SELF INITIATED SCREEN PRINT PROJECT

As a personal project I wanted to experiment with screen printing as this is something that I have been enjoying over the past few years, but I have not had the chance or time to do ay personal projects. With this in mind I set out to produce some prints. I decided to take my inspiration from festivals and nights out I go to which are decorated heavily with psychedelic UV wall hangings and trippy art-work, this has been something which has always interested me from a young age...bright garish colours that glow in the dark! I wrote myself a brief to give me some sort of guidelines to follow, but the main thing I aimed to get out of the project was to improve my screen printing skills.

The Brief - The Mushroom Forest

Create a UV reactive screen print, taking inspiration from psychedelic artwork, with the theme being directed towards woodland critters. The illustration style must be hand rendered rather than digital lines this fits better with the psychedelic free flowing ethos behind this style of artwork. 

Mandatory Requirements

A2 format

UV Reactive

Screen Prints

Inspiration

I have taken inspiration from many different aspects. But mainly from festival art and stage set ups and various events, these kind of night time raves use lots of UV light and UV reactive paint to create magical environments which throws so many different things at you. I wanted to create a trippy mushroom forest, inspired by the magical festival atmosphere and my love for animals.

Tomorrow Land

Secret Garden Party

This is a perfect example of the kind of imagery and experiences

that has inspired me. This looks magical.

Rainbow City

Lisa Kelleher

UV ART

Trippy Forest

Shiva

Mushroom Land

Neon Style Mushroom Land

Design Process

Initial Sketch

In order to stick with the psychedelic theme I wanted to create a trippy mushroom forest, I started to think about all the creatures that could be affected by eating these wild hallucinogenic mushrooms in nature. Its said that loads of sheep trip balls from eating Magic Mushrooms. I wanted to create an illustration showing other woodland critters off there nut. I took inspiration from festivals set ups, where they have giant mushrooms and creepy animals etc. I decided to go with spiders, lizards, frogs, hedgehogs and mice. 

I drew this using 2 different weight pens, a marker for the thicker edges and a berol for the finer detail. After several hours of drawing I had finally finished. It was a relief to complete it as it was on to the fun bit.

Digital Colour Experiments

In order to get an idea of how the image would look with some colour I scanned in my illustration onto my mac then Live traced the Image in Illustrator and then used the bucket tool to add colour to the design. I tried out many variations to see what worked best. Sampling the drawing with different amounts of colour.

 I was not a fan of the background colour

 This was something a little bit different, Quite like the

purple orange combo, looks dated.

 I came up with this version which I quite like,

It almost looks like an X-Ray and slightly 3D

 The Pink was a little bit too dark here and the purple wasn't quite right

Quite an interesting combination but the yellow didn't do it for me. 

 All wrong

 One of my favourite designs. The right balance between the colours.

 Nice combo

Reggae Inspired

 This definitly worked the best I feel. The black gives a nice contrast against the others. I will not be able to recreate these colours exactly when mixing the paints but will work on a similar colour scheme. It was quite a fun process digitalising my drawing but also time consuming, there would definitely be a quicker option for next time. As changing the colours for each image took forever. I have since then been shown a way to Change the entire colour palette at once which is a big help.

Screen Prints

Black Outline Print

I decided to run a couple of outline versions as well as 

the colour ones to get a bit of variation in the prints

Gradient Print

I messed about using different paint at once, this came out with some

pretty random out comes, I like how it isn't perfect, Reminds me of skittles.

5 Colour UV Print

 The 5 colour screen prints worked really well eventually. Overall the screen printing took me around 3 days. I did a run of 25 5 colour prints, 4 black and, 4 gradients. I think this was a ambitious effort and I really did not expect it to take aslong as it did, but there were many errors along the way. The first lot of paint was too thick so it set in the screen pretty much straight away. Then I managed to mix the wrong colour which set me back some more. But once I had finally got to grips with everything the process became smoother, and after the first couple of layers were down I had gotten into the swing of things and managed to get them all done by the third day. I am really happy with how they have turned out, I think 5 colours was fairly ambitious as it was tough to get the registration right ascross all 5 layers, but I managed to pull it off. The layers dont match up exactly but thats the good thing about screen printing, everyone is different. The patches where they don't meet up has resulted in white showing through which gives the drawing an extra layer essentially and also gives the image a minor 3D quality.

