Fiona Banner

Stumbled across the artist Fiona Banner through It's Nice That blog, whilst doing some research for my alphabet summer project. Even though she's at artist she does some interesting things with type. She seems to turn the conventions of type on it's head, making you question why you had never thought about it that way. She also seems to focus a lot on war imagery and machinery; using drawings of various planes, tanks etc. to create her 'The Bastard Word' alphabet.

Some of my favourites are 'Black Alphabet', 'Portrait of an Alphabet' and 'Full Stops'. (All shown above) Hopefully her work will prove as some useful inspiration! x

http://www.fionabanner.com/index.htm

www.itsnicethat.com

*loser alert* MT masking tape

Japanese masking tape, sad I know, but how can it bad sad when it looks so good? Lot's of lovely colours and patterns which can be used for a variety of different things. I'm planning on using mine for sticking up pictures in my new house at uni! I'm lusting after the tartan and black and white sets (not shown) x

http://www.masking-tape.jp/

Cote D'Azur France

Just some pictures I took on holiday on some of the more interesting and less touristy aspects of where we visited! However, I sadly completely forgot to take any on my Diana Mini which was ready and loaded up with a black and white film, gutted. Hope you enjoy! x

Apostrophe design

In my last blog I posted info about the Apostrophe design competition for a winter themed cup. my idea was to do a detailed illustration of a scarf or other piece of winter clothing that would wrap around the cup and look as it the scarf was keeping the hot drink within the cup warm. I drew the outline my hand; first in pencil then in fineliner. I wanted the illustration to be as detailed as possible with each individual thread shown. I did not colour the illustration by hand as I thought this would be easier to do later on in photoshop. Below is the original drawing which i scanned in...

I then coloured in the scarf using the Apostrophe pink colour. Below is how far I got. After the long long process of individually filling in each 'stitch' I decided to print and make a cup mock up to see how it was working. But from doing this I found that it really wasn't an effective design. I like the illustration as a 2-D image, but when applied to the cup format it no longer really ends up looking like scarf. So I have decided not to enter the competition. Im going to put this down as a colossal waste of time, but a lesson none the less!!! x