You know when you read a word so many times it doesn’t seem like a word anymore?
Well that’s where I’m at now with this bird.

Today’s final assessment day on my degree, which is pretty mad.
This week has been a little odd, what with doing my last hand in on monday, and then this last assessment today, which has been why I haven’t posted quite so much this week. I’ll be back on it next week though.

Anyway, we each have to design a banner for our final show in a few weeks, which has to be handed in today (I say design, but we were given a template on which we could change images and the content of the text, that is all).
Wasn’t quite sure what to put on it really, so went with the frames of one of the animations I created this module. Which conveniently diveded up perfectly into the grid that came with the template.

(As much as I wish that brush stroke was actually on the banner, it is merely there to remove my phone number)

Yesterday I handed in all my final university work, and after friday I’ll be finished with the main part of my Illustration course. There’s still a few bits and pieces going on that I’m getting involved with (there’s been talk of maybe having a little exhibition between a few of the illustrators at the DaDa Bar in Sheffield, which would be awesome, as I love tha place and all it’s Thornbridge Ales).
Along with that there’s the whole final show and Chophouse competition to get on with.

Anyway, this is the little self portrait I did for the front of my portfolio, which I will probably upload a version of once I’ve gone through it properly.

Sketches of Rick Deckard for the Spectacle Issue I did a while back.

Yesterday I recieved my copy of Spectacle Magazine that I’d done some Illustrations for.
It’s a really nicely made magazine, Jeff did a great job designing it, and the whole set of 7 of them, it’s definitely how film magazines should be, no adverts, just articles and visuals.

Hopefulyl I’ll be able to get a copy of the 2001 issue Illustrated by Matt Clough (who I should thank for taking the photos of my issue) at some point, I definitely want one of those seeing as I can’t get the entire set.

Pretty busy weekend putting together final hand in presentations, documents and portfolio for monday.

Not going to have the time to do any new drawings for a couple of days I fear, but here’s an animation I did a while ago when I was working up my Lear project and never got around to posting.

Picked up my Ed Lear flickbook today, well worth the wait for it.

Picked up a few issues of Nobrow a while back and neve got round to posting about them, so here goes.

This is Nobrow 5, and it’s really damn beautiful, it’s basically a collection of really nice Illustrations on a theme, and the theme of this one was “A Few of My Favourite Things”, and it’s quite possibly one of my favourite things.

It was really hard to chose which Illustrations to chose for this, but I ended up going with ones by Nishant Choski, Sarah Young and Ben Newman.

Choski’s Illustrations really appeal to me, they’re really bold colour and really nice heavy line, which is everything I love really, they’re just so nice, and they work so well in this gridded format.
Sarah Youngs piece was one of the first I saw in my friends copy of the book, the colouring in it is amazing, and the really brilliant shapes of the people are just some of the many things I love about this one.
Ben Newman’s piece was the one thing I instantly knew I wanted to include here, not only do I love everything about it (there’s some sweet aliens and monsters and a vampire in there) but also he was right up there with my favourite of the speakers from Offset 2013 a few weeks back, both of his talks were great, I thoroughly enjoyed him talking about how great TMNT was.
Also, he can hula hoop like nobody’s business.

The Self
As you wake up each morning, hazy and disoriented, you gradually become aware of the rustling of the sheets, sense their texture and squint at the light. One aspect of your self has reassembled: the first-person observer of reality, inhabiting a human body.

As wakefulness grows, so does your sense of having a past, a personality and motivations. Your self is complete, as both witness of the world and bearer of your consciousness and identity. You.

This intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience. But it is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel. Some thinkers even go as far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self.