wordy

Seeing as I don't have much new stuff to show for myself, I thought I would show you another six I did. I really should send those soon! I'm not sure if I want to use this one yet, I just enjoyed drawing it. It was inspired by this font, which as I look back at it now doesn't actually include numbers. I guess this is what it would look like! I really liked using brown ink for this, but for the victorian type style I have used in the other sixes I may use a bit of photoshop magic and change them to a nice tealy colour or maybe a dark red.

At the moment I am doing a poster project for a lecture about the amazing Downton Abbey which is happening at the Du Maurier festival in May. I thought I would have a go at doing some prospective event posters that were a bit different, as I thought the original posters will probably include photography. I have been playing around on photoshop with silhouettes, and this is what that came out like :

I thought that through using some kind of patterns and things I could reflect the status of the people. Not sure if that's going to work yet. I am getting my excitement back a little bit, but I am finishing for Easter this friday. I MUST WORK AT EASTER! Might have to get that tattooed on my head!

realise

Russell Brand sketch for quote idea

The two Ronnies

This week has been interesting. I've come to a bit of a realisation about my work, and I think that I needed this week to really get it. I have been designing my illustration for the quotes book that I mentioned last week, and the week started with an idea about portraits and type that involved comedians. These few sketches are some of the prep that I did for that piece, but yesterday I realised it wasn't necessarily saying enough about me as an illustrator, so the idea has now changed completely!

This is a section of the new idea for the quotes book, which is a lot more 'me' really, as it will give me a chance to use my hand rendered type as well as be about a subject I enjoy. The quote itself is still undecided, I have a few to choose from which is good. Easter is going to hopefully give me an opportunity to get loads of work generated. Feel like I have a positive end to an otherwise difficult week.

sixes

Have been a busy bee recently, but now that my children's book project is mostly out of the way I am getting on with designing 6's and an illustrated quote for the UCF Illustrated book of quotes and sayings. Every year our course publishes an illustration annual comprising of illustrated quotes from every student, which is in its 6th year. We've been asked to design some sixes for the end papers and to come up with an illustration for the inside which will serve to promote us to the people who receive the book. I've been working on a variety of sixes, the above being one that relates to the cakes on the homepage of my website, www.hannahfbrown.co.uk. I have also worked on some other ones, which are still in the editing stage! This one is meant to be made of icing (although I have heard comments such as alien intestines and old chewing gum!) but I hope it looks as its meant to!

Apart from all of this work it's been a nice relaxed weekend, the biggest highlight so far being the epic victory our England team made in the six nations rugby this afternoon! Now, I have not been a rugby fan for long, but I really am starting to get into the whole game and I am excited to see whether England can go for a grand slam next week!

This highlight may be trumped later, because not only is my favourite man Trevor Eve back on my screen tonight, it is also the last episode in the series of Being Human. It has been my sunday night staple for 7 weeks now, and I have been warned by many a TV reviewing site to keep a hanky close by as it's set to be a sad one! Simply cannot wait. In amongst all this great TV I hope to get something useful done, I promise!

interiors

Today I spent a little time taking some photos for my flatmate who is doing a journalistic piece about finishing touches to home interiors. I offered up a few of my own pieces and also offered my illustration hand to do some hand rendered typography for the first page (see my rough mock up above). I simply found some suitable set types and traced them to the spacing and size that I wanted with some tracing paper. Have used these fonts on some book jackets I did as uni projects and I thought they went really well together, which is why I chose to use them again here. The rest was a little more photoshop magic. I really enjoyed the quality of the photos I got so I thought I would share a few with you. The piece will be in Millie's brilliant blog soon and you can see that here.

Table with my scrapbook laid open on it

lots of little touches to complete the look

I really enjoyed making some hand lettering today, and I hope do some type like this for my children's book (obviously I intend to make it a little more child friendly though!) See back here soon for some progress on that front.

practise

I wanted to share a few more artwork experiments for the upcoming children's book project I am working on. It's been hard to get to this stage as this style isn't one I settled upon quickly, it's taken a bit of work to loosen the work up. But at the same time I don't want to abandon the painting style I use, it does feel a bit like I have too many things happening. Hope to update my website with these experimentations and artworks soon.

It's been an interesting week, a bit of a journey through these artworks, it's been getting a bit stressful but I think once I can see them with the text and everything on them it'll look a bit more complete. Also have been looking forward to getting started on an illustration for the uni's illustration annual which is based around quotes and sayings. Got some good quotes in mind for it, have been drawing inspiration from a few of my favourite films and hopefully the outcome will be good enough to get in the book.

