Out of Order - Signed off & Framed up...

Prints done & signed, and all that was left was to frame it up - along with the rest of the classes work as well, apparently?!  We had nice little production line going; Flannagan cleaning frames, Georgie trimming prints to size and myself framing the buggers up all nice and straight - all ready for getting carted down to CMW for the hang team to take over.

When it came to wapping up my extra prints i really couldn't be bothered with it all. They won't sell,(that's not me being negative) it's really not in keeping with the Colours May Vary aesthetic. Just felt like it kinda got in the way of other things i needed to get on with - especially with the amount of added promo work i was lumbered with, as the majority of people from our promo team have hardly been pulling their weight. I've had more forthcoming assistance from people who aren't even part of the promo team!

Still, i took the opportunity to revamp my business squares for the opening night, should be able to shift a few of those even if no-one's interested in the work I've displayed.

2017 Business card re-rub.

Revised SOI action plan. Another two projects added to the 'see you later' pile.

Out of Order - change of direction ( 3rd time's a charm)

The indecision infliction continues - damn you Ben Jones!


Nothing I've done feels like mine - it's either too fan-art based, or been done before - being pop-culture based this shouldn't be a new revelation really?!

It had reached the point where i was working on 3 photoshop files simultaneously, hopping between them all, working on little bit at a time, trying to assess which one was generating most potential., or that i just liked the best?! Absolutely ridiculous state of affairs!  

With the Zoltar image at Photoshop post-production stages and Subzero being designed more or less on-screen,on the fly (guided by the many scamps) i gave myself a dry slap & went off on a completely random tangent and developed an old design from my a-z sweet project from level4?!

original bubblegum pic

It was already in a square frame, so know it would work compositionally and had always wanted to do something a bit more with it.The exception with this is that it is all of my own making, and representative of the work i have been producing - screen printing principles with solid vectors. It's a lot simpler than the others i'd been working on and may be seen to be taking the easy route?

The original idea behind the A-Z gum design was based on being at school, and finding gum stuck to every surface, and how if you got the stuff stuck on your Kickers jumper, on the soles of your Reebok Classics or the back of your NAFFNAFF puffer jacket - it was game over! So once again, it fits into an 'out of order' theme.

development stages

I developed the chewed up bubble gum from the original design and modified into a stringy, pulled up/off piece of old gum (a 80/90's style juicy fruit) that also resembled a skull.

Final 'Gumbskull' image.

The development stages for this design were a whole lot less painful than previous film-themed concepts; which was down to the fact that there was absolutely no pressure on myself to not produce something that had already been done - as this is my design/character built from scratch. 

No constant referencing to make sure it was an accurate depiction (of some chewed up gum). The only referencing came when i was researching the vintage Juicy Fruit Packet designs - just a small detail, but with that came the colour scheme of the backdrop, which, is the part i was having most trouble settling on.

I've kept the minimal colour palette along with large scale halftones, which is becoming synonymous with my work nowdays.

All in all,  it's the design that took quickest to find a solution to and felt most natural. It has a goofy story behind it connected to childhood memory, so I've still got the nostalgia factor in there, even if it has been far more subtle than if I'd gone through with the Oz/Running Man/ Zoltar themed designs. Most importantly, i didnt lower my final production standards in order to make the deadline.


I wouldn't say its massively marketable,especially at 30x30 & £30, but re-jigged to fit a5 dimensions they might be more appealing at £5 a pop. I'm failry sure no one is really looking to frame up a pic of some grubby regurgitated gum, hence i'll only be making them an edition of 4 (which i still imagine to be taking home with me after March 30th) -  but at least i can sleep easy in the knowledge that i made something unique.

I do intend to plough on with the Running Man concepts (in all that spare time i don't have), purely out of determination to make some work honoring the greatest film ever made, and so that all those roughs don't amount to nothing. 

Out of Order - change of direction (again)

I think i've lost the plot a bit, and the indecision curse has fully set back in with a vengeance!

In the midst of trying to make the SubZero design work i get another 80's flick stuck in my head- again with an out of order theme that could be applied to it. This time it's  'BIG'; in which a boy goes to a funfair, makes a wish to be big and wakes up as Tom Hanks. Who knew?

