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.

competition

Just a quick update to say that I have just uploaded an entry into the design competition over at Don't Panic Magazine to design a poster for the film Norwegian Wood, which is hitting cinemas nationwide in a few week's time.

There are some other really fantastic entries on the site so I have some stiff competition, but I hope that people like the 60s style of my poster. If you would like to vote click here. Thankyou!

sketches

Today was a bit of a milestone in the progress of my degree. I went into town today and got my final copies of my dissertation bound and ready to hand in - yippee! At a rather large 8497 words I am glad to say it's finally over, all done and ready for marking. Though the annoying thing is I don't find out what I got until I actually get my results in June, but there we go. The finishing of said dissertation means that from now on 100% of my time can be dedicated to studio work, which should fully enable me to come up with some great stuff. In theory.

Currently I am still working on my personal website, which will be linked from here in a few weeks when it goes live (Very exciting) and will also link back to this blog. (and will also link to my twitter, very linked up indeed). I have included here a few sketches that will be appearing in the sketchbook part of my web site just so you have something to look at. These were some drawings I did in second year as part of research for various projects.

Also today I wandered around Falmouth looking for some last minute Birthday preparations for a couple of important people, trust them to all have birthdays in the same month! As I was looking for some sticky back plastic (all will be revealed in the future!) I wandered through WHSmith past something rather beautiful on the shelf. Through a bit of internet research I found that these new Harry Potter book covers are aimed at bringing the books to an audience that did not grow up with them.

They really caught my eye as truly brilliant book covers, this one for the Prisoner of Azkaban being my favourite (click here for the illustrator's website, some beautiful stuff on there). I love the simplicity of the design as well as the colours she has chosen to use. I also love the way that, if you have read the books already, you know exactly what the illustration is referencing, and at the same time if you haven't read them it creates a lovely sense of visual intrigue.

I adore these covers and it would make me buy them again even though I have read all the books to death!

Also this week I have been very busy creating a birthday surprise for one of my friends - photos of which will go up next week as I don't want to ruin the surprise!

Progress

Happy New Year!

I'd love to say that there's been SO much happening that I simply haven't had a single moment to stop and rest to write this, but that would be a rather large lie. I've had a fabulous bit of time off, enjoying the Christmas break and a particularly retro New Year party, and now I'm back in Falmouth. To be fair, the Falmouth bit has involved quite a lot of work and not much time, but there we go.

Firstly, I'll tell you a bit about New Year. We had a 1940s themed VE Day party for our New Year and strangely despite our house being late Victorian it really worked in the setting. We had the Union Jack flags flying and the Vera Lynn songs playing - I managed to come across this great website called the Keep Calm O-Matic, a website that lets you generate your own Keep Calm and Carry On, so you too can have the now infamous poster in either its original or your own doctored form. I added a few of my sneaky reworkings taped up around the bar for the party - here's an example.

I also dolled myself up in the 1940s style. Most guests opted for the soldier look, the land girl look or one or two had bandages round their heads! We even had a Winston Churchill (luckily nobody decided to be Hitler, though it would have made for some interesting little skits with Churchill). I opted for the sort of, I was Betty Grable in a former life look. I had a real fur (thanks mum) stole draped over my shoulders with a little ditzy blouse and a roll in my fringe.

ANYWAY. I realise this is at the moment kind of my illustration/life/rambling blog, but on its way soon is going to be my own self-promotional fully-devoted-to-illustration website. News of it will be posted here, and the site will link back to this blog, but as of then my serious work illustrations can all be seen in the portfolio section of the site. This may mean that this blog becomes a bit more personal (not that it isn't already ha) and the true illustrations will be on the website. Exciting news!

But seeing as I don't actually have my website yet, I have a little bit of work to show here. Recently I read a book called The Ice Cream Girls by Dorothy Koomson, a wonderful novel in my humble opinion, but I (apparently along with other reviewers I have read online) thought the cover wasn't quite right, so for one of my uni projects decided to have a go at re-doing it. I have cropped in to the image that I have used, not showing the full image as it might give the concept away - you can see the full image on my website soon!

As for the rest of my time, it's mostly taken up with lovely dissertation work. And by lovely I mean confusing, sinfully boring and a whole lot more complicated than I originally thought.

feature

Just a quick hello to say thankyou to They Draw and Cook for featuring my recipe on today's blog :) you can see my recipe for mince pies here. Merry Christmas to everyone, have a wonderful day :)

crafty

Let it Snow

Well, if you are living in Britain and are not living under a rock, you may have noticed that it's snowing. A lot. And when it snows in Britain, everything has to stop - trains, planes, roads, deliveries, the works. Which means I have plenty of time to go taking pictures of the snow and getting on with lots of crafty projects to keep me occupied! The bulk of the white stuff came on Saturday, which is when I took the previous picture. It's a photo of our front path covered in its blanket of ice white snow, which looks rather festive. Lovely to look at, not so lovely to go walking in.. might be time to invest in some new wellies I think.

My mother has been as crafty as me of late, and she has delightfully fashioned a heart-shaped Christmas wreath for our front door which is entwined with Christmas berries, spices and fairy lights.

Mum's festive door wreath

I have also been making gift bags this week - I got hold of some cheap brown paper bags from home bargains and decorated them with illustrations of Christmassy characters such as snowmen and reindeer, and added some shiny curly ribbons and luggage tags. These are for the children of family friends, and will be filled with luscious Gingerbread and chocolate goodies (when I have finished making them!) I also made one or two for my best friends to hold their Christmas presents, I think these bags would be just as fun for adults as they are for children.

Selection of festive characters - Reindeer, Snowmen, Gingerbread men, Robins and Christmas Trees.

All personalised with each child's name on a label, which says Merry Christmas on the reverse

Festive Snowman

Yesterday I had a go at some little chocolatey fairy cakes to match the gift bags. Each one is a simple chocolate fudge cupcake, decorated with snowmen and crisp sugar on some melted milk chocolate. I had great fun picking the decorations and the cases from our collection of pretty treats!

Sweet chocolatey treats

So it really has been a crafty few days. I ventured out into the winter wonderland and picked up some materials to make my boyfriend a birthday present (birthdays in January, the present buying doesn't stop!) and so that will be under construction in the next few days. Soon it'll be Christmas day, and I intend to sit back, perhaps with my Nightmare Before Christmas DVD on (how traditional) and maybe eat many Mince Pies. I am still waiting to see if my recipe for mince pies gets featured on the They Draw and Cook blog, fingers crossed it gets on there soon!