The Magic Puddle

Here is an image I made last year for my story idea, The Magic Puddle. The collage and ink is very similar to the fairy image in the last post, although it is combined with tissue paper rubbings rather than plant material.

Freddie and the Fairy

I entered the Waterstones competition last month in a hurry, since it was due in a week after the major hand-in. I used a lot of found plant material which I combined with images I had already made. It was fun to do and here are some of the results. I need to rework some of them so they gell together a bit more. I am pleased with the fairy and the mouse.

Mousey and the Scary Climate Change Monster

Here are the updated images for Mousey and the Scary Climate Change Monster. The animals seem to work a lot better when they go across the double page spread. Now I need to work on the monster a bit more to make it more scary and more original.

Here is the storyboard too, in b&w.

My Website

My website is up and running on www.annaviolet.co.uk

Mousey and the Scary Climate Change Monster

These are some of my images for my major project, using inks and collage.

Green Walk Open House

I will be at no 12 this w/e. Not a good time, I know, the w/e before the hand-in, but please come & visit if you can! Several houses will be open & there is a good atmostphere.

Big Orange Studio collective

Talk from Andy Pavitt 22/04/-9

Andrew Pavitt came to talk to us about the Big Orange Studio collective in Shoreditch, London. Big Orange can offer an internship for a Stockport College student this summer for one week, which would be a good opportunity to make contacts and get a feel for what a collective is like. Last year, Dan & Martin from Stockport were involved with an AOI poster which got mailed out with the magazine - & they were able to take 500 copies of the poster away with them.

The studio collective was started 15-16 years ago by RCA students including Andy Lovell and Darrell Rees. Peepshow, Container and Le Gun are all collectives, too. Big Orange currently has 8 illustrators and shares studio space with AOI, which has anywhere between 4-12 people, depending on any internships (AOI also take on illustration graduates – recently from RCA, Kingston, London).

Andy talked about the many advantages of a collective – pooling resources, sharing rent (£200/month each), phones, photocopier, computer network. Maybe the biggest advantage is the support network to keep you going at illustration. If you work on your own you need to be very well organised, good at promotion and not prone to loneliness. He feels they have a good mix of skills and personalities at the studio. They even share contacts, although this can be a problem at times if someone has spent a lot of time building up a contact. The Editorial contacts are maybe less precious, though. They do occasionally work together, although they have not done so recently. Paul Davis is the illustration editor for The Drawbridge paper, a good promo magazine & platform for illustration (comes out once/2 months).

The studio is open 24 hours/day, and this is really important in order to meet deadlines, especially for editorials with daily papers and work in America, where there are different time zones. Toby Morison sometimes comes in at 5am to meet a deadline, and then takes a kip in the studio!

The disadvantage to a collective? You need to fit with others and their music tastes. The dynamics change with the mix of people, and personality clashes could be a problem, although it has not really been an issue at Big Orange.

I had thought I would prefer to work as an illustrator from the comfort of home, but I can now see the numerous advantages in working as part of a collective and pooling resources and support. It would be a lot more expensive, though, and the pressure to find work would be more intense in order to pay the studio rent.