More books

So the past few weeks, I've found a few more books to add to my collection.

They were all bought from Waterstones and since I purchased them fairly recently you should still be able to get them.

The first book I managed to pick up on sale :)

I really like the work of Tim Burton and own quite an extensive collection of his films. This book takes you through the making of his films. Its a really interesting read.

I then picked up another of the illustration now collection from Taschen.

This book is great for researching new artists and getting new ideas for different techniques, styles and materials. Its always good to see what other professional work is being produced.

The last book that I purchased was a bit more expensive but I literally couldn't resist it. Being a lover of all 

disney/pixar films, when I saw this book I couldn't really put it down.

This book shows the process that was involved in creating the Monsters university film. I love learning/seeing how things are done behind the scenes of creating films and designing the characters we all know and love. This book is one I am finding particularly helpful with my current project because it shows the process of creating characters. I am so glad I bought this book.

I'll be keeping my eye out for more interesting books to add to my little growing collection and I'll be sure to update when I do but for now they are my more recent finds :)

Hope you liked them.

Book covering

Since having to find a place to put all my belongings after moving home for the summer I had a bit of a clear out in my room, and found a few old tops I never wore, but I didn't want to waste them and just throw them away so I decided to cover some boring note books that I had lying around and make them look a bit prettier. 

I really liked how these came out and they were so simple to make!

What I used:

PVA glue (which held perfectly well)

Scissors

Old paint brush (to spread the pva)

Card

Old fabric

Note book

How I did it:

Step 1: Choose an old top/tshirt/fabric that you no longer want. Be really sure that you dont want it though, once you've cut it theres no going back!

Step 2: Place the book over the fabric and cut roughly an inch or two around it (its always better to more fabric than needed just in case you go wrong). Also make sure you only cut through one layer of fabric.

Step 3: Place pva clue onto the cover of your book and spread it around with an old paint brush. (Make sure your cover is too thin of the pva will warp the cover page, if it is make it a bit stronger by sticking thicker card down first.) Then place your fabric over the top and smooth it out, be sure to leave fabric over the edge.

Step 4: Turn the cover of the book over and place pva glue on the edges of the inside cover. Then fold the excess fabric over and stick down. Don't worry if its not overly neat, it will be covered later. To ensure that it was stuck down strongly I placed another layer of pva over the edge of the fabric that had been stuck down.

Step 5: Once step 4 has dried, turn your cover over again. The seem down the edge of my book was a bit rough so to make it nice and neat I took one of the ties from my top and layed it over it. I then stuck it down opened my book and stuck the excess down on the inside cover too, basically repeating steps 3 and 4.

Step 6: To make the inside cover look neat I simply cut a piece of card to size and stuck it on top. This hides all the excess fabric underneath and was really quick and simple to do.

Step 7: I repeated these steps on the back cover of the book too. Then added some small buttons to the corner of the front cover as small decoration. I stuck them down using pva glue which seemed to hold them fine. Ideally I would have used a hot glue gun but I didnt have one to hand. 

That was how I created both my books, it was very simple and easy to do and a fun little project that made good use of some cute tops. It also left me with spare fabric from those tops that I can use again in the future.

 I really liked how these books came out and I think they would make cute little hand made presents if you were shopping on a budget. I used stuff from around the house and only bought the note books which were pretty cheap anyways.

Hope you liked it :)

Catch up & Skulls

Hello, so I haven't posted on here in a while due to not having my laptop :( BUT its back now, so hopefully I should resume posting regularly again. 

So what have I been doing in the last few weeks? Well its been pretty hectic and I took a short break away with my boyfriend and his lovely family. Its safe to say it was well needed. And I found that being away in different surroundings helped to give me a bit of inspiration and motivation to get on with my character designs. I've been doing a lot more research and planning of what I want to do with my characters and hopefully will be posting a few images of that progress soon (once its looking a bit tidier and understandable to people with normal human brains).

I've also been trying to get a few art projects completed in my spare time, that I have had on the go for a while now. 

One of those projects was to create a sugar skull or day of the dead skull for my brothers new room.

I found this skull in the garden section in wilkinsons quite a while ago and thought I'd pick it up to use in a art project like this.

 However for me to be able to work onto the skull I had to make some adjustments. 

The skull was very roughly formed and didn't have a smooth surface for me to draw on nicely. This meant I had to kind of resurface it. Which was a pain, but I managed to do it using the wonderful techniques of paper mache (which I haven't used in a long time but it seemed fitting for this project). 

Once the skull was smooth I used a pencil, a white posca pen, and black and white acrylic paint to place the design onto the skull. I really loved the outcome of this piece and it was so much fun to create. I'd really love to do some more of these and make a small set, it also made a great gift for my brothers house warming.

I hope you liked this little crafty project :) and again sorry I haven't posted in a while, but I will be posting more from now on :)

Artist styles

So one thing we have been asked to do for our summer project, is to incorporate other artists styles into our own character designs. 

So today I did a small study of Mavis (from the animated film Hotel Transylvania) in the style of Karl Kwasny. Luckily for me, he had already posted a small tutorial on his tumblr page of how he does his work step by step, which was pretty handy when it came to doing my own study. 

This was my first attempt at creating anything like his work and the image lighting isn't the best so don't judge me too harshly, I will never be able to create work in his style to his ability but this was a fun little piece to do and i did enjoy his way of working.

When reading up about his work I also learnt that he often goes into photoshop and plays around the image in there too, I haven't done that here so it isn't quite as polished.

Close up of step 3.

Close up of step 4.

I was quite happy with the outcome (from the piece in person, not so much with the photgraphs) and I really enjoyed working in his style. I used pencil for the original sketch and then watercolour paint for the rest of the image. 

I really want to practice working in that kind of style because I feel this could have been a lot better, but for a first try... it will do :) 

Hope you liked it,