Author Archives: jemimaalice

The Journey is the Destination

I created this piece for A Letter in Mind, in aid of the National Brain Appeal, having been treated for colloid cyst of the third ventricle at the NHNN on 10 July 2014, which would have been my grandfather’s (pictured) 101st birthday. I got to face my fears, witness amazing skill and professionalism, and I was surrounded by wonderful love and care. It was an amazing and unforgettable experience (even though the cyst was in my short term memory!)

A Letter in Mind, The Art of a Journey, invited artists to respond visually to a journey, whether emotional, psychological, real or imagined – using a simple envelope as their starting point. My design was inspired by an old (rather faded) photograph of my grandfather, mother and her sisters embarking on a journey by camel in Egypt in the 1950’s, with mixed emotions – fear, excitement, trepidation and hope. They didn’t travel far, but it is a journey that the girls pictured remember to this day.

All the pieces were exhibited anonymously in the Oxo Gallery from the 8th October 2015 and the price for all works was set at £80. Now that mine has sold I can post it here for you to see!

Royal Academy Lates: Enchanted Cosmos

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Although my starry Enchanted Cosmos costume was definitely more than a little lacklustre, I spent a fab Saturday evening at Royal Academy Lates with three great girls.

As part of the evening, we saw Joseph Cornell’s Wanderlust and although I was fascinated by many of the collages, it was the story behind the man which had me really captivated. Cornell’s artwork seems to span the globe, with real integrity, but in fact the man himself rarely left New York City.

But it wasn’t just the exhibition itself which intrigued. The feeling in this famous London gallery after hours was magical in itself. It wasn’t completely dissimilar to the emotions captured when as a child I would sneak down to my parents’ parties, soaking up the atmosphere and desperately hoping that I might stay unnoticed. And on top of this there were rooms full of still more delights…

… Osmo, by Loop.ph had created an inflatable infinity space that reproduces all 9000 stars visible to the naked eye. It was like clambering inside a rustling bouncy castle made of silver foil, where we could lounge on cushions on the floor and listen to ambient music and sounds. And I was in awe of the puppet show by Theatre of Dolls, who were two brilliant actresses who retold the story of the beginning of the universe, using their shared skirt as a backdrop to the theatre. Brilliant!

And finally, there was just time for a quick bop at the disco in the cafe before we left. But even this wasn’t quite as it seemed: the Vintage Mobile Disco played from within a repurposed old laundry truck. A great and fittingly unique end to a magical evening.

Summer Festival: Psychedelia

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More amazingly inspirational work brought together by the London Illustration Fair for their summer festival on a sunny Friday evening in Hoxton. Like the winter fair, I didn’t know where to look first – my brain trying desperately to take it all in and remember every sweep of colour, every beautiful and intricate detail. It opened my mind to the massive range and depth of graphic design and illustration out there. The creative possibilities are endless, and it made me want to go straight home to make some work of my own!

Wimbledon Art Studios: Open Studios

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The lovely Laura Stamps invited me to go along to Wimbledon Art Studios Open Studios. I went with a friend and spent a lovely lazy Sunday afternoon pottering around the sprawling complex. My little brain could hardly take in the myriad of different styles and media, all packed together in one massively creative hub of a building. It was incredibly inspiring and made me feel that I would love to be a part of a community or place like this – a space to spend hours sketching, creating and expressing thoughts in a way that I so rarely do whilst caught on my hamster wheel in London. Of course I am completely ignoring the more stressful bit where creativity needs to earn money!

Either way, I can’t wait for the next Open Studios for another dose of inspiration, and maybe some Christmas presents too by then!

Somerset House: Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival

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I went along to Somerset House after work and spent a blissful couple of hours browsing through the wonderful artwork on display at Somerset House. Not only was I captivated by the artists selected to exhibit in the Festival, but I was just as fascinated by all the work by the studios and collectives upstairs.

I love ink as a medium although I have struggled to use it effectively myself – which is perhaps why it holds such a power over me – but Rop van Mierlo has taken it to the next level, creating beautiful animal images from vividly coloured ink blots bleeding out in neat figurative shapes. I could only afford a postcard of his thompson’s gazelle, but it sits in pride of place on my mantle piece.

Upstairs, the work from Supergraph – a Melbourne-based three-day fiesta of graphic art, design and illustration, featuring leading graphic artists and Australia’s brightest emerging talent – really caught my eye. There was a wide selection of graphic styles and subject matter and I was very pleased come away with a cheery colourful print by Milija Trueman which is now brightening up my flat.

simpkinandroses.com

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I’ve loved this project, although once again all the amazing pics of food made me very hungry! I was lucky enough to be asked to create a site for Bella and Hugh at Simpkin & Roses. Although the logo was already firmly established, I had some leeway with the look and feel of the site, and they were even up for a bit of illustration too. Check out their beautiful and wonderfully creative catering.

