Weekly Inspiration: Malike Favre

My favourite artist this week is the French illustrator Malika Favre.
I came across one of her pieces of work on designspiration and immediately was drawn to the bright and striking colour palette. The use of these colours coupled with the flat vector illustration compliment eachother perfectly.

My personal favourite pieces of hers are travel illustrations she created for the Kuoni France 2016 brochure - a travel company.

What I love about the pieces is the way that they look very detailed but in reality are very simple, the shapes are simple, and it is the colour used that gives the pieces the detailed appearance, particularly the piece on the left. Favre paints with shadows rather than light, leaving lots of negative space in her work. This makes the work sound dark and dull however the colours counteract this.

As well as scenes like these, Malika also illustrates a lot of figures. You can clearly see her use of negative space here and her style of illustration has led to her work being described as Pop Art meets Op Art (optical illusions) because of her skill in simplifying the piece down to the bare minimum needed.

inspiration

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - Charles Caleb Colton

The only art I'll ever study is the stuff I can steal from - David Bowie. I love this quote as I feel like it is so applicable to any artist/designer/creative - I love being inspired by different things and using it to influence my own work.

Braun v Apple

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWoprlPMBnA

Apple products heavily influenced by Braun but Braun designer Dieter Rams is pleased about it.

Designers/ Studios

Supermundane

Artist

Kitty Callaghan

Painting

Sculpture

Song

Skin Deep - Dusky

Dreams - Fleetwood Mac

Help Me Lose My Mind - Disclosure

Recording artist

Ben Howard

The 1975

Fleetwood Mac

Book

The Tenth Circle, Jodi Picoult

Poem/Poet

Erin Hanson (the poetic underground)

Quote

'Never in my life have I wanted to be cool. I'm too warm for cool, I'm too in love with it all to act apathetic. I look around at sunsets and flowers and lovers and my soul is on fucking fire. I'm on fire with my passion and wonder and laughter and culture. Why the fuck would I want to cool down?'

'It is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so deeply.'

Building

Miscellaneous

festivals, photography, travelling, music

After listing my inspirations I can clearly see that I don't have a favourite painting, sculpture or painting - so I need to expand my interests and explore more.

After this exercise we gathered everyone's inspirations under each category. I loved looking at other people's favourites as I love collecting and noting down new designers etc, I especially do this with music/songs and I would love to put this more into practice in other aspects too.

Weekly Inspiration: Jon Contino Skillshare

On Youtube I often look for free Skillshare videos as I love seeing designers actually create a piece of work, and also because youtube is free and Skillshare is not normally!
After watching the Aaron Draplin's video on logo creation I was directed to a video on a designer called Jon Contino. Originally from New York, Jon moved from Manhattan to Hudson Valley - he thinks the more relaxed life suits him better and also helps his work, as he describes himself as kind of a traditionalist.

Jon likes to do things by hand, and draw type out instead of placing it in digital software, which is something I'd like to get better at. His Skillshare video was about how to create a 'secret society' bandana for his wife's company Past Lives - which is a company that sells products which have a vintage, used vibe, perfect for his style of working - and he takes us through the process from start to finish.

Conceptualise
Jon wants to have a theme based on 'secret societies.'

Find reference material
Over the years Jon has been collecting organsiational banners or pendants and he starts dissecting them and leaning from their structure in order to create his own banner. As well as looking at the shapes and decorative edging on the banners Jon also draws from his own past designs to include in the banner piece.

Start sketching ideas
Jon advises working small, he likes working in thumbnails, which I think is a great tip as I like to start small too, and add detail in later. 
As well as this he also reminds to think of hierarchy to create a balanced design. The basic shapes get sketched out - and then he fills in the shape a piece at a time. 

Revise sketch ideas and figure out compostition
Taking the sketch into illustrator he creates shapes over the scan to bring balance to the sketch, which is a method he prefers to using tracing paper as it is more accurate and uses 10% cyan (known as non reproduction blue which can be easily taken out when scanned back in.)
Printing out the shapes Jon copies over the original sketch but much bigger so he can add in finer detail and add ink to the drawing.

Ink, scan and get ready for
scanning in the now adjusted drawing, Jon traces it and makes it ready to be printed.

From here the piece is traditionally screen printed which gives the bandana the old school feeling.

What I particularly liked about this tutorial was seeing Jon's process and how he used a mix of traditional and modern techniques, for example preferring to hand draw yet using the printer and scanner to refine his piece. I also liked how he went the extra step to ensure his work was as perfect as he could make it when hand drawing.

