festive

Hand drawn Christmas holly themed typography

Continuing on the theme of being way too prepared for Christmas, I wanted to share with you a little of the work I've been doing on my own gifts ready for the big festive season. I designed a Christmas-themed font for all of the different elements of my gifts, and have been busy designing labels for different things just to give my gifts a more personal edge. I can never get away from my love of Typography so this was the perfect chance to get some festive designs ready.

 (Anyone reading this who I will be giving the following gift to - I hope this doesn't spoil the fun when you receive yours! it tastes good, trust me I've tried it!)

Handmade Mincemeat in personalised jars

This year I decided to make my own mincemeat, as I have often wondered if it would be really that difficult. Turns out it's not, at all! I opted for our national treasure Delia Smith's recipe which can be found here. Then I simply customised the jars with Christmassy fabric, print out labels and festive ribbon.  

bakery

It's been a bit of a large break in between blogs at the moment as I have been working on lots of different things. Today though, I can reveal something I have been cooking up 'Willy Wonka' style for my friend Amber's 18th birthday. A few months ago, she found an image of a rainbow cake and asked me if I thought it was possible to make - so I decided to make one for her birthday. I settled on a brilliant recipe from a blog called The Whisk Kid, whose recipe was not only fantastically written and easy to follow, but the photographs were to die for! So much so that it made me want to be a food photographer for a long time after I read this recipe...

 Anyway, I managed to get some Sugarflair gel food colouring from a brilliant local shop called Angel Cake (which you can also get online at places like this) and after two days of mixing with six separate wooden spoons and icing with a massive spatula, I arrived at the cake. Here's a few pictures of my progress (sorry for the quality, ridiculously bright cake batter and camera lenses don't mix!)

Part of the mixing process - it's a good job our kitchen is heavily overstocked when it comes to bowls and wooden spoons!

The finished cake - I opted for a lilac buttercream over a white crumb coating to hide the cake's gloriously colourful centre.

The offcuts of the trimming process demonstrate how bright the final product was!

 I presented the cake to her this morning in a custom cakebox, with a logo on the lid that I designed myself (above) so that she has something of the epic cake to keep once she has eaten it all. I even managed to sneak a piece of cake for myself and managed to get a couple of better quality photos for you.

Happy 18th Birthday Amber!

home

On Monday, I journeyed the five hours it takes to get back to the Midlands for our Easter break. I packed my sketchbook (though I'm yet to open it) ready for an easter full of illustrating and hopefully a good set of images to get into my portfolio. Another job while I'm here was to get hold of some of my life drawings to put onto my website sketchbook page. I'm still deciding which ones to go on there, but here's a few examples of the ones I was considering. I had to take photos of them with my compact camera which is why some of them aren't great quality. (Just to warn you some of the drawings are female nudes so if you are not comfortable with this don't scroll down!)

Angel

So this week, on top of all the other work I am trying to do, I have squeezed in a few hours to create an artwork to contribute to an art auction that is happening at my university. Because of the recent government spending cuts, our tutors are concerned that we won't be able to get enough funding to create out yearly 'Quotes' book, a promotional anthology of the class's work. So we are putting on an auction of student and tutor work to try to raise money for it in the event that funding gets cut completely. So you'll be pleased to know there's some artwork here! Yay! I don't see why I can't show it before the auction, hell, if you really like it come to Falmouth and bid for it!

This blog post is for my good friend Miss G who really ought to get on with signing up to twitter. :) and maybe blogger too. I hope this colours your day of dissertation work! Now to get on with my own...

week

it's been a while since I posted something because I've been under deadline and my internet has died.. AND it was Hallowe'en :) had a really epic night dressed up as a wierdo zombie girl, and I still have stains on my wrists from my greasepaint "stitchmarks". Good night!

Did some adult narrative work last week for my project, illustrating a piece by Margaret Atwood about the Female Body. Did some work wil gouache and collage, really enjoyed myself working with the strong line too. This week we've been given an advertising task, but I have to wait til Thursday to get the full brief. Got to do lots of reportage illustration soon, really have to get cracking with my location drawing sketchbook cause it's an important part of my course.

Getting really excited about Christmas now, looking forward to making lots of christmas decorations for my house and I really want to get us the most amazing christmas tree ever! Getting ideas for gifts for my friends too, getting very excited. :)