FMP - Artist, Designer Influences and Establishing my style through experimentation & Lino cutti
As part of my creative process I like to look at artists and other projects to help with my direction and evolution of projects. I like to make lots of mood boards to brainstorm execution routes as it helps me to visually see what I can actually do.
As well as creating mood boards I like to look at specific designers, and during this project I was inspired by an instagram artist Natalie Byrne (@nataliebyrne) her work is great because she illustrates topics that are important to her and says it how it is. She is timely with her posts and I love her design aesthetic. I wanted to incorporate this into my project as its a topic so close to me I wanted to express it in a similar way. See below screenshots of her work.
Her design style is unique to her and has developed as posts have gone on as they become more refined which is great to see development.
Xavier altena
Another artist I was inspired by was a 90s inspired pop artist called Xaviera Altena. She describes her self on her website as being inspired by 90's pop culture and modern day youth culture. She likes using a wide variety of bright colours to create a certain feel of freshness and playful approach to her joyful vibe'.
Its Nice That describes her work as: "Rotterdam-based illustrator Xaviera Altena has developed a style that encompasses bold line work, poppy colours and sparse details. Xaviera references modern day issues and news stories stories in her work, combining them with 90's pop culture influences for a fresh approach to topical illustrations.
I really like the simplicity in the designs and the colour palate she uses. I think I will try and use similar colours in my insta-blog.
Development of design style:
From my artist research and mood boarding I had a rough idea which direction I wanted to take the project. Below you can see my trail and errors of establishing my drawing style. I didn't know whether to go for accurate representation or cartoon vectorised. I had my own little character illustrations that I do just for fun but they didnt really seem to fit the route I was going for.
With these I started to create sketches of logo Ideas, I knew I wanted to call it What U Lookin At because it resonated so much with the motivation behind the project. But it was how do I portray it as a logo?
I then took these sketches into illustrator and edited them and experimented with them digitally. I wanted it to be a circle as it would look nice as the profile image for the blog
With the logo I then experimented with lino cutting to try and get a stamp like texture/ clean strong and bold imagery. This was fun because I had not done it since a-level graphic design and I forgot how hard it is to get straight lines as I did not have a wooden cutting board to keep the lino in place. As such I stabbed my finger multiple times, but it was all in the aid of design. Because even if they didn't work, it was fun to experiment with the technique again.
The logo came together at the same time of my design aesthetic as the logo was developed because I tried to establish my style still. I found the design of the girl came out a lot scarier than planned so I decided against this route. But if I was to have more time I would have tried to laser cut and etch the design into the line and then print it. This may create cleaner lines but I have not tried laser cutting lino before.