OWT 'Reflections' + update

I have updated my website with the new work that I produced for OWT Creative's zine 'Reflections' which is on sale now: http://owtcreative.bigcartel.com/product/owt-2-reflections

The zine features work by the OWT team plus various contributors and is only £5 so it's well worth the money!

Also I'm currently doing an internship for Fantastica, a wonderful independent clothing brand from London: http://www.fantasticalondon.com I'm working hard on lots of drawings for them for the future so look out for those!

Playing around

Today I've been playing around with backgrounds for my cardboard city just using Photoshops various techniques. I really like the results but I think they look best smaller as there are some really raw edges on the cardboard but that could add some homemade charm. Anyway here they are:

Streets and Houses continued..

I've been playing around with printing the house drawings and arranging them in a 3D format to photograph but I still don't have a camera so I can't show that yet but I've been experimenting with the back of the houses as I mounted them onto cardboard and I decided to use that side as well. I painted windows in black to make really simple houses and scanned and arranged:

I love the different tones and shades created by the cardboard, it creates a really nice new setting for some work.

interesting find

I found these while I was looking through my computery files:


They're all a3 but the white on white is hiding that. The cat is my neighbourhood friend Trouble who sadly moved away last year but I took these photos and placed her in my versions of her favourite places around my house/garden. Not sure what I think of them, I quite like them but I'd like to print and add to them.

More buildings

Some more building collage/painting type images. I'm really enjoying creating these colourful worlds of grand but precarious looking houses. I'm hoping to make some kind of set using the images, I just need to fix my printer as all the buttons melted into 1 and I can no longer copy things...anyway here is the image:

A little drawing

After watching The Illusionist (see my journal blog for a post about this wonderful film) I was inspired by the beautiful drawings of Edinburgh's buildings so I did a bit of painting/drawing myself from some photographs that I took in Prague. I've been playing around on Photoshop and here's a little image of what I made:

What an exciting time

Today I found out that 2 pieces of my work are featured in the most recent issue of online magazine Blanket; The Gone But Not Forgotten issue (available to buy from Blanket magazine for £1.30, bargain!). This is fantastic as I'm on the way to getting my work noticed!

ContainerPlus ME

Last week I made the big (not really) journey down to London to go and see ContainerPlus for some tea, cake and creative talk. I was very nervous for absolutely no reason as it was all very casual and friendly and Luise and Patricia were both absolutely wonderful. There were 3 other guests graphic designer Deniz Gustavsson Atasel and duo Kerry Hughes and Katie Macgregor (also known as Forager) it was great to show my portfolio to some new faces and meet some new and exciting creative people!

Here are some photos (taken from the ContainerPlus blog)

Luise showed us the ContainerPlus portfolio which was huge but also amazing and full of projects I would love to work on! A very lovely trip. Also see my Barbican blog post in my journal blog.

Competition

Competition entries for a competition with Tigerprint studio; the brief was to design a character for male personalised greetings cards. I did a walrus:

Scary world

SO it's all over, I have finished my degree! I felt it was necessary to do a short post about everything from the past few weeks as I've been silent on the blog front.

The degree show was a complete success, I somehow pulled it all together and looked professional which was good and I was really happy with the work that I had on display so all very positive!

I got my final results last week and I got a First which is amazing, I'm so proud of myself (my parents have told literally everyone they walk past) so all that hard work paid off and now I need to work twice as hard to get myself a career!

Within one week of being alone in the world I have managed to break and then repair my website:

http://www.emmabrownowl.com (it's worth a visit!)

but I've also found out that I'm being featured in Flux magazine so everybody go and buy it tomorrow! Let's hope everything stays positive.

Wide Sargasso Sea photo and text developments

Now that the animation is finished I wanted to try some flat pieces; I would have liked to have made a book but time really isn't on my side so I've just been developing some photos that I took by adding in the text. I photographed the strips of text (printed onto tracing paper) and cut away the backgrounds so that parts of the text were left then used photoshop to layer and lighten etc. I quite like the images; the text picks up the colours on some and isn't too overpowering; it fits well with the content as it looks like smoke and the big scene in the book is a fire.

VIDEO! + the end is near :(

I have FINALLY done my Wide Sargasso Sea stop frame after a week or so of testing and making, this is the unedited version:

Wide Sargasso Sea unedited from Emma Brown on Vimeo.

