Creative industry

Hijinx project.

In October, we were given the opportunity to apply for a placement position with the theatre company Hijinx.

The opportunity was to create artwork for the 12 days of PAWB festival, held annually by the company. I applied for the position of working with the young people's theatre group of North Wales, which included working with the group in person to gather information and inspiration for the work that I would be making for the exhibition. I got accepted for this position.

We had a zoom meeting so that we could meet the Hijinx staff, and also the other illustrators that would be making work for the exhibition. We were asked to make at least 3 pieces for the illustration exhibition that's a part of the Christmas festival.

I attended my first meeting with the young people's theatre in Pontio on the 3rd of November, where I got to meet the members, take part in a few exercises, and observe their preparations for the Christmas film that they are working on. During the session , I also took pictures of the memebers of the group, with elements of their expressions and mannerisms representing their characters, while also showing their own personalities as performers through their lack of costumes.

Here are a few of the pictures I took of the performers in the group.

Above are four of the drawings before I coloured them in. I used black fineliners to draw them, and then used winsor and Newton alcohol markers to colour them in. (Below)

While editing the work on photoshop, something I found to be challenging was displaying as much as I can of the background, while also making the performers the main focus of the pieces. Since I created the background and the figures separately, i didn't consider beforehand the elements of the background that would be covered up by the other drawings. Especially with the 'alice in wonderland' themed pieces, including all of the elements of the background was really difficult, as most of the drawings I had made for the table were covered up by the other drawings. I will know next time i am working with the background and the main focus separately, that I need to consider the placement of everything included in the background, so that everything can be on display on the final image.

Working on this brief for Hijinx has been a really valuable and rewarding experience. It's my first time working on a life brief with a professional company, so it was unfamiliar to me, but the staff and members made the experience a pleasure, and I was inspired from the first meeting and had ideas about what I wanted to make. It was specified to us in the first meeting that the company was looking for pieces that really captured the members and was personal to them, instead of having more of an emphasis on the story that the group were performing. I do think that I achieved this, and that the personalities of each member is shown in the pieces, while also hinting at what kind of character they play with the expressions and the background. After the deadline the work was shared on the website as well as being shown on social media. This project has really given me a taste of working with clients to achieve their needs in the work, and to successfully communicate with them and finish the project in time for the deadline.

Penguin book cover design competition.

For this project, we were given the task of entering the penguin cover design award contest, to design the cover for one or more of the books that have been chosen for the competition. I bought both the adult fiction, and non fiction books, so I could decide which book to concentrate on for this brief. I decided to read 'Diary of a young naturalist' first, and decided through the imagery included, that I would work on the cover for this book first, and then depending on the success of this piece, I could maybe explore ideas for the other book as well.

In my sketchbook , while reading the book, I started a list of the species of the birds, other animals and plants that are mentioned by the author. I then use this list to create sketches of the species mentioned, mostly birds, to try and explore ideas on how I will convey these themes on the cover, and show the variety of wildlife included in the book on the cover only.

The main idea that I immediately thought of for this brief was to emulate the old illustrations seen in old nature books. A line that stood out to me was "We're not separate from nature, but a part of it", so I would like to make a cover that includes the author among the animals and plants, to represent this.

I wanted to make the typography for the main title by hand, since making text by hand is something that i enjoy in general. I drew a serif font that I thought would look like a traditional font for a nature book, going along with the old fashioned, classic imagery that I wanted to convey for the cover.

Even though in the beginning I wanted to make the cover using gouache paint to create the illustrations, after looking at the other line drawings that I had done while sketching, i considered that maybe using that kind of medium would bring a more contemporary touch for the cover, so going forward this is what I decided to do. I drew the pictures separately, scanned them and then uploaded them onto photoshop to organise them into the cover that I wanted to make. Over time, I saw that doing this was difficult without having a composition planned and in mind before I did this on the computer, so I did a small plan and sketch in my sketchbook, so that I could use this as a guide when trying to make the cover on the computer.

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When making the cover on photoshop, and seeing how it looked like, there was something about it that I wasn't happy with, The cover didn't look like a professional book cover to me, and wasn't up to the quality that I was hoping for to enter this competition. One of the requests of the judges for the competition online was to make something that truly conveys the spirit of the book that I chose, which in this case is nature and youth. Bringing more colour into the piece is something that I think lacked in this initial cover. Because of this, and because of advice from my tutor, I decided to make another cover, something a bit more playful and experimental.

While reading the book, McAnulty mentioned his love for punk music, so I took that, along with other elements into consideration for the new cover. Since the book is about a young man, I wanted to make a cover that had a youthful energy to it, containing some brighter colours than what I used for the original cover that I made. I looked at some of the other artwork that I have made, and felt that maybe using linocut as a technique for the cover, which is something I have worked with before, would be effective. I really wanted to still include an image of the author on the cover, as drawing and painting people is a big part of my artwork in general.

I drew the image on the lino, then carved into it as I have with other past linocut projects.

I also collected some other materials to use on the cover, such as a map of Northern Ireland, where the book takes place, and some coloured and lined paper. I felt that including lined paper on the cover would convey the fact that the book is a diary, as well as nodding towards the fact that the author is himself a school pupil who is working on exams and assignments.

I decided to create a sketch of what I wanted to make in my sketchbook (below).

Originally, I wanted to cut the letters for the title out with coloured paper, so that the text would stand out from the marks made from the linocut and the other papers used, but after cutting out the letters, I decided that a better approach would be to use gouache paint, so that the opacity of the paint would make the text stand out, but would also give me more freedom to change things than cut out letters would have done. I also used a typewriter to make the type for the rest of the cover, such as quotes and the blurb on the back.

I used my sketchbook to mock up a rough idea of what I wanted the cover to look like, and then proceeded to make the final cover.

I scanned the work from my sketchbook and put that onto photoshop to insert it onto the

Working on this brief gave us an opportunity to work on a live, professional brief for designing a book cover. This gave us a taste of the kind of opportunities we might pursue in the future, and the kind of processes we might go through. I'm glad that I decided to make two separate covers for the competitions, as this gives me options when submitting. The second cover that I created is the one I feel is the most successful, and is the one that I intend on submitting to the competition. I feel that there is a more unique quality to this cover compared to the other one, and the colours and different mediums create an eye catching texture. I think I spent too much time working on the original cover on the computer, and not giving myself the opportunity to consider other possibilities and ideas. In a lot of my other work, I do enjoy working with different medium, textures and colours, so exploring these a bit more would have been beneficial because I would have more to work with, and maybe convey more of the spirit and energy of the book and the author by being more spontaneous. The fact that I created most of this cover by hand, instead of making drawings and then creating the composition online, is something that I also think conveys more of the energy of the book, but also conveys more of the kind of work that I enjoy making. Going forward, approaching briefs similar to this, I intend on taking the approach I did with the newer cover, taking more risks, being more spontaneous, and maybe taking things a little less literal.