Cut it out

A workshop for first year students - looking at the relationship between colours and composition.

Niels Klim's journey under the ground by baron Ludvig Holberg

Louis Holberg's 1741 science fiction / fantasy / utopian / satirical novel derides his contemporary 18th century society while drawing inspiration from Thomas More's Utopia and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It was considered too radical for Nordic culture, so the first edition was published in Latin in Germany where it circulated to a much wider audience and its popularity ensured it was quickly translated into a number of languages.

Inspiration: Karel Teissig, Czech Poster design.

I found this poster designer on Rick Poyner's design observer blog from his posting "An unknown Master of Poster Design" observersroom.designobserver.com This is fantastic inspiration for the Year two poster project. Some original thinking, brave compositions, and strong combinations of type and image. Beautifully quirky imagery.

The Hunterian Museum Drawing Visit

www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums
On November 3rd Year 2 & 3 illustration students will be taking a drawing trip to The Royal College of Surgeons of England. There are some fantastic exhibitions there at the moment and include: Abnormal: Towards a Scientific Model of Disability by Ju Gosling aka ju90: Extinct and Ivory,Treasures from the Odontological Collection.

Parrots at BibliOdyssey

A taster from the always wonderful BibliOdyssey.

Here are the reliminary drawings for Edward Lear's book ''Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae, or parrots: the greater part of them species hitherto unfigured, containing forty-two lithographic plates, drawn from life, and on stone' 1832  You can see the final plates here.

Edward Lear was TWENTY YEARS OLD when his Parrot book was published!!

Edward Lear Sketches of Parrots Relating to 'Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots' (1832), ca. 1830 (MS Typ 55.9). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Fontifier - your handwritting as a typeface

Here is a website were you can turn your handwritting (or anything hand drawn) into a typeface with no need for fontlab. It uses a template which you print out fill in, scan back in and upload to their website.










None of their examples are particularly inspiring but I think it could be a brilliant tool if used well.

Word as Image

This is a great film by Ji Lee (Creative Director of Google). He is a very interesting fellow and worth looking into. This is an animation of his new work 'Word as Image'.

Berger on Drawing

You should all have read (or watched - it was a TV series) or at least heard of and about to read John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' - I will write a post about this later. However, more relevant to the 1st Years 'Drawing Object' project is his less well know book 'On Drawing'. Below are a few excerpts that really rang true with the way that I think about drawing.

- “For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations.” (page 3)

- “A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – seen, remembered or imagined.” (page 3)

- “It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

John Berger [2005]: Berger on Drawing. Edited by Jim Savage. Aghabullogue, Co. Cork, Eire: Occasional Press. Second Edition, 2007.