The London Illustration Fair 2014

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Words just don’t describe how much I loved visiting this quirky little fair in East London. I have just been offered a full time job in graphic design and so I made the most of my last day as a wanderer, going to the Egon Schiele exhibition at the Courtauld and then on to the London Illustration Fair in Hoxton. Everybody I know is now getting a print for Christmas!

I went particularly mad at Sandra Dieckmann and Ben Rothery‘s stalls. Both very different in style, but oh so beautiful. I was unable to leave without a large armful of prints from both. Sandra’s colourful prints fuel the imagination and drag you into a more beautiful reality and Ben’s prints are based more in the wonders of this reality, picking out forms and characters in wonderful detail and often adding a little twist so that you just have to look again.

It was a great and inspirational day and I’m sure that my head will buzz from all the fab artistic input for a long time yet!

Lyrical Notes

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I wanted to design some cards or postcards that I could send to friends to say thank you, or even to just say “hello, how are you?”. I drew inspiration from family photographs of small children. Many of my friends now have small children, so I hoped that they might relate to the designs and that the imagery might therefore appeal to them. And I hoped that other friends might relate the nostalgic images to their own memories of childhood. Although I very much admire more traditional illustrations like those created by the artists behind Belle & Boo, I wanted to give these designs a more contemporary twist and make them my own. I started off by captioning the designs with phrases like “Thank You” or “Thinking of You”, but soon found that this restricted the functionality of the cards far too much. Various song lyrics and sayings sprang to mind as positive, upbeat phrases which might work whatever I wrote on the card and so the words joined with the images and I came up with four designs.

Another Portfolio Website…

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Part of the brief for this last project included creating a simple portfolio website. I wanted to base the site on my book layout and content for the time being, until my portfolio became more extensive. Originally, I wanted to create a book within a book, but I now came up against various problems.

For a start some of the different types of gallery software compresses text and line to such an extent that the text within my pages would not be legible. In addition, my book layout had text coming over the borders at all angles, making it difficult to add html text to text-free images of the pages. The “jotted note” feel was integral to the design and the feel of the book so I either compromised on the graphics, or the feel of the book.

In addition, I had based my book layout on web design, which meant each page had a thumbnail navigation. If I put this into a gallery, would people assume they could click on the thumbnails? Would it annoy them that they couldn’t? Or would they be drawn in by a website within a website. I was very tempted to go with the last assumption, as it would be a far more interesting layout and make my life much easier! But in reality, I feel that I would need to build the gallery from scratch so that each thumbnail would also be “clickable”.

For now, I have created PNGs (of the pages rather than the spreads) from In Design, and then optimised the large PNG files in Photoshop, so that they could run on the web without too much delay (even the gallery software couldn’t cope with them as they were). I also extended the canvas horizontally on both sides of the image to the full 800px width of the gallery, so that the arrows of the gallery wouldn’t obliterate any of the illustration itself. The text isn’t as clear as I would like it to be, but it is not completely illegible either. That said, as per my previous observation above, I feel I would in any case need to create each page of the gallery as a new html page and link them together, in order to attain full functionality and optimum legibility. I didn’t have enough time to do this for this project, so I have used Easy Rotator’s software, which meant that I could run the entire website from one html page. I have managed to provide contact details and further information about my work from the navigational menu in the footer, which includes email, facebook, twitter and my blog.

I coded the site so that the content centres vertically and horizontally. The wrapper was only 700px, so nearly all the content should fit onto even a smaller screen. Below are screenshots from Firefox in full screen mode. The top image is from my laptop screen and the bottom image is taken on a 22 inch screen. The site is incredily simple and I’m sure I would change things if I had time to tinker with it further, but it shows the book and my work. I just need to check the image quality of the content further and make sure that the gallery software works on all popular browsers.

The Fashionable Girl’s A to Z of London

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Our final Level 3 project brief asked us to create a book. I had to meet an earlier deadline so I decided to keep things relatively simple and create a sort of portfolio book which might be useful for clients/in interview and which would help me to hone my ideas for an online portfolio. Most of my work to date is feminine and delicate and often focuses on the female subject so I decided to create the book around an A to Z of girls names, linking in London place names and landmarks within the text to give the book an another dimension. I went back through past work and pulled out anything I felt I might like to use or re-edit, and once I had this little collection in front of me, I looked at what additional work I might like to create. I decided that I would like more vector work as much of my earlier work was raster, so I created or re-created much of the work in Illustrator, although I added pattern or texture in Photoshop. I looked at different layouts for books, magazines, newsletters and websites and really liked the functional simplicity of many of the website layouts. After much exploration, I decided to create a web-style layout within a book, using thumbnails and coloured borders as web navigation might. My work needed to be grounded on the page and so I cropped the images and used borders. When cropped my work often become far more powerful, despite the fact that some of the detail is missing. Although the text may be a little blurry, if you click into the first image below, you can flick through the book on screen…