...and then some.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ANYONE WHO READS THIS AT ANY POINT IN THEIR LIFE! I hope you all spent 2013 preparing yourself for 2014, and I hope you spend 2014 being awesome.

Now that's out of the way, we can get down to the all important task of looking at a few things I've designed in the last few months. It's been a while since I updated, so there's a nice little collection. Especially as my last few posts have been photography-exclusive. Time to mix it up!

Chronological order is probably the best, to avoid any anti-climaxes or anything of the sort.

This is probably one of my favourite posters I've done! Toby, who runs the screenings that I do a lot of the posters for, really just said that he wanted something a bit psychadelic and trippy, so I had to try and work that into the way that I like to create things. El Topo is an amazingly visual film that has a lot of strong imagery. Lots of fun things for me to play around with.

The original poster idea was going to have more of a traditional colour scheme, with a blue sky and the such, but I felt that colourising it really added to the more surreal feeling that was wanted.

This was designed for a all-night screening of Season One of The Walking Dead at the Duke's at Komedia cinema in Brighton. The original idea was just to have a dilapidated version of the Palace Pier. I decided I wanted to have some sort of nod to The Walking Dead's origins as a comic, which is why I drew the gross zombie mouth and kept it as a hand drawn image rather than recreate it digitally. I often try to include slightly subtle, hidden or faded imagery in some of my work, and this poster has one of my favourites - the bloody Brighton & Hove council logo just behind the main title. BLOOOOOOD. Also, I'm really not sure why I chose a white border for this. Oh well. It was three months ago. I was young and foolish.

CARRIE! CARRIE! CARRIE! What more can I say? I was really excited about doing this poster, and I pretty much got it exactly how I wanted it. The gradient, the texture. I hate to say it, but I was quite pleased with myself. The only thing that was missing, according to Toby, was "more blood". So more blood there was, added at the top.

I wasn't actually asked to make this poster, but I was going to the screening and I really wanted to have something awesome made on the off chance that I might have been able to get Chuck Pahlaniuk to sign it. I didn't get the opportunity. Sob.

Christmas!!! I had so many half-baked ideas for this poster, but thanks to sitting down with my colleague over lunch, he helped me sort them out and this was the final idea I came up with! I'm not sure if it's obvious enough, but the shape of the city and the underground layer are meant to mimic that of a christmas tree. I actually ended up selling a few copies of this and still have a few left!

I created this as a Christmas present for someone special! It went through a few terrible looking stages before reaching this finished version! It's the first out of four that I am making, based on SEEMINGLY unconnected films, and I shall be posting them up here as I do them!

Space Bear!!! The first of three, the other two being worked on at the moment.I will hopefully have number two up and about soon, I'm currently in the process of finishing the sketching and then it's onto the ink!

Well, THANKS! if you made it to the end of all that. I will soon be setting up a facebook page for my work, where there will be more updates and also an opportunity to buy some excess prints I have from older screenings that I designed posters for. How exciting for you! How exciting for me! We can all be excited!

Off you go now.

...and then there were more posters.

Hello internet. Regular website updates re-begin now.

Just typing that is tempting fate. The ironic thing is that I've been so busy doing creative type things that I don't have the time to type it all up. So I'll tell you a little story that made me happy.

Before I went away on my trip abroad that was slightly accounted in my last post (of which there are actually photos to come...sometime), I took a late night trip to the Duke of York's cinema to pick up one of my posters that had been used to advertise one of their screenings. It was David Cronenburg's "The Fly", which was a touchy subject. Mainly because I had this idea for a design that I thought would look really damn cool, and I don't think I really achieved what I had set out to do. Which is a major issue for me.

A quote from Saul Bass - I'm afraid I don't know who created this graphic though

 This quote kind of summarises my feelings towards the whole creative process. Of course, I love it when people DO care about my work, photography or graphics or whatever, but if I'm not happy with it then I can't appreciate that other people might like it. I don't think that's special to me, I think every single person I know who puts themselves out there with their creative endeavours, painting, music, filmaking, has the same feeling.

Which brings me onto The Fly poster.

HELP ME! HEEEELLLPPP MEEEEEEEEEE!

The font is meh, the placement is meh.

And really, I was worried that the design looked like a penis instead of a fly's proboscis.. Of course, if you've seen The Fly you know it's all to do with body horror and reproduction and the such, so ACTUALLY, as Toby from the Duke's pointed out to me, it fits it quite well with the themes of the film. But it's not what I wanted it to look like. And it was made aware to me by a lot of people, in real life and on the internet, that it didn't look like what I wanted it to.

Anyway, I sidetracked myself.

I went to go and pick up this poster, spoke to a few people there and left. As I was leaving, one of the lovely staff members said "nice poster." And obviously, because I'm me, I was all like "HUH? PARDON?" and went over to him. He said it again, I said thanks and launched into a brief summary of what I didn't like about it, because that's obviously what you do when someone compliments your work.

He then replied that it was "obviously a proboscis" and that he was "a big fan" of my work. This is hands down one of the nicest things a stranger has probably ever said about my work, ever. And it made me so very happy. And that's the end of that story.

And now, here are some more pretty things I have made for the cinema recently.

She Wore Blue Velvet

Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand

These two prints were the first prints I've ever made extra copies of to sell, which hopefully might become a regular thing at the Duke's screenings. I sold about half of what I printed up, which was amazingly better than I had ever conceived of happening. So thanks to anyone reading this that bought one, and to anyone who gave me their e-mail addresses about getting larger copies of the Serenity poster, I am currently doing some research on it and will get back to you soon.

Tasty noms?

This is a menu cover I designed for the Duke's at Komedia, where they serve some damn tasty food. The menu makes it tastier, I believe.

These next two are for upcoming screenings at the Duke's at Komedia, y'all should go because again, it's a fine choice of late night films.

Thank God for the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks

What is your damage, Heather?

I had a really good time making these final posters actually, in research and in process. Mainly Heathers though, as the research involved a lot of drinking and good times.

To round off yet another post of LOOK AT ME LOOK AT WHAT I'VE BEEN DOINGness, I have made my first venture into creating title sequence animations. I have made animations before using more traditional frame by frame programs like Flash, but this was made with After Effects and was beyond fun to actually do, "fun" being a word I don't often attribute to Flash.

It's Firefly related, so it's already awesome from the get go.

Mine is an evil laugh.

Speak soon. Much love. xx