A New Look!

I've recently decided to revamp the look and feel of my business. And yes, it is a full blown business now! I'm getting business cards printed up and everything.

The concept is a simple one: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. The colours used in print. And a very sleek, simple, sans-serif font. I think this look is much more sophisticated while still bright and attention grabbing. I've also decided to keep the lovely grey that I had going before, because I like it :)

So here it is! My new logo, banner and letterhead:

My Business Card

The site banner

And even a letterhead for my invoices!

You may notice that my phone number is on my business card. That's right, you can now email me or call me to talk about your graphic design and illustration needs :)

Magazine Cover Design

I've always liked magazines. The look and feel. The smell. The texture of the glossy pages. And of course, the layout. I think I fell in love with layout design when I started scrapbooking. To me, it's almost the same principle: putting different elements together in a visually pleasing way. There's all sorts of stuff happening. Balance, colour, the tension between text and images. All sorts of good stuff. And then there's the print. I love print. Don't get me wrong, digital layout is cool too. But there's nothing quite like holding the physical thing in your hand, is there? I'm crazy about paper from all the drawing. When design, good printing (things like proper alignment and quality ink) and pretty, glossy paper meet, you get a really great magazine.

I've had a job doing layouts for restaurant menus for about six months now and it's all well and good. But once in a while I have to stretch my creative wings and that's what this mock-up is about. Unfortunately I can't print it out and show it to you, so you're just going to have to enjoy the design from the screen :)

Disclaimer: The photograph does not belong to me, only the design. Made for fun, not profit.

Adventures in Web Design

I've been avoiding learning web design since the beginning of time. Okay, maybe not that long. But it kind of feels that way. In my final year at Wits I could choose between Web Design, Design and Drawing (which is essentially more Fine Art) or nothing. I chose nothing. Then last year when I had the choice between dropping out of Graphic Design school or going back for my second year and learn web design I chose (you guessed it) dropping out. Well, not exactly dropping out, just not going back at all, ever.

So now that I'm gainfully employed by a lovely company called Delivery Xtreme, I thought my learning to design websites days were over. I could just sit back, relax and enjoy being an exclusively print designer. The Universe had other plans.

A few weeks ago my boss called me into his office and asked if I had any interest in learning web design and I said (quite convincingly) "Sure I am!". So, I designed a mock up of the company site and to my surprise, everyone liked it. Thankfully no-one expected me to learn everything overnight, and used an actual web developer for the coding and stuff.

I likened learning HTML and CSS to learning to see through the Matrix.

"I know how to make that button go a little bit more to the left!"

It was hard, I'm not going to lie. At times I was so frustrated I wanted to cry. But when I stopped crying and tried again, it all eventually came together. I did a course called 30 Days to Learn HTML and CSS. It was awesome: clear, concise and easy to follow. And also free! I had absolutely no programming knowledge or ability before I started, so I was really worried, but it's targeted to total beginners. Here is my final project for the course:

This is the Home page, it's very pretty and yellow, but also coded quite beautifully too

This is the Work Examples page, super simple to code after setting up all the CSS from  the Home page

I'm a designer, so I know what looks good. But now I know and understand how to take my design and transfer it onto the web. Here are some snapshots of the finished Delivery Xtreme Website. I made all the design decisions (Layout, pictures, buttons) but the actual development was done by Gert Swanepoel over at Jabulani Design Studio. To see the live site click here.

About Us
The idea was that if you go full-screen, you wouldn't have to scroll to see the rest of the site.

Contact Us
We wanted it to be clear that we deliver food, hence all the lovely food pics

My baby, the Home page
Little snippets of information that inform the visitor, with links to the rest of the site

Home
Another panel of the Home page, soon you'll be able to order online from this site and a mobile app

Branch pages
Every area has a page with all it's info like the trading hours, delivery areas and charges, a list of restaurants and a link to the e-book

So now I can officially add web design to my list of skills! My next mission is to create a website proper for myself. And then my mom's business. I've actually designed her website already using Yahoo's WYSIWYG web design tool (but that doesn't count, it's just like a template format that you add stuff to) but I think it could stand to be improved. Check out the Simply Art Website.

