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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!)

sketchbook

Just a quick one to show you some of the sketching I have been doing for experimentation for my Downton poster. Have been trying to represent some of the characters, without being particularly detailed. I think it's working so far!

Lady Mary

Carson

Dowager Duchess

Anna

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.