to this ides from a book I purchased from a charity shop whilst back at home called "Pictures from the past: The Seaside" by Gavin Weightman the book had such great imagery in it and the dull dusty tones of the colours make a really great contrast to the bright colours of the background images. I've only done a couple at the moment but this definitely something I'm going to continue to work with. 


The second is working with the idea of people being seen as buildings and building being people etc. This is just a weird little concept that I thought about after an odd dream but I'm really having fun with it, using images of people in everyday situations but with buildings as heads. Something so simple but I really think it works.



I can't wait to carry on building up some more and hopefully putting together a little zine or magazine together of them, so keep an eye out! Let me know if you have some constructive criticism or you're thoughts and if you know of any great collage artists who's work you're really into. I always love finding new people. !

Collections // Patterns


This is going to be a really quick post but, since my last post I've been noticing a lot of patterns in everyday life. With so much graffiti and street art around the city I though it would be a good idea to take note of some of the patterns I'd seen around and grab some inspiration for a project I'm working on. Not only have I been looking around the city but also patterns and designs in shops etc. Anyway here are a few that really grabbed my attention.


Monday 10 March 2014

Things To Celebrate // Catching Up

HOORAH! 
I can now happily say that I have finished my dissertation and will never have to write another essay (for educational reasons) ever again.
After weeks, months of working on it my dissertation is finally completely which is just fab, this now hopefully means that I can get back into doing more creative things with my time like making a mess, taking photographs and working on my final year projects, which I am very happy about. I think the work 'dissertation' leaves everyone with the feeling of terror and the end, but honestly I didn't find it that terrible, I actually learnt quite a lot about my topic and hopefully that was reflected in the essay. (I critically analysed the differences between Polish and American film poster design approaches with reference to Cabaret, Vertigo and Midnight Cowboy).  Anyway we all celebrated its completion and now its back on track with everything else. 
Something else myself and Gemma (as Ordered Chaos) got to celebrate that we were featured in this months copy of Toast Magazine! As you may or may not remember, I posted a while ago about Ordered Chaos and how we were putting together an exhibition (which I am yet to write a post about!) 
Toast is a local magazine run in Sheffield and we are so thankful and grateful to be featured. They sent down one of their team members as our exhibition was taking place, asked us a few questions, took a few snaps and wrote some really lovely words about it. So that was also really exciting and I will hopefully get a post about that up soon with pictures, but until then don't forget to check the Tumblr and Facebook page for more info!. 
With this all said and more time to make a mess I've started working on some more collage pieces which I'm hopefully going to turn into a set of prints for one of my Grad 1 projects. With a bit more time I'm hoping that I'll be able to upload more of what I'm doing and what I'm making and be able to fill this blog with a lot of content! 


Saturday 1 March 2014

Patterns Galore




Taking a little break from dissertation writing (I'm almost done, horray!) I thought I would share a couple of images and things that I've been loving lately. I am, just like millions of people a tumblr user, I think it's such a great way to find and share inspiration and lately I have found a lot of that. Most recently I've been really drawn to weird and outlandish patterns and fabrics, theres just something about the chaos of patterns, the bright colours and clash that really attracts me to them. I thought I'd share a couple of my favourites!. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.