If anyone needs a simple website design done (no e-commerce or blogs just yest I'm afraid), then feel free to contact me.

Smudge Art

When I was a little girl, everyone told me I was talented. And by everyone I mean my mom and dad. Which, when you're five, are pretty much the only people that count. I'm always astounded when I hear about people who's parents pushed them into accounting or engineering or, I don't know, what's another mind-numbingly boring but well paying job? President? Anyway, from the time I could talk (or probably before then) I was doodling, making a mess of every childhood home I ever had by covering it (and myself) in colour. It didn't matter the medium, I just loved to draw. Felt pens, ink, watercolour, pastels, pencils - whatever. And it never occurred to me that I would do anything else for a living, my parents always encouraged me to work on my art.

But wait, you need more context: my dad is a classical musician, his uncle is an artist. My mom's kind of an artist too, but I must admit that for her it's more of a hobby. Never the less, these highly creative people took one look at the splatterings of a two year old who was trying to render a frog she saw earlier that day and thought: "Brilliant! Amazing! She's so talented!" 

I'm guessing all new parents feel this way at some stage, their kid throws a ball and they imagine a star cricket player. A baby learns to swim earlier than expected and the parents are sure they have the next Micheal Phelps on their hands. A foetus kicks in utero and the mom fantasises about going to the soccer world cup in twenty years. My frog drawing looked something like this:

A Picasso like abstraction of nature

Actually it looked a little worse than that. Imagine it minus the PhotoShop and covered in mud. 

I recently watched a documentary called My Kid Could Paint That. It features a so-called prodigy painter named Marla Olmstead. She was four when she started to paint, and her paintings fetched thousands of dollars by the time she was five. This film made me have a lot of... well a lot of feelings. Conflicted emotions, let's say. I won't get too far into it now (because it's kinda boring), but basically it made me pretty angry. Marla is a very sweet little girl who clearly enjoys to paint (what five year old doesn't like to smoosh paint between their fingers), but instead of encouraging her and teaching her how to paint better, her parents chose to exploit her. That's a very strong statement. But what else can you call it? Even if they're not doing it on purpose (as they claim) it's still a violation. 

My parents thought I was a freaking genius, but I never got an endless supply of paint, huge canvases bigger than me and I sure as hell didn't get my own solo show at age 5. The documentary questions whether Marla actually painted the works that bear her name or whether she got help from her artist father. Personally, I think her dad helped her. That's pretty clear to me. But that doesn't make him a bad parent. No kid is gonna pick up a brush and just know what to do. Of course someone showed her how! But why lie? Why pretend that he just idly sat back and watched the genius unfold? That makes him a bad parent.

In any case, anger aside, I tried to do some more research to compose a balanced review (how am I doing?) and I found this video. The girl's name is Aelita Andre, and she's also a child artist prodigy type person. With one minor difference: her parents acknowledge (at least to some extent) that her 'talent' is really just a product of her youth. She paints because she likes it and her parents (who are surprise, surprise also artists) simply give her the room, so to speak. I'm jealous of this girl's studio. Seriously, it's huge. I wish I had enough money to buy huge ass canvasses and then just spill buckets of paint on them. The video is very interesting. There's nothing more fascinating to me than the process of another artist, and just because this particular artist is very small, that doesn't mean it's not awesome to watch.

Here's what I think. All children are amazing. We all do things when we're kids that we never do in our adult lives. All kids read and draw and climb and get dirty and just figgin' play. My theory is that if you gave any kid a room and a canvas and twelve buckets of paint, and you gave them enough time and enough chances to get it right, you would be surprised by the result. Of course if you couple that with a particularly curious and clever child, you might be so taken aback with what they produce that you might want to see how much you can get for that smudge on canvas. And that's just it: it all comes down to how the parents react. Maybe if Marla's parent's were both accountants they would have put her first drawing on the fridge and called it a day. Patted her on the head, said "That's nice, dear," and moved on with their lives.

