how to you animate diabetic retinopathy?

well this was a brief for uni and the Cathedral eye clinic we had to make an animation aimed at young people to remind them to look after their eyes, so here was my take on it

Meet Boomp!

My finished storybook ended up begin a very simple idea it has been designed so that it can be a series of stories based around the little marshmallow like character 'Boomp' and his little friend Birdie. The idea i very simple its to teach children about emotions in the first completed story whee the little character changes colour to show hows he is feeling this also teaches children about different colours and feelings i think because the idea can be expanded in many ways to cover many different area to teach an entertain children. i am also working on turning 'BOOMP' into a short animation series and the progress of which i will post up here soon.

Here is just a few pages from the book i will upload the full book on file soon so you can have a look.

Childrens book project

I was delighted to hear that our next project in uni was to design a children's book something which is very much on my level! although as a sign of the times we are not being asked to design a physical thrilling page turner, but rather an interactive book for the ipad i was a little disappointed at this but i suppose that's the way technology is going and as designers we have to keep up or get left behind.

i have a great love for cartoons and children's animation already but i decided to go see what kids actually enjoy and went to a primary school, and was delighted to find we had a lot in common and had the same taste in books!

The books the kids enjoyed were books i had read as a kid when i was in that very school, always a favourite is Eric Carles the Hungary Caterpillar its one i can vividly remember as a child and its still very popular today. And to my delight also in the pile was a personal favourite Meg and Mog of which for 'research' i already have copies of both DVDs. i love the illustration style its clean bright and bubbly, i always remember Mog the cat because of his stitches like tail their simple little character that work well over various coloured backgrounds.

I

I have also come across another great children's book by Shaun Tan its a fantastic book called The lost Thing and it is beautifully illustrated i just got My copy in the post the pother day again for 'research' and the pictures don't do it justice.

Its a simple little story but the illustrations really take over there is SO much detail i could stare at it for hours, i love the way the type is Incorporated also it looks written on little bits of lined paper and cut and pasted on and fits in with the style of the book. i like this as I'm aware type on the books can be an issue of how to incorporate it to the illustration style.

However for our project we are aiming our books at an audience of roughly 3 to 4 year olds so the simpler the style the better with much more bright and bold colours and not a lot of type. So i would like to have mine more in the style of meg and Mog, I have a few ideas i am working on at the minute but from my research the children responded best to books where colour was the main theme.

Colour me happy was a great little book which aimed to teach children about emotions using colour each page was fantastically vibrant and all based on a particular emotion "when i am bored colour me grey" and the page would be filled with lots of different grey, blue and purple tones. I have got a lot of ideas from these books so its time to get sketching on my own i will up date with any progress.

Pharmacy practice

I am very lucky to be living with four Pharmacy students and it does sound like a sort of sitcom pitch when explained with an art student thrown in for some comic relief. 

But it also has given me a great opportunity to work with the QUB pharmacy society in designing some logos for their year nights out. i was first asked on the off chance if i might be able to quickly make some arm bands for the reps so that they stood out during an army themed night  out. So i of course agreed and took the theme and made up a medical/army themed arm band a simple dog tag shape with a bold red to stand out.

They like these little designs and i was then asked to design a logo for the t-shirts for a mystery tour that was coming up so again i got doodling and came up with with a few designs but they chose the blue logo below for their t-shirts and i believe both nights were a success and I'm quite happy with how my logos were put to use.

This was my first experience of designing something for a society that was going to be used and i wasn't given too many restrictions so i was free to create pretty much what i wanted but i still panic with my work when other people depend on it! but I'm glad they were happy with the logo's, next task is customising some mascaraed ball masks time to get the sketch book out again!

Pinhole Photography

In uni we made pin hole cameras out of everyday tin boxes, i chose a popular seasonal sweetie box which i renamed my 'quality camera"

This unfortunately isn't my camera my actual one was apparently that good of 'quality' that someone pinched it from UNI when I wasn't looking :( so there is a reproduction image of mine, luckily however it was very simple to make its pretty much all in the name a pinhole in the centre of the tins lid which was covered by a bit of blue tack as a sort of squishy lens cap 

It did take a lot of patience of working out the exposure time for the depth of my tin it was around two and a half minutes inside to get my images

As long as it took it was really rewarding when you start to get somewhere and I definitely want to experiment more with pin hole cameras, I will have to empty a replacement tin however which should'nt be a bother any form of chocolate brought into a student house will last no more than an half an hour if left unattended!

Anyway here are some of my images that I quite liked, before and after inverting the images

This work was created in November 2010

Crafted group project

Back in November 2010 we took part in group projects set around creating an event we had a seperate blog for this project so here is the link to the work for that.

http://craftedbelfast.blogspot.com

Imaging project

This is one of my imaging projects for uni, i decided to look at hands and how i could photograph them alone but give you a sense of the person they belonged to. But i just found that simple images of hands alone quite dull and not one to go along with the straight forward approach i decided to experiment a bit. 


My idea was to personify hands making them individual little people, and it could have perhaps been influenced by the fact i had watched the Adams family quite recently. Im really happy with the images their just fun to look at, the more you look at them in their poses the more they look like little people, i cant help imaging Madonna's 'vogue' playing over and i am realy tempted to create a little cat walk video with the hands struting and posing. My inspiration also came from the Guinness 'dancing hands' video which is fantastic, inspired by this i aimed to animate my hands in the photos so i have them posing, walking and even holding hands.

This work was created in oct 2010

Revamp

After many failed attempts at logging into my old blog i have had to create this new one! im taking it as a sign and a chance to get started again, and get all my work up here and organised. I will be transfering old entries onto here just to keep all my work in one neat and tidy place.