Here is the print under UV light, the photo is not the best as my camera is not up to scratch but you can see how the colours glow brightly, It definitely comes to life under this light, I feel I have created a psychedelic piece  which matches up to current designs, I have applied my own style but stuck with the conventional methods. The one problem was that the blue paint is not UV reactant which lets the image down slightly. But we learn from our mistakes. I will take on board all my errors and improve for next time.

FINAL BOARDS

YCN LEGO FINAL CRIT FEEDBACK

FEEDBACK SHEETS

From the feedback I have decided to concentrate on the website and how I can

publicise the competition. I will mock up a website and how it will function. I need to also

create some informative presentation boards that clearly get my concept across. I need to change

song over the top as it is from the game SIMS 3.

I am wanting to maybe have a voice over on the video rather than the type.

It would be nice to have children speak over it.

Consider A2 Presentation Boards.

Has the potential product range been exploited fully?

Has the context of delivery been considered?

Has audience or gender been considered?

How much information is necessary or needed?

YCN LEGO VIDEO DEVELOPMENT

After starting to build a pyramid out of lego at home for a stop motion video I realised I didn't have half the amount of lego I would need to make impressive sculptures so I found a digital lego designing application where you could create sculptures on the computer, then in a separate view you could watch as all the bricks are placed down to create the buildings.

After searching online I came across loads of pre-made lego models

which was really helpful. I was able to come across loads of historic landmarks

as lego has an architecture series already. My idea was for the buildings to represent

the greatness of lego by linking it to these masterpieces of human engineering.

Also trying to convey that anyone can do it and there are no boundaries.

Using lego digital designer I could view the buildings been built brick by brick

which was a really cool feature however I had to solve the problem of

recording my screen.

Some aspects of the video I built myself to accompany the buildings

I managed to download some screen recording software to capture the video

this allowed me to video only a section of the screen that I wanted which was good.

After lots of hassle trying to convert it to the right file type I managed to get

them in the right format which allowed me to work out the glitches

in Final Cut Pro.

I had some debates choosing what song should go over it, but in the end

I went for some magical sounding music from Sims 3. I think it works pretty well

Its up beat and fairy tail like which draws your attention.

Progress so Far

Unsure about the Titles will see what others think.

HELLFIRE BEER LABEL BRIEF

We recently got set a brief to redesign the Label of Leeds Breweries Hellfire Pale Bitter for Leeds College of Arts Creative Network. I set myself this as a day brief. I researched into different beer labels to start with which gave me some inspiration. 

I ended up going with something quite obvious choosing the devil, but I thought it was something that would stand out and could allow for some interesting imagery. I have been quite interested in negative space recently so I wanted to try play with this. instantly thought of the faces and the cup image I had seen when I was younger.

I wanted to create a  bit of a spin on this design and use the devils face on either side. 

With a kind of holy goblet spin off Which is more like the goblet of fire!.

As it was for the creative network I decided to be creative and draw it by hand first to get an idea of how I wanted it to look. 

In order to get the shape right on illustrator I cut it out of a piece of paper folded in half then took a photo of it and downloaded onto the computer in order to trace the shape.

I tried scanning in my writing but it didn't work very well. I then started drawing the

face of the devils with the pen tool and mirroring the image.

I messed about with different colours to see what worked best I wanted to stick with the

fiery colours so played with red orange yellow and black. 

I thought the red black combo was probably the strongest.

After finally deciding to just stick with red, white and black I started adding the final details.

 It was quite difficult to narrow it down to a final design as I couldn't work out it 

I liked the black background more than the red

Final Design

I was happy with my final design. I think the label has a good shelf presence, it is bold and bright. It is different to other beers and has a very different illustration style to most beers which I feel represents the creative network. If I were to change anything it would be the text as I'm really not happy with it. This could of been altered if I had managed my time a bit better. It was a fun experience and I'm looking forward to trying out packaging design in the future.