I'm very happy with it, I would have liked to have done more text but the set began to deteriorate and the light was going funny because of this but I am happy with it. The colours of the images look beautiful, I'm really glad I didn't end up ripping them (which was my original stop-frame plan). I need to edit and then possibly create some extra piece to go with it.

Having a slight panic as final hand in is on FRIDAY (oh no) but I think everything's under control...probably not though.

Wide Sargasso Sea Moving Image Tests

Over the past week I developed my Wide Sargasso Sea imagery by using projections and silhouettes to try and express a narrative that was easier to understand, I was really happy with the photos, they had exactly the kind of look and feel to them that I wanted to capture the inner turmoil of the girl in the book. I wasn't sure where to take them next though and John suggested I try some video work but through the shape of a little girl. I've been experimenting over the past 2 days using After Effects (never used it before eek!) and Photoshop to see what the images would play like through the shape of a person.

The images:
This is just a sequence of all of the images together that I quickly made using iMovie; all of the photos are portrait which means that they don't actually fit into the normal dimensions for video but I'm still going to try and make it work:

Wide Sargasso Sea experimentation from Emma Brown on Vimeo.

Test 1:
I did this quick test using the video above and a path on After Effects, the quality is really terrible though and I wasn't able to choose where the mask covered so it's in the same position on every photo which isn't something that I wanted.

Wide Sargasso Sea experimentation 1 from Emma Brown on Vimeo.

Test 2:
This was also using After Effects and this time I used the actual photos and inserted them as a sequence, the timing is something that I couldn't work out which is why it goes incredibly fast and then is just black at the end. This is obviously a HUGE problem and again I wasn't able to position the mask myself and it always ends up being too big. The photos are pixelated again so all in all not going too great.

Wide Sargasso Sea experimentation 3 from Emma Brown on Vimeo.

Test 4:
I managed to slow the time down on this one and the silhouette is stretched across the screen but this doesn't really improve things, the quality is terrible:

Wide Sargasso Sea experimentation 4 from Emma Brown on Vimeo.

Test 5:
After some unsuccessful attempts using After Effects I decided to just try out the mask on Photoshop; this meant that I could position it onto the photo wherever I wanted and I was able to introduce text into the images. I don't like the size of the text on this sequence it's way too small. I slowed it right down though and the photos seem to be a bit clearer.

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Wide Sargasso Sea experimentation 6 from Emma Brown on Vimeo.

Test 6:
I edited the text on this to make it larger and more spread out on some, the photos are going quicker but the text is a bit slow. I do like the images though, they look really good through the silhouette.

Wide Sargasso Sea experimentation 5 from Emma Brown on Vimeo.

Wide Sargasso Sea experimentation

Over the past few days I've been experimenting further with my new project. Yesterday I took some photos using the under lit contraption in the photography studio which produced some nice results. I printed the layered images onto baking paper and the slight translucency to them meant that I was able to layer them on the lighting and photograph them. Here's a link to most of the photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46995107@N07/4581265019/

Tomorrow I'm heading home to try some projections and photography (maybe a film if I can process things in my mind quickly enough) and try to make the project a bit more developed.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Last week I started a new project, I wanted to squeeze one more in before the END (oh god) so I chose to set myself another literature based brief. I'm responding to a section of the book 'Wide Sargasso Sea' by Jean Rhys which is a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre which is set in Jamaica/Dominica and deals with issues such as slavery, insanity and Obeah. I've been looking at the first section of the book which is written from the point of view of Antoinette (the main character and Mr Rochesters mad wife in Jane Eyre) as a young girl. I picked out some of the most visual parts and began creating simple almost childlike paintings on white tissue paper using watercolour. I wanted to take imagery and split it into simple shapes and colours and I intend to use the paintings to create layers. I want to try and use acetate and possibly even projections (inspired by Katrina Currie's wonderful Beachhouse photography) and later incorporate text and maybe some silhouettes. I also had the idea to try and create a layered image in some form of box using acetates, possibly lit from behind.

Today I photographed the paintings and I've been playing around with the colours and layering in Photoshop, something I've recently been using a bit more since Chekhov. I'm quite pleased with some of the results, there are 3 main scenes; mountains/sea/'tree of life', the garden and the burning house. Here are my favourite images from today: