Home for Christmas :)

After a hell of a journey across the country due to extreme weather conditions, I finally made it home two days before Christmas day at 2.30am! Home was all warm and christmassy though so it was all worth it! I spent Christmas Eve helping my mother prepare a christmas eve 'picnic' utilising all the usual snacky foods into little containers and boxes. We're definitely onto a winner I think...

The classic christmas day photos; you'll be able to see why I had to keep up my family's reputation of a Christmas Table haha. 

Christmas Breakfast Table

My family know me too well; homemade hot chocolate stirrers! 

My dad's weird gifts.. 

The Christmas Table 2014

Homemade Crackers (made by Neelz Expressionz)

Christmas Din!

Spoilt :)

After a lovely day, we ended with a christmas tv marathon and a traditional 'tree present', the last present of the day hidden amongst the christmas tree branches. 

The Tonbridge Flood of 2014... 

We decided to forego our boxing day walk as the weather was despicable but once the weather had cleared up we decided to walk into town and survey the damage!

Christmas Dinner, Student Style!

Sam and I managed to convince our flat to be decidedly less humbug this year by forcing christmas upon them... The christmas decorations were amped up to the next level as we found some fake snow for the windows and hung some lights up in the kitchen which looked very cheerful! 

All the student essentials.. 

 I present to you flat 5's very first home cooked Roast Dinner! Coming from a very creative family I had to live up to the reputation and couldn't not decorate the table so after some frantic searching around these gold cards, after some alteration with decorative tape and the red cloth were a lucky find! Needless to say it was very delicious!

 

 Cheeky Jaeger Bomb and we even put our 'tree' up from last year!

Merry Christmas everyone! 

Final Book!

Final Images: 

I like the simplicity of these lines and felt it
 would be suitable next to the inside cover

Interesting element of the forest

Having decided this I then sat about working out the pagination using a mockup of my book I had made using folded paper so I could remove pages and rearrange them if I changed my mind. I also drew up a template in Photoshop using the rulers so that all my images would be in the same position and be the same size and even, when folded.

Mockup paper template

Photoshop Template

Using this I dragged all the images I wanted into Photoshop and organized them into folders, layering each half via cut so that I could mix and match them during the printing process: 

Printing: 

I was able to borrow my flatmate's printer luckily and had to work out what side the printer printed on as I was manually printing on both sides. I chose to print the cover on a semi gloss canvas card to differentiate from the inside pages and to create a professional finish. Inside I used some plain matte white card so overall the book is sturdy and well finished. 

Prints on the bottom

Binding: 

I've decided to saddle stitch the book together so I've measured a series of holes made using the compass and decided on black thread as this is neat and tidy. 

Digital Development for Uni.

I've finished for christmas now so here's some of what I've been working on!

Photoshop Development: 

Here I've started to play with the idea of mixing illustration with photography by digitally overlaying my drawings on top of my photographs using Photoshop using a variety of different filters and techniques to see what the effects were. 

Screen: Dark Areas are Translucent

The above was a happy accident with the second tree from the right; I really like the way the watercolour was has come through on photoshop. It's clearer that black or dark marks become transparent using the screen filter so I want to try and develop this idea further... 

 

I really like how these came out, the simpler lines are really striking and much more noticeable against the photo which I like; it's simplified the chaos of the more detailed drawings I've used previously. 

Exclusion: white goes blue, black goes white, similar to cyanotypes: 

 

Screen Development: 

Woodgrain:

Monochrome:

 

Print Edits: 

The following are some examples of using the prints I made the other day to see how they would react to being digitally manipulated. I really like how the words make give the image another subtle layer to them, which in my opinion adds an interesting  addition. I particularly like how the last images came out once I started cutting them up and manipulating them into an almost fairytale collage like style.