BRACKENHURST YAY !!! i love brackenhurst campus so much, i used to go to all the open days when i was younger because me and my mum and sister enjoyed wandering around the bee hives and the big gardens. i also really like the area where brackenhurst is (Southwell) and i used to go on walks around there or wed park my caravan nearby. good memories and a really pretty posh part of nottingham. id never previously considered doing murals until the past few months looking at the area where im from and identity, but i think its something id love to do because i like the idea of leaving a lasting impact on peoples memories and its nice to think of my work improving a space. i love staring at murals and seeing the brush strokes and imagining the artist plopping the paint on. this whole project is my idea of a fun time :) this page were all the basics that i have to remeber during the project or ill get CarRIED Aw ay in the whimsy of it all :0
one of the first artists i thought of as soon as i knew that the theme was flora and fauna was Florence Waters. shes an artist ive been following during her masters and shes done some really beautiful murals. i love how you can see the blending of colours in her murals, im a bit of a hater of flat colours because why WOULDN'T you blend them but maybe thats because im a very colour-oriented person. i love how she uses so many textures in her work, especially on the grass. i want my mural to me FULL of movement and suck people in to a lovely world of horses and fields, which is a big bonus of the wall being curved because it means its like a curved tv :0 i want it to be a nice happy break from all the dissertation work people will be doing in the library.
i also really like when murals work around the space, like they frame a door or a window, i think it makes the mural feel like its part of the room rather than a big sticker, and it makes me happy to think the artist used the space to the maximum. it feels PERSONAL !!!! by the looks of it im going to have to fit my design around a double door and two power pillars, but thats FUN and i like a challenge o yea. we're going to brackenhurst next thursday so ill be able to have a proper look around and take some videos of the space!!
I care a lot about the colors that go on them. I know I need to use a restricted color palette to keep it looking cohesive, and I normally work better with a strict color palette; otherwise, I get too excited and do too much. I want the colors to look like a cold, crisp, frosty day—so light blue and a peachy orange, like the sun on snow, and bright greens. But I don't know if that works with people using the library all year round, so I don't want to show multiple seasons. Or, should I just go with something more like a spring color palette, which would show off the flowers better and keep is as more vague so it doesn't look weird during the year
I went onto coolors to have a look at making up some color palettes. Normally, I just try to make up my own color palettes or create one from photos, which I still might do when we go to Brackenhurst on Thursday. I could take some photos of the surrounding area so the mirror looks like it fits in at Brackenhurst. But I want cool colors and have made a few palettes of the kinds of colors I want to use, like the crisp blues, greens, and oranges. I think the rainbow one is a bit too full-on, but I'm not going to write it off yet because I could do a more muted rainbow. I really don't want to use a lot of beige. I want to brighten up the library rather than make it seem darker, and I want it to make people feel refreshed, bright, and like a cucumber.
i had to get the first idea out of my head or i wouldnt have any room or the good ideas. the idea i had was very storybook whimsy magical becasue thats what i like even if it doesnt fit the brief very well but i needed it out my SYSTEM. i like the owl tho i love owls so much their one of my favourite animals i likke their spinny heads and i like drawing apples and cats so hopefully i can include them in my final painting too. i think badgers r hated more than they should be so i want to include them too, they are the pinicle of english animal to me and im sure theres some at brackenhurst so ill have to ask about where they live on campus. i also like turning doors into trees because it helps absord some of the awkward spaces and i think its fun if the doors made of wood big added bonus. very desperate to include southwell in the background too bc i dont think anyone else will do that with a scenery mural.
i want to include the Nottingham national flower, which is the catchfly. Even if it doesn't go in the Brackenhurst area, I like putting in things that are fun. This is the county flower, and this animal, which is probably a fox, is the county animal of Nottingham. I want to include them all because it’s nice, and it makes me think of time with Sylvanian Families when I was little. They had all the little details, like bread in the toaster, and it makes it exciting.
I think for the way I paint the mural, I don't want just flat colors. I really like when things have a smooth gradient to them, a little like how you can get on illustrator when using vectors. I think it highlights texture and movement on objects without making it look too painted today. It still keeps it looking clean and crispy and easy to understand. It also eliminates the big need for really dark lines and means that you can play around with the colors of the snow, much like I shared in my tattoo flash designs. I'm used to it, and I think it looks great in contrast with colors, especially on a bigger scale.
