Clare Caulfield

Clare Caulfield

Came across her work at the Yorkshire gallery in the Piece Hall, Halifax.
I really liked her work and it reminded me a bit of more sophisticated drawings of my continuous drawings of buildings.
All my drawings so far have been fine liner pen drawing but I think that they would translate well into etches like these!

Saltire

 I immediately recognised this as an arcade in Leeds. Somehow she has really managed to capture perspective but not in an architectural way, it is still inaccurate and has character.

Leeds Archade

One of the first continuous line drawings I did last year was sat on these railings, drawing the shops on the left and the entrance to Kings College Cambridge (as shown here). I like how there are blocks of colour... not too bright. Also there is still character in this piece. I like how it has captured how gloomy Cambridge by here which is created texture on the etching plate i guess.

Cambridge

 I really like that she draws in different places, Europe and America. I have drawn a view of Venice from a holiday I went on and appreciate how complicated it is capturing the water and the magical atmosphere. Her inclusion of colour creates a sense of life and beauty. The tone of the blues and pinks particularly creates a very vibrant effect. Maybe this is something that I need to start including. 

Venice

 This has inspired me to not just draw using fine liners, that I could perhaps also use coloured pencils with watercolour as shown here. This creates quite a naiive effect but it works because Caulfield understands the basics of image making so she can really pull it off.

Paris

Open University Work Experience

Milton Keynes Open University Work Experience


Early starts for me. Took 50mins-1.5 hours to get there which meant waking up at 6 in the morning to be at the desk for 8.00 (this alone killed me).

I was in the Graphic Media Designer department (which are higher up than Art workers). It seemed a very complex hierachy. GMD's also had a lot of variety to their work. It can range from designing and creating a poster to moving text boxes around to update textbooks (tedious).

It was really nice how much time they put into having me there for Work Experience. I was the first work experience student for years and years. They had everything prepared for me and spent time out of their working day to look out for me. They said it was nice to have someone who was obviously so inspired by Illustration to inspire the people in the office because after a while it just becomes tedious and boring in the office setting. People who work in the university seem to stay there for a long time which apparently is unusual for a design career.

In the first few days there was an Illustrator called Barry Patterson who was friendly to me. He was hired as an artist rather than a graphic designer and he said that I was right in thinking that it is very restrained and uncreative here. He said this is the first job he has had that isn't free lance as he sold paintings but also worked for advertising. He said that advertising got too stressful and took the fun out of image making for him so he wanted to work somewhere which wasn't commercial and was actually to help other people.

 They decided to set me a brief to occupy/test me throughout my Work Experience. I have 5 days to read an article about different ways to express yourself and create 3 different (better) illustrations for this chapter. The article was originally a lithograph print in grayscale with one colour (teal). I was told I could use any colours I wanted because it wasn't a "real" brief but I wanted to keep to that brief. I thought it would be a good chance to be restricted and work on gaining a better understanding of shading and tones. I chose a magenta as my colour though because apparently that is very popular within textbooks and stand out more.

I did my normal thorough reading of the article picking out different parts and making notes. This took up the first afternoon. They were quite shocked by this as they literally skimmed it and chose something to discuss with me in 5 mins. I guess this is important when you have lots of different projects to juggle, you want to be as efficient as possible.

I then went home and tried to create roughs. For the first time I understood why my parents do work at home...because; you want to, you need to get it done to crack on the next day. This was very quick turn around for me to process the article and respond to it.

It was interesting because apparently the guy who was looking out for me actually had a job of drawing out roughs to pitch ideas for years!

Some of the ideas were totally shit and there were really lame obvious uncreative ones I really wanted to avoid. It was interesting when I briefed the guy because he didn't pass any judgement on the quality of my ideas. I guess this is because when they are hired in the office they all just accept that people are good enough to be there because they are hired. He just wanted to make sure I was on track. At this point I only had 2 ideas but he suggested getting them done and hoping getting in the swing would generate another idea. I was allowing myself one day to get each design finished.

Of course the image that i wanted to draw was not already for a photograph so I had to improvise. I had to find some reference imagery to go off. Chris introduced me to copy paper which is semi-transparent but not so much as tracing paper. This meant that I could use the reference imagery underneath for body language  but customise it.

