Category: VIC105

Week 1: The Letter A on Branding/Books

One of our first tasks was to take time to look around our environment at home and find interesting examples of our chosen letter. My three collages above show the letter A I found on Star Trek books and DVDs, on packaging, and other miscellaneous As.

Two of the Star Trek ones are actually the Starfleet logo, which is called a Delta, but despite this association with the Greek letter (the equivalent, of course, of the Latin alphabet’s letter D), the book which features the first one uses it in place of the letter A in Picard. It fits well and it is immediately clear what the word says, despite a symbol being used in place of a letter.

The packaging As are from Fab ice lollies (top left), Carex hand sanitiser (top right), Alpro soya milk (bottom left), and a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. My favourite of these is the chocolate orange one, as I like the contrast of the dark blue and the orange, and the fact that the A resembles orange peel is very effective advertising.

The other As are from a range of book and video game covers. I really like the first one, as the colour scheme, despite the book’s location being Italy, reminds me of the Swedish flag. I like this collection of images as they show a range of typefaces being used, from sans serif and serif to script typefaces.

Week 1: 3D Letter A

We were tasked with creating a 3D version of the letter we had drawn. I began to see the problem with choosing such an elaborate shape, as I knew I would have difficulty in creating this out of cardboard, which was my chosen medium. However, I took the challenge and began to create this. I started by drawing the shape on two sheets of cardboard, making tabs for folding as I went along, and then I cut it out. It took a while to assemble using masking tape, but I eventually finished and moved on to decorating it. I chose to use tin foil as I felt that if I painted it, the heavy layers of tape would still be visible, so I wanted something which would both cover the letter and create an effective finish. I believe I achieved this successfully, and whilst I had difficulty in creating this piece, I am happy with the end result.

Week 1: Chosen letter in more detail

For our next task, we were told to choose one of the letters we had drawn, and to draw it again, in more detail. I chose to draw one I had based off a rune. The rune is called Enkeli, or the Angelic Power rune, from the Mortal Instruments book series by Cassandra Clare, and I had noticed that placing the rune on its side made it almost resemble the Greek letter alpha (α), so I chose this letter to draw as I liked that it had a bit more background information, and was simple yet effective as my chosen letter. These have been drawn in charcoal, pencil, fine drawing pen, and pro marker (with an outline in fine pen). I had a lot of fun drawing these, as runes are very interesting for me to draw.

Week 1: Drawing different letter shapes

Our first task was to create as many different forms of our chosen letter as we could think of, within the time limit. I chose the letter A, not just because of my name, but also because I could think of lots of different styles of the letter to draw. I had a lot of fun doing this task, and found that I knew more ways to draw the letter A than I had previously thought.