All I know is, Marla's documentary made me feel kinda sorry for her, made me angry at her parents and want to shake her patrons. But Aelita's video made me remember my own childhood, how magical making a picture was and it made me want to paint.

So, in conclusion, my latest 'work' was inspired by these two girls. My materials were about 10 nail polish bottles, and my canvas was the cover of my notebook. So we'll a low budget homage to the child abstract painters of the world.

Materials

More Materials

The very deep artwork

The workspace
(Modest, like a true artist)

Detail of the every deep artwork

My only regret is that I have nowhere to take notes for the next few days...

Drawing Dangerous D

Everyone who knows me knows that I love to draw. But not many people know what a constant struggle it is for me to apply my ass to a chair and actually produce interesting work. I usually draw when I'm feeling creative, which can happen after I get "triggered" (yeah, like a drug addict) by something I see on TV or read, or if I just start to think about drawing or painting, I get all excited and can't not draw. And sometimes I feel bored and listless for days without understanding why, but then I realise that I haven't created something in a long time, and once I do I feel better.

When I get these bursts of creative energy, I go and create (painting, drawing, crochet, cooking, whatever) for a few hours. I put my head down and forget about everything else in the world: I forget to eat, to drink, to go to the bathroom. I don't feel tired or hungry, all that matters is what I'm doing at that moment. I liken it to a kind of meditative state. When I come out of it, I usually feel quite satisfied and relaxed (not to mention exhausted, starving and desperate to pee). 

And all that is fine, I'm not complaining, usually my best work happens in one of these sessions. But the problem comes when I want to make something that can't be done in one afternoon. Like a comic, or an epic painting, or a novel. These things require time and patience and planning, but more importantly: controlled creativity. Any fool can feel inspired and make a cute slogan or a hum a catchy tune, but what happens when you don't feel inspired? 

I find that (wait for it) nothing happens.

When I don't feel the itch (again, like a drug addict) I don't create. And that's why I get all listless and don't know what to do with myself every now and then. I'm getting much better though. Having a job in graphic design really helped me harness that thing that I have (good taste?) that makes it possible for me to be a good creative. And that is the crux of it: it seems that I only "work hard" at being creative when it's on someone else's dime.

Many years ago, maybe I was still in high school, I thought it would be cool to make my own graphic novel. I've been flirting with that idea for nine years. I read books, I sketched, I read more books, I read wikihow articles, I even mapped out a few story ideas. Then, about a month ago, my sister had a birthday coming up, and she wrote this blog post. This inspired me, I wasn't working at the time and I had this crazy idea to make a comic book for my sister on her birthday, with her as the star. In a week.

Long story short: I did it. 16 pages full colour. I missed my deadline by two days, but she didn't mind once she saw it. I worked non-stop for seven days, going on job interviews and doing freelance work at the same time. I bought ink and paper, planned, sketched, inked (with a brush, not a pen), scanned, Photoshopped and layed out every single page. It didn't take me an afternoon, and believe me it came to a point where I did not even want to look at this thing. But I did it. I'm not trying to brag, my point is: I've been planning (hoping) to do something like this for years, but as soon it wasn't just for me, but for someone else, I finally got my shit together and just powered through until it was done. I don't know what's been stopping me all this time, but now I feel like I can do it. For myself.

The sketching and inking alone took like 3 days. I drew some parts separately to put in later, digitally.

After that I scanned in all of the pages and added colour in Photoshop, this was the most complicated step by far.

The final part was adding all the lettering, I did the layout and the text in Illustrator

An in-joke becomes an awesome page, we love this song because of Jensen Ackles :) And cos it's badass!

It was fun to play around with different fonts and comic book tropes

I really like how the Time Turner turned out