Marcel The Shell

Just because it's cute, and it made me smile.

Ridiculously talented 8 year old

I recently saw a news report of a little boy who made £150,000 in half an hour by selling his artwork. To begin with I thought I'd heard wrong, but Kieron Williamson from Holt in North Norfolk is apparently a bit of an art sensation.

Experts have said that the eight-year-old's atmospheric paintings, which began with harbour scenes and expanded to include rural vistas, animal portraits and landmarks, have perspective, shadow and reflections that demonstrate an ability well beyond his years.

His paintings have been compared to the work of Monet when he was the same age, and has stirred a crazy amount of interest worldwide. He has appeared on BBC's The One Show and ITV's This Morning, with profiles in many national newspapers. He is also currently being filmed as part of a Channel 4 documentary and has been featured on television channels in America and Australia.

At Kieron's last exhibition in his home-town of Holt on 30 July 2010, people from across the globe actually camped outside the gallery two days before it even opened, to be first in line to buy his 33-strong collection, featuring Norfolk landscapes, worldwide cityscapes and other watercolours.

This little kid is literally a prodigy!

John Frusciante

Now that I've finished uni, I've had more of a chance to get back into Illustration, and I love it! A close friend of mine asked me to do an illustration of former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, and I couldn't wait to start it. I was well chuffed with the results, and think it's one of my best pieces of work so far.

This one's for you Mark.

copyright sktchpd 2010 ⓒ

What else do you do?

I got given a project this year at uni where I could more or less do anything I liked. It was called 'What else do you do?' and was one of my favorites as there was literally no structure and no limits at all. It was a chance to do something completely creative, and a great opportunity to use all the other facilities and resources in the school. Some people chose to make and illustrate their own books, create quirky animations, or even craft something beautiful from paper.

I chose to write the word 'prick' using pins.

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It was just a simple play-on-words idea that I came up with which is pretty self-explanatory. I thought it was still quite "course-appropriate" as it primarily focuses on typography, but still gave me an opportunity to be a bit audacious, and see what I could get away with.. which apparently wasn't much seeing as the school principal wouldn't allow it in my final end of year degree show. Gutted.

Update

I have been so so busy recently with everything that I haven't really had chance to update my blog in ages, so I'm going to attempt to update on everything these next few days, and get some more examples of various pieces of work up.

Basically I had my final ever deadline for uni a couple months ago, which was kind of stressful and kept me very busy. I then had my uni exhibition to help organise and put up, which took a lot of time and effort from everyone involved, but was well worth it in the end as we had a lot of praise from a lot of people.

I then found out I got picked to go to the 2010 D&AD New Blood show in London which was really exciting news! Me and around 12 fellow students had to work together to prepare large AO posters of our work to put up in the show. Once again the hard work payed off, and our stand within The Old Truman Brewery in Shoreditch was something to be proud of.

After four days in London, I returned to attend my Graduation. It was hot, sweaty and to be honest pretty hilarious. It was quite sad though to think that that was the end of it all, and even sadder having to say bye to close friends that I knew I may never see again, or at least for a while.

A couple days after that I then received a few emails from some big London agencies that had seen and liked my work at the New Blood exhibition, and wanted me to meet with them. I was so excited and went down to London with my boyfriend the following week for meetings and interviews. They went really well and one company (BBDO) set up a placement for me and asked me to do some branding for them which I was ecstatic about as they are huge!

So since then I have been working on that, and am waiting to hear back from them. I just can't wait to get a proper job now, and start earning some proper money at long last!

Spring Photography 2010

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So my parents have decided to get into walking in a big way.. They've bought proper walking boots and coats and everything, and have started going to different parts of Norfolk in search of new and different places to go on long walks with the dog. They told me about this pretty place they found near where we live, so I decided to go with them one day, and took camera just in case. Im glad I did, as I got some really nice shots of a nearby ford, and surrounding area.

Really Cool Stop Frame Animation

I stumbled across this really nice video by Oren Lavie earlier today, and thought it was a great example of stop frame animation. It must have taken so long to do, but well worth all the effort. Very clever, and really cool.

Mind Design

A fellow student and friend of mine Mark Fuller showed me this amazing website the other day of London design agency Mind Design. It has some really beautiful and inspiring work that has got me excited about design all over again!

http://www.minddesign.co.uk/show.php?id=6&pos=6&cat=2

Commissioned Illustrations

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These illustrations are ones I have done for various people as commissions. They are all done using a variety of soft, medium and dark charcoals, and are around A2 in size. These specific ones have sold for around £100-£200 (depending on size and framing). If you are interested in having anything done, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment or message.

Photography in 2009

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Old Illustrations

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These are a selection of Fine Art illustrations I did when I was at Sixth Form College for a project on Realism. Since finishing College I have done quite a few illustrations for different people, and sold them for anything between £70 - £200. Examples of these shall follow shortly.

WWF Awareness Campaign

This was a self-written FMP brief that focused primarily on the fast-declining numbers of Orangutans in the wild. I wanted to make more people aware of this issue, as not only are their trees being cut down to obtain Palm Oil, but vast numbers of larger Orangutans are being caught and sold on Bornean markets for street entertainment purposes.

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 These posters are some examples of the final campaign outcome. I drew the illustrations, logo, main headings and subheadings by hand as I thought it gave it a more authentic feel, as I was going for a Western-style 'Wanted' poster theme.

CD Cover Design

Another second-year project was to use the photography suite to create a CD cover design based on a band/artist of our choice. We were given a day in the studio working alongside a photography tutor, using all equipment available to us. Here are a few examples of shots before, during and after my shoot, as well as my final outcomes.

Here is my final CD cover outcome - front and back. I decided to create my photographic concept around the band MGMT and one of their singles 'Time To Pretend'.

copyright sktchpd 2010 ⓒ