Gardens open day!

If you are near Winchcombe today it’s our gardens open day
I’m taking my camera (it’s like an extra limb on my body these days), gonna have a jolly good nose around other peoples gardens and grab a cream tea along the way.
Doing a sun dance now which appears to be working! Hope it stays that way til 5, rain has been forecasted though so it could all go to a bag of worms later on…..let’s stay positive!!

Recon mission at Sudeley Castle

I work up in the cafe at Sudeley Castle, It’s been my summer job for the last 5 years but I haven’t taken the time to look around the place lately. I went up and had a nose around, and it’s a good job I did because stuff has changed. At least now if anyone asks me anything about the Castle I should know what they are talking about!
I took my camera with my as I would hate to miss a good opportunity and here are the results (:

https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Slowly getting there….

At some point in the near future I am hoping to upload some photo’s I took at Sudeley Castle when it was nice weather.  I still haven’t worked out if there is a better way to upload a photo album, instead of individually.

Double check before you leave!

I went to Boots yesterday and got some photo’s developed with their 24 hour service.  When I went to collect them today I didn’t bother counting them out as I ordered 257 photo’s. I saw there were 4 folders full of pics and thought they must be all there but when I got home I found only 200! Where are the other 57?? Luckily when I phoned Boots up they said they would reprint them and post them to me. Thank goodness for that! I would have liked them all in one go, but it’s kind of them to sort it out so easily for me.  Thanks for fixing  your muck-up Boots! (:

An unusual alphabet

This was my final major project at foundation.

I began looking at Arabic typography and Islamic designs, I think what interested me was how beautiful their calligraphy is, and how alien and unrecognisable it is to the western world.  After many different ideas I came up with this one. It is a cross between an alphabet and a kaleidoscopic, Islamic design (I guess it would be classed as a ding bat typeface).

The basics of how I created this is as follows:
I took 1/8 of a circle and arranged different type faces in the same letter in that area.

I then duplicated and rotated 8 times to create a circle, much like a Kaleidoscope creates it’s patterns.

By doing this for each letter I turned something we all know into something unrecognisable and unfamiliar. If you look very closely you can work out what each letter is, however there are some red herrings! What you might assume is the letter X is in fact the letter K.
This was the final piece that was displayed in the exhibition.  This project was mostly done digitally on photoshop and illustrator. I don’t like being digital, I know it sounds odd but I like hand made things. I get more satisfaction out of it.  So to make myself feel better I screen printed the final thing (:  It actually made life easier as well because I screen printed it on an A1 sheet, seeing as I was only in foundation at the time it saved me a lot of money on printing….

Sorting through old boxes

I found this little gem whilst looking through some things on my shelf. It’s a little rose for letterpress. I put a penny next to it to show how small it is. I have no idea where it came from but I’m sure I will find a use for it somewhere

The end of the year, the beginning of summer

So it’s the beginning of summer and the end of my first year at uni. It doesn’t feel much like summer though. I look out of my window now and all I see is torrential rain and strong winds blowing the trees.

Evidence of a true British Summer!

I guess it’s a good time to start my rainy day projects.  The first on the list is this blog
I want to have a place to show my creative projects, thoughts and ideas, as well as somewhere to ramble on!

My nice, ordered desk….wont stay this way for long!

I work in the company of my fish (on the right of the desk), I’ve had them for about 2 years. They’re golden white mountain cloud minnows and I’ve grown quite attached to them. They share their tank with about 50+ snails, I can’t seem to keep the population under control!