Book Design - "Wabi Sabi"

This is one of my favourite books at the moment - "Wabi Sabi is the quintessential japanese aesthetic. It is beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incompete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional". Its got good content, but what makes this book for me is the stocks its on, the fact that it is all printed in greyscale except for the cover,  and the actual book design of the columns and paragraphs is really easy and comfortable to read. I like the full bleed Image idea which is used throughout the book too.  This is something I have been looking at and was helping me to make decisions about stock and printing process whilst having to deal with a budget. The book shows for me that you dont have to spend big bucks on something to realise it to a point of perfection - as long as the content and function leads a book, the look of it will follow and be totally apropriate to what the book actually is.

Morning breath - Colourways

I think most illustrators get a bit jealous of the images that come out of morning breath. I know I do! I love the way they use colour and tone. The Queens of the stone age poster is Two colour plus tints, and it just shows how much can be done with black through to white before other colour even comes into it. Youve got, mid tone, highlight, dark areas and outlines, then the pink just adds to the overall impact of the image.

This would be a good way for me to think about my images tonally, If I do want to have the book in black and white, tone is going to be a really important part of my imagery to add depth. If I was going to work in colour, I think I would go about it in a similar way to this, usig overprints and a very choice colour pallette.

Reuben Rude

Reuben rude is one of my favourite artists at the moment, not for any conceptual reasons, just simply because of how he puts lines down on a given surface. His eye for it seems quite similar to mine, only difference being, this guy is absolutely shit hot at it. He works the same way in painting as I try to work digitally. The way he makes a character look using thick lines that run off into a sharp point is really effective, and then he further enhances this using alot of colours for fills or an overprint feel. In time, if I ever get the time to do a painting, I would love to explore the technique thats done here. I mean, it can be done in other ways, Morning breath are almost a digital equivalent only with more typographic insight.

Caspar Williamson, submission for Nobrow.

This was Caspars submission to Nobrow magazine. This is two colours not including stock and is made up of quite thick textural line work to make tones and shades on top. In print, it almost looks like a hand coloured photocopy because of the level of detail in it. What I like most about this image is the actual form he has chosen to give the jellyfish, with long tapering tentacles (Or cilia, as I have found out throughout gathering the copy for my book.)

Caspar Williamson / Glow pigment overprint.

Caspar Williamson is an illustrator/designer/printer. The work above is actually by Franz Vesolt, but as far as I can tell was printed by Caspar Williamson. Its a great idea, simply dat and night. in daytime you see the first image, and at night you see the glow in the dark overprint. Im really glad I found this because it shows how good getting some glow in the dark ink could be. Ive sent the check off for the stuff today, so I should have it half way through next week.

The line work here also works really well with the glow overprint, its simple and suits being illuminated because of its content. This is something I am hoping pulls off well with my use for the glow in the dark. The idea is that I'm going to print my squid icon I developed at the start of the project over the front cover.

Jens Harder

Jens Harder is an illustrator and a comic book artist From germany. I found her in NoBrow magazine issue 1. Jens doesnt just draw sea life, but here are two particulary good examples of how Jens uses line and how it translates across to sea life imagery. Jens uses lines to create tone, and in the image above Jens has also used one colour to help build up a tonal quality to the squids bodies.

In most of the imagery I have seen of Jens she uses 3 colours including her outline colour, which is something I have been doing for my sea life illustrations, I think something I can take away from looking at Jens work is that the more detail you put into the line work, the richer the image you are working on will become, making it much more appealing to only add  a few simple colours the emphasise the immidiacy of the image.

I find the way Jens produces line work really appealing and it has the qualities of a really well done pencil drawing, so as is stands I'm pretty unsure how she does these illustrations, I mean they could be digitally done but they have an organic look to them too so she could be really good at pencil drawing and inking, which is probably closer to the truth as she is also a comic book artist.

Census of marine life website

Just been on the Census of marine lifes website, its interesting to see how they are dealing with images and type to give readers entry level information about deep sea life.

Ill upload the images tomorow, the server is rejecting them

The release of marine census 2010

As Fred so rightly pointed out on wednesday;

I was missing a trick on my fish publication! The release of the 2010 marine census has now happened with catalogues over 5000 new species of fish and is being heralded the age of discovery. I think I need to now be thinkning about the way my publication fits in with this one. At the moment Im thinking I want to promote the marine census book, the cover is here:

I'm going to do my best to get hold of a copy of this. I think it might well be in waterstones or something like that, but if not Ill have to order it online. Either way it will be a great thing to get my hands on to help inform what I'm doing. I also want to mention that I dont think I'm producing any stuff as part of a range now, other than posters and stickers just to do justice to my illustration.