Now, this most definitely is in fan art territory - my envisioning of Zoltar, the fairground wish machine (seen in the trailer above).

It's quite an iconic image, if you're of that generation and i shouldn't be too surprised that there are a number of existing designs that look similar to what i've sketched out so far. I mean, how many ways can you draw a Arabic dude's upper torso & head in a glass box? 

Early compositional sketch-up.

Still, i thought i could bring my own individual touch to the proceedings - I also had the urge to produce something that would be largely hand rendered (with fineliners) and would require minimal digital assistance. I even went to the trouble of colouring in a developed sketch to see how it would look, before i went to any effort to produce the full-size 30cmx30cm inks (progress stages below). 

Probably not an ideal time to rediscover my love for using Microns, especially as i had less than a day to sort this out!

Out of Order - change of direction...

With the Adidas comp brief nailed there's (literally) no time to pause for thought as i had under 48hrs to pull something out of nowhere for this bloody exhibition at CMW - which although i appreciate is a great privilege, at the same time, i can feel myself caring less and and less about the whole thing with each day.Plus there's actually quite a good chance i'll run out of time to make & print something to display at this rate. On that note, enter;

THE RUNNING MAN @ 30

Made 30 years ago, set 30 years into the future (ie; now), The Running Man is another all-time fave film, along with (Robocop & Predator) from the vintage year of 1987! The film features plenty of bad guys all with unique attributes that i've wanted to do some sort of illustrated series on for a while. The whole concept of the Running Man tv show, and the dystopian vision of earth depicted in the film would certainly fit in with the theme of being 'out of order' ,so i thought this could be the ideal opportunity to start the series; with the first stalker to come up against Arnold Schwarzenegger'a Running Man character and unleashing the greatest one-liner in cinematic history...

       

With the idea already in mind whilst mulling over Wizard of Oz layouts,(which ive now abandoned) i started sketching out how i envisioned the subzero design looking, albeit in a square frame, which has been proving troublesome so far.

Initial scamps, upon scamps...

upon scamps,

upon scamps.

Not sure how many times i can rough out the same arrangement of objects without getting any nearer to being satisfied with the direction its going in?! Im also worrying thats its too fan arty, with too much referencing (again)..?Not really sure where i'm going with this all now, and its getting a bit close to d-day.

Adidas - Womens mural brief (final proposal)

I  resisted pulling an all nighter and submitting at the crack of dawn, A: because on my little macbook screen i just knew there'd be some glaring errors on that my weary peepers had missed and that would haunt me to my death, and B: for once i didn't actually need to! So i was able to wake up, reasonably fresh - get the design up on an iMac screen and make, sort out any glitches ( which there were, phew) and then still have over 5 and a half hours left to submit...was a weird feeling. It's the earliest i've ever submitted anything. What a breakthrough!

>>>>ISSU DOC<<<<

Me being me, had made a few colour variants, including one on a black back ground, as i couldn't decide which looked better, plus maybe fits in with the black and aesthetic that the Brick Lane studio has. I also had a chance to browse through some of the other 500+ submissions - which did fill me with a bit more confidence as a large majority of them are shocking - i mean, actually hard to believe how shocking - and thats not just coming from a artistically minded person. 

But there are a hand full on there that i feel have maybe answered the brief a bit better than me, in regards to the simple colour scheme and straight forward hand-drawn imagery, and i'm not so sure i'm going to make the top 5 now. I'm worried the Adidas Brick Lane big wigs will favour the more 'trendier', doodle-style of design. 

Either way, i'm fairly pleased with my efforts - but wished i'd seen the call-out a bit earlier to give myself a nit more time on developing the look of the characters - maybe approached it a bit less straight-laced, and more fun way. 

As long as the winners are worthy, i can't argue (i can).

Fingers crossed for the March 6 judgement day though...

Adidas - Womens mural brief (final stages)

I'd reached the point where i could either settle for using the final pencil drawings apart of my submission - which were more than suitable, and had bit of texture to them - OR in and make clean solid vectors out of them. I still had a healthy enough amount of time to get this all done by ( turns out PST is 8 hours behind us, so i'd gain a whole load of time that i hadn't bargained on. Which is always nice!

