Final Faces

'character research' for final project, or a happy afternoon drawing faces, whichever.

Me and Phoebe are doing our final project of Year1 together, it is to be an animation, and that is all I will divulge at present, but there is a grand plan, oh yes.

Alice in Wonderland

This is my cover design for the Puffin Children's books competition. This year's brief is Alice in Wonderland and my ideas about Alice came from the logic of the storyline rather than characters. Lewis Carroll was a conservative Victorian mathematician who distrusted contemporary algebra, according to New Scientist. Imaginary numbers were discovered around the time he wrote Alice, and numbers that can be two things at once, which is echoed in the bit where Alice is told 'You mean what you say is not the same is you say what you mean'.

Expression of maths and logic led to drawings of geometry, and thinking about Wonderland, the phsyics and laws of such a place - I see it as an otherworldy place of strange characters and shapes, a bit like Antarctica. Influenced by Herzog.

There are more illustrations I have not scanned which may eventually follow, I prefer them to the cover anyway.

Berlin

The week before last I went to Berlin on a graphics and illustration trip. It was amazing, we visited brilliant illustrators and designers who said mostly good things, we saw bears, we went swing dancing at a gypsy ballroom, pingponging with dr. pong and up the tv tower with an american called erica. I think I want to move to Berlin.

Here is a drawing of the Reichstag. It's on the back of a very nice big old circus poster I found in the street, the poster is bigger than A1, kind of corrugated plasticy material so you can push ink all over it, it was pleasing to work on. I did feel guilt becuase after I picked it up I realised it had probably been a homeless persons bed, but by this time I had lugged it all the way down the very long Avenue to the Reichstag and I thought I may as well make use of it.

It almost folds down into 8 12" squares.