I then could use my acquired graffiti skills (coincidence that this came up!) to create a pice for the wall. I know that this isn't a developed piece of graffiti which would be respected in the graffiti world as the lettering wasn't of consistent forms but it does the trick. I wanted to write something not too lame and a core message from the text.

This is an example of how amazing Copy paper is with overlaying designs.

In the office they don't really use analogue forms and are whizzes at Photoshop and Illustrator and very happy to teach me. It was really valuable having a few days and solid time to experiment on Photoshop. For example here I had to develop good understanding of layers and could experiment with different textured brushes and opacity.

I had to bring my own laptop in to create the images with my Wacom because the ones at the uni were encrypted. 

Here I needed to consider composition to create this effectively. It was difficult creating something so simple to be in the foreground!

I am really satisfied with the development of characters in this fashion. Definitely a method to consider in the future.

 Throughout this time nobody came over and asked what I was doing. The office was basically totally silent the whole day. People were either plugged into earphones or just concentrating and they didn't seem to help each other. I went round and had a nosey at some peoples work when I needed a breather. It was really interesting that the GMD's were the highest and most talented and experienced people and expert at what they do. Some of the other employees took off their earphones and listened to the gems of wisdom they were telling me. An example of this is Glen Darby who has created the natural geographic animal posters since forever. He also told me that the way forward is to use Pixologic and Z Brush to create 3D animals as you can then sell these to films and there are just more options. 

I had a stress trying to come up to the 3rd piece but I was determined to have everything done in time. In fact I ended up going really speedy creating the final piece as I had a much better understanding of Photoshop.

This design is very important that the lighting is right and the perspective is right or the image could easily look bad. It took quite a lot of fiddling.

I got this printed off at different sizes to figure out how light or dark I it would print out as it is a very dense image. It also annoys me that the floor is more brown than grey for the gradient but neither me nor Chris could figure it out...

This is the first time I have really done full bleed illustrations, especially digitally. there was a lot to consider, especially keeping them all looking similar as a set.

We then put them into the InDesign documents, fiddling around with which text would accompany it and the size of the imagery.

This was the final product. It got printed out on a beautiful lithographic printer that they have in the office. We then took it down to the cutting room. We then guillotined everything. He was telling me how crucial it is to not fuck up the guillotining if you have promised a certain amount of outcomes. 

Then we cut the presentation board to size and spray glued the backs. He said how important presentation was for pitching your ideas and everything has to level and equal as you only get one chance to stick it down. 

We also discovered that a page number was wrong and he was disgusted and re-printed everything because he said that if I take it to an interview I don't want to be disregarded as sloppy because that is not a good skill to have as a designer.

Chris also acted out what a mass printer is like when you are getting books printed. He said the best thing you can ever do is make friends with the person printing your work. This includes owning up to your responsibilities but also means that if it is the printers mistake they will own up for it too. The printers print so fast and so many that soooo much money and waste is on the cards.

This is an example of how the work prints out. The colours are so that universally the colours should match up so that everything will be printed the way that you design it.

I am very happy that I finished not only in time but early. It wasn't looking hopeful when I didn't even have my 3rd design but I did it!!

Nobody had any spare errands/tasks for me because they were all pretty much going on holiday so he set me another task.

There are art directors within the university. He wanted me to find work and create a mood board which I could be briefed on to create my illustration. Its not very good and there are ethical issues associated to this but it is common that people are told to do different aspects from different illustrators specifically but it is cheeper than contacting the illustrators directly, to have someone in house creating the work.

At the end of this work I have decided that I really never ever want to work in an office. I found it very uncreative and restricting. I don't really like working in open spaces and in front of people (hence I favour working in my bedroom rather than at uni) but also it was so silent and dead. I could imagine very quickly becoming unhappy and beginning to not enjoy image making. 
Also I can think of nothing worse than editing other peoples work and just adding images into documents rather than being able to create them new! I sat in a briefing of a science module and all the work that was being given was just small bits of editing...
However it was a very valuable experience being shown what work is like in the real world and what opportunities are around other than free-lancing. I also really enjoyed the challenge of answering a brief and creating imagery for a chapter. It wasn't the work that I was set I didn't enjoy, more the environment...