It was really nice because the woman who showed us around the campus was lovely and really knowledgeable she knew a lot about plants. The space isn’t as big as I thought it was. When I had looked at the brief, it seemed like there was a door in the middle, and the wall stretched out in a big semicircle. However, in person, it’s more of a quarter circle with a door in one corner. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse because, although I have a smaller area to work with, it will be quicker to paint. There are also some pipes along the wall—one runs horizontally along the bottom, and two come down vertically.
I think a way for me to get around this is by incorporating one of my original ideas. I'd like to include the underground world and how biodiversity locks in the mud, with things like plants, badgers, and voles. If people can’t see them, I think it’s important to signal that there’s a lot of biodiversity in nature underground. So, anything below the horizontal line could represent that hidden world. I really liked the idea of showing what’s happening beneath the Brackenhurst campus, including badgers that are hidden on campus, worms, rabbit dens, foxes, and lots of insects.
Since the space is smaller than I originally thought, fitting everything I want to include will make it feel a bit crowded. So, I think I need to think really carefully about the layout and how it will look with all the components up against the wall
messing around with making shapes with ink and then turning them into animals !!! ive missed drawing lol the last two projects have been textiles so its nice to do somat that isnt fabric. is also nice to do things quick because textiles take alot more planning. hedgehog and worm is my fave i think he'd make a cute little print. knristian spoke to my about how some of my work from this project, bc its so cut and dry final piece is a big painting, i can turn some parts of it into prints to get some use out of all the illustrating. i think this projects going to be my happy brain empty project when i can draw my happy flowers and then do my other projects with the whole of my brain
these are my new possible plans for the mural now ive actually seen the wall and bonus points we get PAID ABOUT 1200 BLOODY QUID hazar hazar hazar even more reason to try and get the brief yippe. i think if i did my orginial idea but chopped in half it would get way to crowded if i wanted to fit everything in so im going to have to think about the composition v v carefully. the other way i was thinking of doing it feels more graphic designy but then that means i have the power of both GRAPHIC DESIGN and illustration ON MY SIDE. i wanted to show slices of some of the ways that brackenhurst is being sustainable and biodiverse. the best ones i ould think of were the worm farm, the greater crested newt project, rose garden, bug hotel, and the wool insulation. very big fan of drawing a massiv newt think of the delicious COLOURS I COULD USE!!!! and think of all the massive bigs i could draw in the bug hotel!!!! also the vertical pipes could add to this because it will be following the same direction. horizontal pipe BOOOOOOOO but its okay i love a challenge.
I also really like these murals by Minna leunig. I love that there is a simple color palette—probably just three colors maximum—and there's a lot of space within the shapes. I’d really like to include facts about the campuses, like how many pieces of flowers there are, how many, how do you set Sarah, and so on. This composition with space allows for that, and it also means that any part from the work that is hidden underneath, where all the components are, still won't look weird. It won’t look like the final design is missing anything because it’s more like a pattern than a big picture. I’m trying to think of compositions more in terms of graphic design. It seems we're going up against graphic design students, and I don’t want to be trapped in the kind of scenic image that I was originally thinking of.
some more ideas !!!! i like the underground one but its alittle bit static :( could be BETTER.
uggo little mock up of the wall that the mural will be on with the orange being things in the way of the final design. my sketchbooks not big enough to draw my ideas to scale, so this means i can take any other the little ideas i have and plop them onto procreate to see them relative to the canvas size. much easier :)
I went to city farm to do some life drawing because I wanted to try and do the mural in my normal style, which is loose and messy, and it involves a lot of mediums. I need to find a way to translate this into wall paint, so I want to do some sketches and have something to refer to throughout the project for the style that I want the mural to be in. I drew some cows and sheep and i LOVE GEESE. id like to make some prints on this project and I also want to make some flash designs because if I don't get the mural project brief, I want to have rinsed all my drawings as much as i can. I think I'm going to turn the cockatoo drawing into a print of some sort and maybe a bigger flash design, and then some of the others. I've turned the chicken and the sheep into small flash designs and I'll include them with some from the flash designs that I've drawn at Kew Gardens.
