Bad day

One of those days when nothing seems to work out, I kept trying make progress with work from a few different modules but couldn't seem to focus. I think I had got stuck in a rut and was too focused on the work I had already don so decided to try something new. I spoke to a friend that runs a screen printing business and arranged to print some t shirts over Christmas to accompany my book. I am going to go to his workshop next week and screen print some of the characters from the book. This gave me some inspiration, I wanted to work with the images from my book but find a way to make them suitable for clothing. The main character of the book is the ogre but I wanted to concentrate on some of the other characters for the screen prints and communicate the idea of escapism/hiding/running away. 

The print on the from of the t shirt will be very small so needed to be kept simple. I liked the idea of using the colour of the shirt to suggest shapes in the landscape. This helped me to keep the number of colours down to a minimum. I think I might remove the flower from this design, it seems to unbalance the composition. Because I will be using the t shirt colour as part of the image I will need to make sure the screens are lined up perfectly for the image to work. If I don't it won't just be overlapping colour on line work, it will ruin the form of the character and the tree.

in a couple of recent projects I have used characters as letters and saw an opportunity to do so here. The ogre is a perfect shape for a capital A with the book acting as the whole in the middle. I have broken up the letters more than i usually do but only on a couple of them and where i thought it looked good but maintained the integrity of the text. I wanted to use the lettering to add some context to the t shirt and make it function independently from the book. I am not sure how well this works, it may still need to accompany the book to make sense. 

I have been talking to a friend that works as a book binder who is going to show me some materials that I could use for the cover of my book as an alternative to wood. I feel that I will have to compromise too much with the wooden cover and will lose the look I was going for. The practicalities of being a functioning cover mean I would have to use wood that will not have the look I wanted. Hopefully I can find a material that I can cut and neat key hole into and create a professional looking finish.