As much as i wanted to get this done, submitting scanned in pencil drawings just feels alien to me, and in my head it seemed still very W.I.P - so it was to the vector stage, for everything!

As i'd considerably stripped down the amount of detail on the women and animals featured in the image, the amount of time needed to colour them all in would be minimal - block colours in the large part. Also rendering in Illustrator meant that i could quickly and effectively produce the 'glitchy' looking black and white plumage of the falcon, and some of the finer details on the adidas shoes and sports wear, plus i've given them all their own subtle 3-stripe branding.

Sketch-to-Vector process below 

(as making ISSU spreads is becoming a real chore and its saves further waffle!)

With the elements all vectorised this allowed me to play about the sizes without fear of losing any image quality. I was also able to make them interact with the cracked back ground via layer masks. The composition was more or less there - each woman is also placed next yo her corresponding speedy wild animal.

I was always intending to have some colour fills or patterns happening in there, to break up the white a bit so with the extra time i'd gained with the U.S time difference i played around with some simple broken-chain vector shapes - these will be used to symbolise women breaking free from any mental or physical chains/shackles that may beholding them and trying prevent them achieving her goals!

Adidas - Womens Mural Brief (development)

As I've decided on the animals i want to feature i just need to bring them together with the women athlete figures in way that isn't massively cramped or over colourful. I had considered just having a single animal with a single woman figure - but that left a lot of unwanted empty space. 

Mock up using developed sketches

B&W compositional mock-ups using the final, refined pencil drawings.

As with the sketches of the women, the animal imagery is looking like it'll be pretty closely referenced. The pressure of producing something for a big client is starting to affect my design decision making, and i'm floundering. I'm also a bit worried about making something that is too experimental - so instead playing it a bit safe, but trying to push wow factor up a notch, even if the concept isn't mega deep?! 


I've even gone to the trouble of making sure the women i draw will be wearing sports gear based on the current Adidas Performance range. The devil is in the detail, plus i'm getting a bit ahead of myself, considering i haven't even settled on the layout yet!

I've added a simple 'crack' effect to break up the white background, and to create the illusion of a world/person record being broken. Will try out filling a number of the sections with a colour or pattern.

I think this is as busy as i'm going to be allowed to get away with. I still want there to be some breathing space around the image elements,as well as some slight overlapping so it doesn't look like 6 separate images on one picture. Also i intend to have the characters entering/exiting the canvas rather than trying to squeeze them so they all fit in. This will hopefully give the impression of them travelling though the 'frame'.

Initial colour experiments

Adidas - Womens Mural Brief (development)

Although i'm not panicing too much about the amount of time left to get this done, i probably should be as i'm not coming up with much that's really visually clicking so far. Having said that, i'm confident in my ability get  something done in time - i have the skills to do whatever it takes to get it done, stay up working on it for as long as it takes to get it done, and to a level that i'm happy with, and that the Adidas bigwigs would consider a professional submission. Missing the deadline is not something that has ever crossed my mind or something that i'd allow to happen.Naive?! 

However the problem so far is that; i wish i could draw the accurate depictions of human females without the constant need to search endlessly for online images that match what i have in my head (Them life drawing evening classes would've been a big help right now). Part of me is saying' just sod the physics and draw weird quirky women' - but the sensible side of me is thinking; 'it's for a women's fitness centre - are they really wanting pictures of weird blobby people with out of proportion bodies plastered up on the walls..?' 

initial sketches 

At the moment i'm working with concept speed and power; in sport and in nature, and striving to be faster and stronger. Animals are the ultimate athletes, (apart from sloths and slugs and well, loads of others) But as far as being double quick, theres a list of 20 or so critters that i'm looking to incorporate into the image. Aswell as it fitting in with the back and white studio decor that's mentioned in the brief -it'd also be an excuse to draw a peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on the face of God's green earth, busting out +200mph during its dives! 

