The Little Big Book Club are featuring The Box Boy this month to celebrate their theme of art and creativity in children's picture books. I was flattered when I found out that it was to be featured, and am very pleased that it is being used as a starting point for kids to go and create their own cool box creations. Kids can enter their creations online at The Little Big Book Club website and can go into the running to win a print from The Box Boy!
Keeping Busy at The Lemonade Stand
I've just realised that I haven't posted on my blog since Christmas last year... Things have been busy. After Christmas last year I headed overseas for a holiday in Bali. I spent most of my time in Ubud and really loved the experience. After returning home from Bali a week-and-a-bit into January, the work hasn't stopped. Work for me in 2012 started with a number of corporate jobs; annual reports and branding/identity work. After knocking over a few big projects, my usual gig as a design teacher started again for the semester. During Feb, March & April, I juggled full-time teaching work with freelance design work. ...And in the last three weeks I've been working predominantly in a new role as a Publications & Promotions Officer at the school I currently work at. I've well and truly hit the ground running. Its been very busy, but that's how I like it! I've also been doing a little writing about branding and marketing, I hope to have that ready to post here in the next fortnight. But for now I'll leave you with a little illustration I just finished; a cute little kid selling drinks at his little lemonade stand. I'm not sure quite what inspired me to do this one, but I felt compelled to create something bright and fun.
Here are some images to illustrate my process:
I generally always start an illustration by creating a rough. When I say 'rough', I mean really rough. While working at this stage in the process I like to work quickly, just to visually jot down my ideas. From this point I block in many vector shapes to add a little colour and start bringing my rough draft to life. For this illustration I was tinkering with a new, predominantly digital process. As I'm so busy, I really have limited time to create and working digitally gives me the freedom to quickly undo my mistakes and trial different ideas that I may not have risked working with traditional methods and mediums.
After this point, I continued to work in Illustrator, putting in details like the trees, little tufts of grass and the fence. I also decided to change the colour of the roof, as it needed a lift. This is shown below in the finished illustration.
To complete the illustration, I started work in Photoshop. Adding a really subtle texture to the ground, clouds and bark on the trees. The shadows were created with my trusty wireless Wacom tablet. I also enhanced the lemonade stand by adding a real timber texture to its exterior. At that point, I decided that my work was done... Although an artwork or illustration is never complete. I'm a perfectionist, and I could work forever on an illustration or design job, whether it be personal or commercial. Anyway, there's a little about some processes I've been tinkering with. I love reading about the creative processes of other creatives and I hope to share a little more of my here soon.
Now to finish off that branding and marketing essay, and the pile of work I need to complete before Monday for my day job...
Cheers, Mal
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
Well, another year has almost come to a close. This may not be quite as eloquent as the Queen's Christmas message, but I'd simply like to thank my clients who have supported me during 2011. Thank you for allowing me to be creative, because that's what I love. In lieu of posting Christmas cards this year, I decided to donate to Oxfam instead. I apologise for not posting a card to each of you, but I thought a donation to those in need was more meaningful.
This year was very busy, and at long last my third picture book, The Box Boy was released by Windy Hollow Books. My editor, Helen Chamberlin and the Windy Hollow team were a pleasure to work with. I am very grateful for their support.
I hope that you all have a safe and restful festive season. I look forward to working with you all again in 2012.
From Mal (and The Box Boy).
Congratulations!
In addition to working as a designer, I also teach VCE Visual Communication & Design. Today my students received their results after a long year of hard work, stress, a few tears and eye-strain due to long hours working in front of computer screens and generating folios packed full of fantastic ideas. Being a VCE student is hard work, I've been there and done it myself and there's no way that I'd want to do it ever again. So, I'd like to take this opportunity (with a little tear in my eye) to say, "Totes Congrats!"You've all done your best and for that I think you should all be proud of yourselves. I sincerely wish each of you all the best for the future. Enjoy your summer break, be safe, keep in touch, and most of all, enjoy life. That adventure has only just begun!
The Story of a College Drop-Out
An excerpt from Simon Garfield’s ‘Just My Type’ p.11-12 Introduction
On 12th June 2005, a fifty-year-old man stood up in front of a crowd of students at Stanford University and spoke of his campus days at a lesser institution, Reed College in Portland, Oregon. ‘Throughout the campus,’ he remembered, ‘every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.’
At the time, the student drop-out believed that nothing he had learned would find a practical application in his life. But things changed. Ten years after college, that man, by the name of Steve Jobs, designed his first Macintosh computer, a machine that came with something unprecedented – a wide choice of fonts. As well as including familiar types such as Times New Roman and Helvetica, Jobs introduced several new designs, and had evidently taken some care in their appearance and names. They were called after cities he loved such as Chicago and Toronto. He wanted each of them to be as distinct and beautiful as the calligraphy he had encountered a decade before, and at least two of the fonts, Venice and Los Angeles, had a handwritten look to them.
It was the beginning of something – a seismic shift in our everyday relationship with letters and with type. An innovation that, within a decade or so, would place the word ‘font’ – previously a piece of technical language limited to the design and printing trade – in the vocabulary of every computer user.”
Steve Jobs was and still is a truly inspiring man. Its difficult to believe that he was a college drop-out… Or, perhaps it is quite believable. He was obviously different to his fellow students, a dreamer, a believer, creative thinker and future leader. It’s difficult to measure the legacy he has left behind. Jobs has changed the way we use technology, changed the way we interact with each other. He humanised technology and paved the way for future technological advances.
To finish, here’s a quote from Apple.com, displayed this morning as a splash page to commemorate his life:
Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011
“Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind the company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
