In central London in midst of a heatwave going swimming seems like the only sensible thing to do. Today my friend Freya and I went swimming in the pond at Hampstead Heath, drew in our sketchbooks and generally enjoyed the sunshine.
In the last month I moved out of my (rather nicely decorated) room in halls of residence.
And into my grandparent's baker street flat for the summer
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My summer project set by my second year tutor was to create six bits of work from six different times over the summer. These then needed to be posted to our second year tutor, with the packaging an important part of the project. My first project was to record things about my last weeks at halls. Little things like how I decorated my room, the pens on my desk, the people and met and the old photos my boyfriend gave me. Here are a fews bits of that work.
Anyone who knows me knows that I very, very much like coffee. It's a family affliction, my parents just bought their own coffee grinder because it's cheaper to grind your own beans and I routinely drink half a litre of filter coffee in the morning. Anyway, my love and appreciation for coffee has blossomed as I have realised the versatilities of coffee as a medium.
I was going to make the most of the uni's screenprint facilities and screenprint myself some t-shirts. I had them all designed but then I had to have a lot of emergency hospital, doctor's and optician's appointment about my eyes. I had my eyes dilated, ultrasounded, completely numbed and thoroughly checked in a myriad of different ways. They're fine but I missed my opportunity to screen print. Anyway, here's what I was going print on t-shirts. They're in black and white so I could expose the images onto the screen.
In Camden yesterday I discovered what is probably the best milkshake in the world. There's this little cafe just past the market hall run by the loveliest little old man and they have about 20 varieties of milkshake. At £3.80 it's not cheap but it's plenty for two people and probably death for one. We got strawberry because it's The Boy's favourite, and whilst we were drinking a massive pink milkshake through curly pink straws I was aware that we had in fact become nauseatingly adorable. Well, more nauseatingly adorable than normal.
I drew this this morning with two pink sharpies and my hand carved rubber stamps.
My last project of the year was to produce two pages of graphic novel. And remember those books we all had to write about a memory or event in our lives? We all got given someone's else's book to work from, which certainly made it interesting. I won't tell you the story I got because hopefully my comic should do that for you. Click larger to read it.
We had a very tight deadline for this project which resulted in my consuming a litre and half of coffee in one day in order to get it done. To my great surprise I got a first, which was one of the highest grades in the class, which definitely makes rotting my insides with coffee worth it.
Yesterday was my final hand in date. Now I have more time than I know what to do with. Okay that's not strictly true because I'm already planning collaborative photography illustration projects, designing t-shirts, modelling for photoshoots, thinking about doing some freelance editorial work, and let's not forget all the parties planned. And of course I will be updating my blog much more frequently.
Here's a snap shot of my first year at uni, told in polaroids naturally.
My personal easter tradition.
Here are the pages for my memory based book called 'I Heart NY'. I'll write more about each page on the individual image description. It's concertina bound with a thick white outer cover that is embossed with the New York sky line, but unfortunatly my tutors still have the actual book. My tutor gave it a provisional 2:1 grade but when he showed it to my second year tutor he said he'd been stingy and said that he would have given it a 1st. Firsts in the first year are very rare and it was a big enough deal that my tutor came to tell me this himself. However the second year tutor isn't marking it so I shouldn't get too excited. If you'd like to see some my friend's books they've posted pages from theirs on their blogs here and here (blogs belonging to Gemma and James respectively, two very talented people).
My current project is called drawing from memory, and you have to illustrate a memory, story or event from your life. I picked my first night in New York and here's a page I've been working on. This took me hours. For a short time it was the bane of my life. I was concentrating so hard and so in the zone that when someone knocked on my door the shock of it made me literally scream with fright. The people knocking on my door was quite rightly weirded out.
on a liking for coffee