Christmas Patterns

Christmas in excitingly not too far away and to get myself in the mood I drew up a couple of christmassy patterns involving my favourite christmas time animals. I have been very neglectful of my blog and own work recently but have been finding it hard to find the time from my 9 to 5 work I've been doing, which I unfortunately can't post on here. I know its a few months away yet but my new years resolution will definitely be to spend more time working on my own projects.

A bird from A to Z

I've been wanting to get back to the drawing board for a while now so to get started I have given myself a nice little project, I am drawing a bird whose name begins with every letter of the alphabet. Here is last nights work of A, B and C, and in time I will draw the rest right up to Z. I'm always afraid of adding a bit of colour to my drawings so have decided to add colour to every bird to try and get more comfortable with it as I don't want to be stuck in black and white forever. I'm not sure what I will do with the drawings (a zine, a print, ???) so any suggestions would be much appreciated.

want... want... want

In need of some rabbit food this morning I went to our local pet shop only to find these cuties, I can tell you it was very hard to walk away and I now am extremely cat broody.

Amelia's magazine

A little while ago I was browsing twitter (as you do) and came across a tweet in need of some illustrations to go with a review of a folk night. I had no plans for my Sunday evening so decided to get in touch. There were a variety of different folk acts that needed drawing and I decided to draw Juan Zelada. I listened to a couple of his tracks which I enjoyed and he seemed like a nice fellow, so here it is, my drawing of Juan, I didn't spend as much time on it as I normally would as there was a short deadline but I think he turned out ok.

Berlin

It seems like a long time ago now, as so much has happened since, but in mid July I went on a short break to Berlin and had a very wonderful time. We tried to see as much as we could of the city in the four days that we spent there and I went a little snap happy so thought I should share some of the photos. I found all the graffiti and wall art very inspiring and everywhere you went there was so much to see. We also spent a sunny day at the zoo, I went a bit crazy for the bears of all varieties, black, brown, polar, sloth and sun. I'm looking forward to start drawing from the photos of all the animals from the zoo.

tweet

I received a lovely write up today from the wonderful Clare and her fabulous Tweet blog, check it out here.

Graduate Fashion Week

So the time has come and I am finally finishing my degree...it's been a great four years and I will be sad to leave but equally excited to start the next chapter of my life. Here are a few pictures from my stand at Graduate Fashion Week in Earls Court last week.

Youtube

Here's my animation on a little bit of a larger scale....I uploaded it on youtube so take a look

Self Promotion

Here's a little package i'm putting together to go on my stand at my final show for a little self promotion. Included within the brown paper bag will be my business card, a button badge and a small A7 postcard.

If I have any left over may send some out so if anyone might want one send your address to alexandra.embleton@hotmail.co.uk and will try and save you one.

Perk Up Your Ears

As part of the promotion for my zine and record player I created this animation. I am not an animator and don't know much about it but I knew my way around imovie so created this stop motion film. It is created almost entirely out of paper and took me quite a while to cut all the characters out but I think it is pretty fun. The animation has a main story line which focusses on social interaction with music, it then goes on to show teasers of four animations which would be (theoretically) available to download when you purchased the fanzine and are in conjunction with the new release section of the zine. They promote the four bands who have albums being released within the month of June. I think I enjoyed this part of my project the most, even though it was the most stressful and I almost lost a finger to it. Hope you like it :)

The Animation Affiliation

This is a small zine I created in conjunction with my animation. The information within is supposed to let people know where they can get there downloadable animations.

Cardboard Record Player

So the zine is done but I had to think of a way to package it...and again try and get younger people to want to buy and play physical music...so what did I come up with? A cardboard record player...that's right. It's fully working, I admit the sound isn't brilliant but there is sound. The box is made completely from cardboard, apart from the motor and a wooden axis. It runs of a battery pack and is pretty cool if I do say so myself. Had a lot of fun with a soldering iron to put the motor together.

Keep Your ears Wide Open

So here it is, the time has come and all my university work is pretty much finished. Its been a good, and long and stressful year but I am pretty pleased with the outcome. The main part of my project was to create a zine (it's turned out more like a magazine now) to try and promote people into buying music rather than downloading and to also try and shop in independent record stores rather than visiting high street chains or shopping online. Here's a selection of some of the pages.