Feeling a bit odd this week. Doesn't help that I have a giant cold.

happy

Today was my formative assessment at uni, and we had to present the work that we've been doing since october to a group of second years. I was pretty nervous about it and I am sure my face went a lovely shade of ruby, but I think I got through it ok. It was nice to see the work of other third years who I don't usually get to see but at the same time it was nice to have some familiar faces to calm me down! I remember being in the presentations in second year and thinking, man, I am not looking forward to doing that! and now that it's over I feel so relieved. Another hurdle over!

Currently I am working on a children's book - that's right, a children's book- they're chipping the ice from the gates of hell as we speak! Joking aside though, as much as I was afraid to even go near a children's book, when my aunt asked me to illustrate her story it was such a lovely story I really believed it needed to be done and today I feel like I'm going to do it some justice. I've been working on it for about three weeks and I have a couple of dummy books and huge pages of colour studies, and I think it's going in a good direction! Might even enter it into macmillan if I am confident about it.

Here are a few character studies I have done for the main protagonist, Daisy. I used lots of different materials and tried to be quite free as I was told to loosen up, and I think it's working.

Daisy doing a bit of ballet.

Time to play pirates!

Overall I'm feeling quite good about illustration at the moment. I am also very excited about our New York trip that's coming up after Easter! I am mentioning this now because I found out yesterday that there is to be an exhibition of the late great Alexander McQueen's couture in May, and it's going to be held at the Met in New York when I am going to be there! Which makes the trip a million times more exciting, can't wait to go. (The BBC have done a great slideshow of some of the pieces that'll be featured, check it out here)

Shall post up some more colour studies and maybe some page layouts soon. And I might also treat you with one of my 6's, more news on that later!

Birthday

Just a few photos of the cake I made for my flatmate's 21st birthday last week. The heart shaped mould was in the valentine's themed offers at Lidl last week so I'm not sure if they will still have them, but they were much cheaper than the usual so if you fancy one go see if they have any left! The rose decorations and pink glitter were from Asda and the candles were from the delectable Trago Mills!

Millie will also have a little piece about her birthday on her blog here.

New Portfolio website!

Hello everyone! Well the wait is finally over (!) and my portfolio website is finally online for everyone to see. There is a page dedicated to artworks and a page which is sketchbook and visual studies stuff, some of which I have posted on here before. I will probably try to update it maybe once every six weeks or so seeing as I am still creating artworks for uni, and maybe more frequently if I get lucky and manage to get some commissions! I somehow managed to build it all myself through photoshop and dreamweaver with the help of one of my tutors at uni who was brilliant. I wanted to give people a good impression of my work on the homepage which is why I decided to incorporate two of my favourite things - cupcakes and vintage typography.

Hope you like it!

www.hannahfbrown.co.uk

Hogwarts

So - about that Harry Potter themed birthday present I mentioned last week. I can now reveal it, as it is the recipient's birthday today and I won't ruin the surprise. Happy Birthday Lily!

I handcrafted a Harry Potter Hogwarts acceptance letter for a special treat for Lily's birthday. I will mention that she is 19 - might not be best to do this for a child and get the hopes up of an 11 year old and have them realise they can't actually go to Hogwarts. Who am I kidding, of course they can.

Anyway, I got some tan coloured Murano paper and cut it up into a4 sized pages. I then used my desktop printer just to put the Hogwarts crest at the top of each page, and wrote out the letter word for word from the book (my friend would have pointed out any mistakes if I had not done this!) in a lovely emerald green acrylic ink using a dip pen. I also printed out a Hogwarts Express train ticket and popped it all inside a cardboard envelope. I wrote out her address in the style of the letter that Harry gets in the movie version, and then put another Hogwarts crest on the back with the words "owl post" in script. I finished it off with a sealed wax stamp. It's safe to say that she loved it!

Hogwarts letter page 1. I signed Minerva's name with black ink instead of green for a bit of authenticity!

Owl post with a Hogwarts crest which I found simply through weheartit here

I added this train ticket to the envelope too. Again, probably not so good to give this to a child that may believe in it all too much...

Hogwarts crest printed through my normal everyday desktop printer, with hand written school name underneath.

This was such a fun present to make, and I really felt like it was going to mean something to her. She definitely loved it and she told me she's going to frame it for the wall. It took me around two hours to finish the letter fully, so it didn't exactly take much of my time either - a great gift idea I thought! I also made one for my flatmate as it was her birthday last week, will put some photos of her birthday cake in the next post.