A look into type...

 

I'm pretty sure that the look I want to achieve cant be done effectively using a sans serif typeface, and I also dont think its relevant, from what I picked up here it just doesnt seem right. I mean, would Darwin have been feeling the use of LOT in his publication? I think not.

The sans serif typefaces look alot better and one in particular stands out for me. This being Baskerville old face. The type family looks really interesting and the italic version of baskerville oldface is really nice looking. I think its character is classy, but functional and vintage. Which is a nice look for my publication.

Baskerville Old face it is.

An idea for the visual approach to my publication I'm on with.

From Darwins book on the Theory of evolution. Some good old classic victorian labelled anatomy and botony. Looks great and I think It is really applicable to the work I am doing, would tie type and image together in a functional way really nicely for my publication. I'm going to have a go at producing something similar today.

Inspiration -

• Serif type
• Labeled images
• minimal type
• Emphasis on layout and page composition.
• Later on also, I will have to consider paper and stocks for a really nice visual effect that makes it clear what the publication is all about.

An article from todays metro - tuesday 5th October

Found that article this morning on the bus into town. this topic seems to be on the lips of the media at the moment, and as the article says; There has been a global investment of £410 million into deep sea studies.

The article also has some facts and figures in it which will most likely come in handy for the content of my publication. A selection of this information would probably help shape a testimonial at the beginning of the publication.

Plus its given me a new idea for an illustration - the hydrothermal vent snail.

Im going to have a dig for some better imagery, but theres a taster. This makes my tally of fish to include 23 and counting, it would be nice to get this number up to about 30, but that all depends on how much time I want to allow myself to do these illustrations. Which, isnt actually that long ( about a week so I can get on with researching content and start the type layouts in consideration for print ).

A look into specialist laquer prices...

Ben, This one's for you. Me and Ben went to the print studio this morning to find out about some specialist inks we could order to use for the upcoming print job at the end of our first brief (Manchester Book Fair.)

We had both decided that we wanted to use a specialist ink because the specific inks we want to use have relevance to our subject matters.

Mine being glow in the dark ink - I want to use this for two reasons.

1- Deep sea fish are often bioluminescant, a great way to communicate this through high end print is using glow ink.
2- I'm a show off.

So, Ill be ringing Quality colours London tomorow! Aparantly a contact Gareth Gave me will supply to students and also do me a deal on a smaller amount of ink than he normally stocks. AWESOME!

Use of colour and line weight in digital illustration

Some great visual referance. I actually own this T- shirt and its an awesome example of crisp digital illustration translated into colour separated screen printing. The design is from the Disturbia clothing website. (which is great for nasty illustration on tees.)

This image and others in the same visual approach are making me think about how I can use line weight and colourways/tints to achieve a very high impact and high detail look, which will translate well into print - possibly high end print for publication at that.

This shirt is 4 colours not including stock, and uses a multitude of line weights. I know that the illustrations featured on disturbia are all digital because I have a shirt and a postcard with the same image on, both at the same image quality, making it pretty obvious the images are vector lead. Which is perfect, because I've just bought a wacom tablet - Anyone would think I planned it.

Deep sea fish publication - visual content source material

These are deep sea fish. They make my skin crawl. So what better subject to produce a series of illustrations about? Some very weird and wonderful creatures here ranging from the vampire squid to the blob fish. Obviously these images are the start of me using referance imagery to base my illustration on for the content of my publication. I think something I blatantly need to think about is what limitations am I setting for colour here? I deliberately left this area of the brief quite open so I could make a more informed decsion later on based on my content and visual approach at the end of the brief just before printing.

I was talking about my project with Ollie earlier, and he came up with this idea:

"If the book is a classification archive, why not base your type and layout solutions on old victorian botany books and the like." - obviously im paraphrasing here, but you get the idea, and I think its a pretty good idea. So this visual approach needs exploring. I'm thinking serif fonts, flourishes - and possibly greyscale. I want to think about colour after I have all the content finished first because the publication is definately visual and content driven and these are the most important factors right now, everything else is secondary.