PEREGRINE FALCON

capable of reaching speeds of up to 200 mph while at a dive

CHEETAH

can reach speeds of up to 61 miles per hour

THOMSON'S GAZELLE

capable of running at around 50 miles per hour

Strong, empowered sports women should be aligned with strong, solid imagery/linework/shapes/colours. So maybe i should just go with my gut and stop concentrating on trying to be quirky or what's been done before by others.

I am IanF. I am a strong independent, empowered young woman, man, illustrator!

Adidas - Womens Mural Brief (development)

Before i get started with any sketching i had thorough comb through the Pinterest mood board that Talenthouse had linked us to in the brief. Although i wanted to retain a tone that was in keeping with what sort of work i want to produce, i'm also aware that i might have to make it a bit more less cartoony and bit more, 'corporate' looking - for want of a better word. With a big company like Adidas being connected to the project (or any company brief for that matter) i tend to lose any looseness i might have within a design and tighten things right up. 

The target crowd is 18-35 is so still young, but i just fell if i made anything too cartoony it wouldn't get taken seriously. Also minimal might be the way to go. It states that The adidas Women's Studio has a distinct black and white colour palette, (colours are allowed though) so maybe pushing that angle should be considered. But then again, if thats what they posted  then i fully expect a flood of black and white, geometric shape driven designs to appear on the submissions page. So not only do i need to consider tone bit also somehow try and come up with something diferent to what everyone else has proposed

Above: some examples from the Adidas mood board that  really caught my eye 

in terms of varying style and composition.

ADIDAS MOODBOARD

Although women in various sporty action poses will be present in the majority of the submissions i fully expect, it's also going to be pretty damn hard create a design for a woman's sporting project without it. This is where my weaknesses as an illustrator show - my concept design drawing skills. Or at least the ability to draw human figures in specific poses without having to trawl google for reference images. But i heard Mr Bingo once say that what he does the same (makes photoshop collages of people in poses he wants them in) as he isn't good at that sort of thing, and he seems to be doing alright!? I just don't want to end up drawing something that been referenced so closely that it wouldn't even feel like my own work.

As far as bringing empowerment into the proceedings, and it not simply being a picture of some ladies jogging, with the adidas logo on there somewhere - i was struggling to find a meeting point so far. Women doing boxing or weightlifting is NOT the answer!

'Out of Order' - development work, sort of...

In between all the mural designing of the few weeks or so i'd been playing about with a few possible ideas for themes for my exhibition piece. My playing about, i mean thinking about them in my head then getting pulled back onto mural designing ( or blogging). So as far as physical evidence goes, there's not much going on with it to be fair.

I mean, the brief is good because the theme is so open to interpretation - but also that's the thing that's im getting in a rut with; you can attach an out of order concept to anything - THIS COULD BE LITERALLY ANYTHING?!(and therefore very straight forward, right?)


I'd had an initial Wizard of Oz based idea going around my head for a while, as the characters are all missing an emotion/body part (Heart, Brain, Courage) and technically they're "out of order". There you go: CONCEPT! So i went reference image swimming to see if i could spark off any further ideas.


For the sake of saving some time i started making quick PS composition collages using Oz imagery that id manipulated using the Liquify tool in order to change the characters expressions to ones that more suited what i was looking for ie; The tin wanted a heart, he got a heart - but then went a bit wrong, he started loving people a bit too much, became a bit of a pervert. So he's now got a bit of a creepy, leery look to him. 

PS timeline animation i made of the new and lewd TinMan

Cowardly Lion,likewise; got his courage, got his bravery medal - then went ferrel, chewed up his medal and became ultra violent. started chewing up anyone he came across.

Scarecrow, well, he pretty much stays the same - if not a bit less intelligent.

No actual sketches as of yet, as i'm not sure this idea has any legs?

As with the Adidas brief I'm tackling at the moment, i want to try and not rely on reference imagery too much, but also retain a level of accuracy to the film characters. Maybe it shows a lack of imagination - or maybe I'm just a stickler for those small details that nobody else thinks twice about?

Compositionally this is also proving to be a bit of a pain, and im starting to go off the idea. My only other options so far are also based on 80-90's films though, which aren't really going to work with the Square dimensions we have to work with - and that i really am beginning to resent.