Type as a graphic element

In our brief it states that we could use type as a graphic element, something I'm still considering myself. Here are a few examples.

Book Cover Research

I've been mainly looking at flat graphics for my 'Musicophilia' book cover, I'm thinking of going for an Asian influenced illustrative style at the moment much like some of these images here. I love the matte bold colours used and strong lines.

Ta-DA!

The above are variations of my final chimera piece, all are me messing about with Photoshop filters. I need to decide which looks best unfortunately though. Indecisiveness is a curse. Anyway, I decided ages ago that I wanted to do an abstract montage of my chimera in a bag photos rather than just make an actual object out of them. We were told that the meaning of chimera was not to be taken literally anyway so I hope that my version is okay. I made this piece by first taking my photos, isolating the individual item using the magic wand/magic eraser in Photoshop then arranging them on a gradiated background that I created in Illustrator. Bringing it all back into Photoshop, I then played around with the 'Polar Co-ordinates' filter. I had intended to make it look like a little planet at first in using this filter but wasn't happy with the end result so I just kept filtering my image until I got a nice effect. Then I brought it back into Illustrator, used the pen tool to draw some abstract flowing geometric shapes and added them to the piece to give it movement. I also emphasised the 'Vaseline sun' by drawing around it with a chalk effect brush and adding 'sun rays'. Overall, this is the kind of thing I want to do for my dust cover aswell so I treated it as a test run. I'm fairly satisfied with the result.

A little light anthropomorphism

One of our current college projects is to make a flipbook out of 9 drawings; transforming ourselves into an animal of our choice. I decided on a Highland Cow as I thought it would be easy enough for me to transition into an animal form as long as it had similar hair. This is a work in progress so I guess we'll see how that pans out!

The zombies are multiplying.

Latest addition to the zombie project. It's Layne Staley, the late singer of the band Alice In Chains for those of you unfamiliar with 90's grunge.

More Chimera Research

More Lou Beach work, also some Keith Haring pieces. Keith Haring was a very influential graffiti artist of the eighties. I like the messiness of his work and its pure energy. I'd like to incorporate some of this energy and movement into my own finished Chimera piece.

More Pet Projects..

Haven't posted in a while so I figured I'd 'exhibit' various pieces that I've been working on over the break. Everything here has been drawn in Adobe Illustrator with a graphics tablet that I got as a present for Christmas. My current aspiration for the zombie pieces is to have them made into a book/booklet type thing to throw into my portfolio. As I'm sure you've guessed; they're all portraits of famous dead rock stars - Ian Curtis, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Frank Zappa, Sid Vicious etc. Those five are all I have completed at the moment; Layne Staley, Janis Joplin and Phil Lynott are all still in progress! The final piece that I've posted is one inspired by the movie/book 'American Psycho' which is by one of my favourite authors Bret Easton Ellis. This piece is actually drawn from a movie still in which the main character is looking at himself in the mirror at what I will politely describe as an 'inappropriate moment'. I decided to draw it in Illustrator first so I could basically play around with effects. I plan on hand-painting the image onto an old mirror I have for the finished piece.