After talking with Kristian, we decided that I needed to play more with the movement of my mural, because that’s what the murals I was using for inspiration had, and it wasn’t translating into my own compositions. I didn’t have to stick to the laws of nature—I could make the mountains move or make the hedgehogs massive, and walls didn’t need to be straight. So, I started messing around more with compositions and landed on this one as my first to take further into looking at color palettes and adding more detail into the parts I’ve recognized and included, which are:
-Bug hotel
-Hedgehog bridge
-Greater crested newt
-Badger sets
-Rose garden
-Hedgerows
-The sculpture
-Southwell in the background
This would be my final design, because there are things I could change to make it flow better. I think the top design is still one I really like; I like how big the animals are, and i think its a more fun design, it just doesn’t include as much of the diversity factors I’d like to. Maybe I can go back to that one and look at ways I could adjust it without making it look to crowded
This is the flash sheet that I made from some of my sketches at the farm, and then some past life drawings included in the way of color that I did from the first set of sketches i did. I don’t get a tattoo color a lot, and I thought this was a nice way to introduce color into my tattooing outside of uni and show how I can take sketchbook drawings and turn them into something profitable. So far, the dinosaur, the flower basket, and the chicken are claimed, and I was really hoping people would choose frogs because they’re MY favorite. I’m really happy I’ve been able to include some of this project in my tattoo work, and then I’ll be done by the end of March. I’ll be able to include them in my final, and then I just won’t be able to show them when I pitch the mural brief.
You have to excuse that I'm bad at digital art, but I wanted to test out the color palettes with the first composition that I really liked. I'd made all the color palettes with some coolors, and I just went with my favorite one to test out first. It just looks cold in comparison to how I wanted it to look. i tested the other ones just using the recolor on Procreate. It’s not perfect, but it does what I needed it to do.
Originally, I was using a dark brown to shade the lighter brown areas. I really like the burgundy color a lot with the light brown i LOVE when different colours are used next to eachother o yes. I probably wouldn't have done the sky that light without doing this, and I really like the shades of green I’ve got for the grass in the last one because I think it looks warmer and more muddy. Normally, I don’t really want colors to look muddy, but I’m happy for it to look muddy in this case because Brackenhurst is muddy. I think for this composition, I’m going to move the main house around because I don’t really like how it looks, and I’m going to include the hedgerows in the back fields just because that was a part that’s really easy to include, and is a bit part of brackenhurst biodiverity schemes.
TO DO LIST !!!!
-I need to find some scrap wood planks and test out what techniques I can do on them, especially with medium is like a motion because I want to be able to have the freedom that I would do in a sketchbook and make it scruffy and loose, I just need to find a way to translate that into a wall.
-I need to look into getting some designs printed out as prints that might be able to sell at markets and maybe look at what I could do with these prints because I like the idea of using them in textiles and things that I can sell and so maybe I could have a look at doing some of the continuous line drawings from the farm on quilts and fabric.
- I need to mess around my compositions until I can finalise a one and the colours I want to use so I can start really understanding where things are going to go and I can go to Brackenhurst and sit in the library and be in the actual room where the wall is and just see what gets in the way of the mural while I'm there.
- I need to look at some ways that I am able to present my pitch that are interesting and up to standard with the graphic design presentations presentations and us and I need to make sure mine is good.
I've got the first two designs that were booked in on the discounted flash done and then I've also had any person booking for May 3, so I won't be able to hand it in on the deadline for the mural project but I'll be able to put it in my portfolio. I'm really really happy with all the chicken looks it's probably my favourite I've ever done and I love the shade of red that she picks it's called tangerine and it's a slightly lighter orange shade of red, but it looks really good on the skin and then for the flower pot I was outlined the colours and she said she really liked how it looks and if she decides she wanted it fully coloured and then we can do that for her. I'm hoping that I can do more in the future because it's really fun and I think it's a nice way to introduce colour into in the styles of tattooing, because a lot of people stick to black.
I'm also really surprised with how popular the flash was too. It's probably the first time that I've ever posted flash and then had people booking straight away. Normally they stay my Instagram for a couple months ago I get some interest in them, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to practice the style more and see how far I can push it with it, being outlined in the kind of ink splatters of paint style. how would it looked if i used lots and lots of colours IMAGINE A BIG MERMAID :0.
because i wanted to replicate the style of my flash designs on the mural i needed to find a way to get the freehand look naturally rather than imitating it. My brain immediately went to the posca mop. P but then I realise that I have to buy lots of colours and I won't be able to mix my own colours and because im using a restricted colour palette. It would be a lot easier if I made my own mops, I knew about making mops with deodorant rollers, but this video probably explains it the best. it will probably have a little bit of dripping on it but I don't mind that and also it be interesting to bring that graffiti style into a place like Brackenhurst and make it more palatable for an area that doesn't necessarily have a lot of graffiti.
so my plan is to go to B&Q and buy lots of emulsion samples in one of the colour pallets I plan on using and then making some up since it's now on the spare wood that I got from the woodworking room.