Thursday 15 March 2012

Pitt Rivers Museum





In preparation for this year's Cheltenham Illustration Awards brief our tutor suggested we go to the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford. An afternoon of wandering about, sketching, taking photos was not enough. There is such an enormous amount of objects to look at that you could probably spend every afternoon in there for years and still discover things you never noticed before. The organization of the whole place was a bit strange - objects were divided by their purpose rather than any usual chronological/geographical area. Which meant you could walk around a case of hundreds of ivory objects from Italy to China, needles from Victorian England to pre-Columbian Mexico. It was interesting and did, in its own way, make sense. I managed to forget my camera but did a few sketches while looking around the place in amazement. I must have spent hours just staring at the great collection of netsuke they had, the Balkan and feather jewellery, the body modification section. I got a little too into sketching the skulls and shrunken heads (two of which are on the wikipedia page for shrunken heads!), which Cheltenham won't accept for the competition anyway haha. It's definitely a place I'll have to visit again sooner or later.

procrastination, yay!

Hey, I opened a tumblr blog as well! It's a bit more serious, full name and eveything, it even says "illustrations". What worries me a bit is that my name in every combination has already been used by a porn star and a Bible preacher - I have yet to decide which is worst. Time shall tell if I will stick with it just to prove I can get away with it, or decide I can't compete. (I am quite proud though that "diaryofaflowerpunk" comes up as the first 4 google search options, plus a fifth time quoted on a website that, uhm, maybe got an image from it? I honestly don't know, there's a lot of clothes on there. oh oh and there is a lot of my work for the image search, awesome)

Saturday 10 March 2012

Yaxin le Faune Gabriel

Everytime an Amazon package arrives, I feel like I'm 8 again and it's Christmas morning. Honestly, I get excited even though obviously I know what's in the brown box. So yesterday I'd been out the house since 10 in the morning, had lectures until past 4 then a double shift at work. By the time I got home at nearly 3am, I was looking forward to crashing in my bed. Then I saw the package addressed to me, knew exactly what it would be and literally ran up the stairs with it so I could open it in my bedroom. I'd seen a couple of images from the Yaxin blog but this "tome" by Dimitri Vey and Man Arenas was much more than I expected - gorgeous, delicate drawings, stunning and smart layouts, great storytelling all round. Now French isn't my first (or second, maybe even not third) language, so it'll take me a little longer to read it, but that means I will spend more time looking at the beautiful pages. So yay Amazon for making beautiful stories and illustrations like this available everywhere in the world!

Monday 5 March 2012