Lo Fi Printmaking: Stencil Prints

We worked in groups of four to cut out stencils for our prints. Below are process images!

I think we made good decisions about what would be our block background colour, how we would layer the colour and overall colour palette.

I really like bright, block colours in prints. I gravitate toward screen and Lino and stencil type prints, and away from litho and mono type prints, just for the crispness and brightness that the former offer.

I might use this sort of thing to create some cool surface design or fabric design, e.g. an outfit.

Narratives in Motion – Stop Motion Experiments

I enjoyed class this morning. Jeremy did a great job teaching the whole year group and adjusting the class for the Rail Strike absences.

The animation lecture was super interesting and I took lots of notes. I realised my concepts of “easing in” and “easing out” had been backwards in my mind: I thought of them as “easing in to motion”, but I needed to be imagining them “Easing out of the start position” and “into the final position”. Makes sense as to why I got so confused with ease out and in on procreate keyframing.

Below was me putting some of my new knowledge to the test.

You can see that some animation is more organic and reactive than others. I’m particularly proud of the squashed and stretched balls, where I used three pieces of paper of various squashiness to create that illusion of motion.

Spoiler Alert-! Xmas Card Lino Cut

For the last half of my day off yesterday I made up a Lino cut for my Christmas Card designs.

While printing, I wipe away the black on the heart and nose and dab in some red. It creates a unique little print!

In my thumbnails, my original design was going to be some half-eaten carrots and milk. But right before I started to draw it up properly, I realised it was a little bleak. It was too interior-design minimalist. I VERY quickly used a ballpoint pen to sketch a little rudolph, and he had so much character and love in his face, I immediately switched designs.

Visual Diary – Mist was Brilliant

This happens immediately after Antonia takes Techo in from her hungover bus journey and settles her down with a cup of tea.

Techo explains that it’s been almost exactly a year since she broke up with Mist. Or rather, Mist broke up with her.

A few notes on experiments that I want to draw attention to:

This is a narratively complex comic, in that there are flashbacks and memories playing in Techo’s head as she talks. I wanted an aspect image to open with, so the reader fills in the details with their mind and also creates a sensory experience with the cup of tea, bringing us closer to Techo. This grounds us in the present moment.

The colour changes and becomes quite cloudy and pink, and the monologue becomes descriptive. This should indicate that we’ve moved to a memory, introducing the reader to the tool of decoding pink as memory and desaturated blue as present moment.

The composition of the second and third panels are almost identical, making a sort of graphical cut between the speech bubble and the steam coming from the tea. This takes us from memory to present in a cool way – I see the memory almost melting away as Techo comes back to the present, seeing Antonia sitting across from her, but still fuzzily, still deep in thought.

The final panel is designed for Instagram, where I have my biggest readership, and is saved elsewhere as two separate square panels that should scroll seamlessly to make one long scene. The act of making someone scroll before they come to the end of the comic adds physical time and pacing, mimicking the time indicated in the final panel, of the rain spitting, growing stronger, and then pouring. It’s up to the reader to decide how to read this – whether it’s been raining harder throughout the whole comic, or whether it begins to rain quickly right then, or even if it’s just metaphorical for her mood.

So I used a variety of different methods to indicate narrative, memory, time passing, pacing, etc. my thumbnails had a few more aspect shots, e.g. the kettle still steaming in Antonia’s kitchen, but the piece of text fitted this number of frames most appropriately.

Open Day!

Today went well. I thoroughly enjoyed speaking to the lecture theatre! I always look forward to these days, and do enjoy honing the skill of crowd control, public speaking and suchlike.

This was the result of the drawing workshop we held in studio 250. I was so run ragged doing tours that I missed most of this!

And this was new: although I didn’t get to see my work being looked through, I found that people had taken photos and shared it on Instagram afterwards! I even had a few messages in my inbox of visitors saying they really liked my style. Jamie later described this as “too much for my ego.” He’s the one that has to live with me, so…

Visual Diary – Techo, Hung Over, again

I’m getting some deja vu here. Did I just make a post about Techo being hung over?

Anyway, here’s the deal. We were briefed (I say briefed in the most confusing sense of the word) today on our Visual Diary projects. This suits me well: I’ve been making and updating my personal work almost daily here on the blog. From here on out, I’ll formalise my OC work as the daily visual diary work, because I respond to and filter the world through content for my characters.

Here’s today’s work.

An image I dreamt up a few days ago and thumbnailed lazily during the crit. This is Techo, hung over, just off the bus. Ah, the bus. That was what the last post was.

So you can draw the narrative line anyway: she gets off at her stop, trudges over to the nearest lamppost and slouches against it, forehead first. She’s been trying not to be sick, taking it stop by stop, for the last half an hour, but doesn’t feel particularly victorious.

It is from here that Antonia spots her. Antonia lives right across the street from the bus stop, and is not even dressed when Techo dismounts. It emerges over a cup of tea that Techo has been kicked out of the house by the girl she slept with last night as she had a train to catch. She had a particularly rough night as it is nigh on exactly a year since the breakup with Mist, and her heart hurts.

A funny thing: in a few of my narrative lines, Antonia picks up Techo’s pieces. I like happenstance bringing these two closer and forcing their vulnerabilities into the open. Otherwise, they would not volunteer personal information to each other: Antonia talks to drake, Techo to Mitzi and Ludwig.

Antonia speaks in a charming and often incoherent franglais around others, but she is Spanish by origin and often exclaims or mutters in Spanish when alone or surprised.

Later edit. Watching upstart crow

Later later edit.

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