Visiting Professional: Radim Malinic / Brand Nu

Radim Malinic of Brand NU came in to talk to us and I love his talk, it was so great to see someone who had built their reputation for a non design background and been so successful. 

Influence - experience
inspiration - colour
information - science

Einstein - 'same process and expecting a different result is madness.'

Search - want/need
Henry Ford - if I had asked people what they wanted they would've said faster horses.

Direction - first idea/opposite.
Thinking of ideas can be hard so go with the first idea you think of and then the polar opposite of this, can lead to interesting results.

skills & knowledge - understanding graphic design is for others not you

meaning
making ideas happen - use phone on the go
miracles can happen on any size wave

Face a fear everyday. - I loved this idea as I tend to stay in my comfort zone in general I would love to push my boundaries more.

Presenting 
-explain meaning 
-think outside the box
-visual cues

Weekly Inspiration: Kitty Callaghan

I first heard of Kitty Callaghan through an i-D Vice article that was shared on Facebook. The cover photo looked really surreal and interesting, a collage of photos cleverly put together to create a scene that flowed.

The article was an interview with Kitty and it was really nice to read about her life in Australia, growing up in the country and her adult life in the city. 
What I liked particularly about the interview is that she revealed her biggest inspiration is the female body. She uses female figures in a lot of her pieces, creating fantastical worlds surrounding these figures. Nude figures are often the focus- but not in a distasteful way, giving new meaning to femininity. I also gained respect for her following her opinions on gender and why it is important to give female artists recognition. She highlights how women are still seen in a sexist light and that it is rare to hear a man referred to as a male artist, where as women can be labelled as female artists a lot - particularly in the music world. Her feminist views on life clearly come across in her work and I love how she makes the female form her focus and recurring theme, showing the beauty and strength of women.

Her actual work method was fascinating to me as collage is not something I am too familiar with or able to do. Using a combination of found imagery and photos, textures and paint, she creates nostalgic images. Her secret to this is something really original that I found really inspirational. Kitty often visits a camera shop near to her to raid the photos that have never been claimed - often finding pictures from the 70's which she uses in her work often. Her resourcefulness is something I have really taken on board, showing that found imagery can come from anywhere and all you have to do is ask to get free, useful stuff that would otherwise go to waste.

What I find most inspirational about Kitty is the way she has taken a method used often her in primary school art classes, so a skill she has honed over the years, and adapted to become a successful artist in her own right. She works with fashion brands often, for example Elle and Woolmark, due to her focus on the female body, as obviously fashion has the same focus.

Something I really want to do after finding out about Kitty is experiment more with collage as I have never really had the opportunity or felt I had the composition skills for it as I am used to digital work. I am also really inspired to take my own photos to use as this is a method Kitty uses often, using her friends to take photos and incorporate into her work.

Weekly Inspiration: Graphic Means

I came across this Graphic Means trailer on Creative Review.

The trailer gives an insight into the coming film, which focuses on the processes used in graphic design before the invention of desktop publishing.
I found this so interesting as obviously I am from the digital generation who has grown up with computers and the way I have learnt graphic design is through Adobe software, primarily during A Levels where our course was digitally based. During foundation year I started discovering more hands on techniques where at one point we experimented with Letraset.

From the looks of the trailer, the film will be a detailed insight into the hands on world from the 1950's to the 1990's - the age before digital computers. I have so much respect for designers that worked in this period, the amount of work needed to create a piece of work is astonishing, as the processes were long winded and often didn't turn out the way they were intended. In comparison to the way I create designs on Illustrator and Indesign etc, where I can quickly draw and delete designs in a matter of seconds, the original processes of typesetting and paste up design could take days to reach a final piece. The skills needed and gained through the years would be invaluable nowadays, whereas anybody with a computer can create a design now.

One part in the trailer features Malcolm Garrett, a designer and educator, who reaches for his laptop and states 'the amazing thing is that this is your studio now', meaning that everything you need is contained in a laptop. This is both amazing - showing the depth of technological advancement we have reached in such a short space of time, enabling us to work quickly and easily within our laptops - and a bit sad as most of the processes used to design in those days are in decline or dead. The old ways of design can be seen as an art form really as only a few require the skills needed to use these processes/machinery. 
This has inspired me to get out of my computer and be less of a 'mac monkey', and start looking at more analog techniques instead of relying on my computer software.