Research
Peter Strain
Peter Strain is a digital illustrator who lives in Belfast who has won a Communication Arts Award for his work. Most of his work is inspiration from music, films and social/political things. His work is styled as drawing something and having big bold letters surrounding it or sometimes using the words as part of the drawing that say some things about what it is from, some of these drawings usually having some humor to them and others having a more serious tone to them. He has been commissioned by companies like BBC, Adidas, Harry Potter etc.
This is a piece he did on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, all of the text put together makes up a bunny, which had a running skit in the movie as being a killer bunny. The most noticeable piece of text is at the bottom left which tells the viewer what the name of the movie the piece is based on is called. Different parts of the bunny have some humorous quotes from the movie, several quotes on the bunny are in reference to the drawing of the scene with the 2 nights at the bottom like “Tis but a scratch” “It’s just a flesh wound” “Im invincible” and “I’ll bite your legs off” all of these lines said by the black knight as he gets his limbs chopped off in a fight.
This is a poster he did for the Japanese version of the ring’s 20th anniversary, it features Sadako Yamamura, the main antagonist of the Ring climbing out of the well that has been integrated into the VHS, all of these are connected into the movie as the plot of the ring is a cursed video tape that shows Sadako climbing out of a well, the distortion on the tape also adds to referencing it as the tape when watched in the movie has some distorting and glitching effects.
Jessica Hische
Jessica Hische is a lettering artist and author and has been able to work for many well known brands like Facebook, Penguin books, New York times, Apple etc for around 15 years. She has travelled around the world somewhat to do speeches at creative conferences and colleges. She is based in Oakland in California
This is the cover of a book called “How to raise a reader” that is written by 2 editors of the new york times Pamela Paul and Maria Russo. Jessica was commissioned to help the cover of the book tie into art by using colours and re illustrating the characters in the interior in her own style. In Jessica’s spare time she says she likes to help others find fulfillment in work like she has so working on a book like this would have been enjoyable for her probably.
Jessica also makes fonts that companies can buy and use for their own purpose, she does fonts that can be used for a range of things. one of her fonts, called Brioche, is a fancy type of font that would be used for anything old timey or for something fancy like a wedding or to put on the menu of a cocktail menu to give that extra touch to make it look better than if someone used some normal font.
One of her fonts called Tilda was a font that was used in a romance drama movie in 2012 called Moonrise Kingdom, it’s creation was apparently inspires by director Wes Anderson’s aesthetic from La Femme Infidéle. Tilda is a formal looking Font that would be used on something like an invite to a fancy party or event. She had made 2 different sized versions of the font, Grande and Petite, to preserve it’s qualities for when it is used for big or small text.
Presentation
Matt Griffin
Matt Griffin had done a presentation of his work at the OffsetDublin 2019 to talk about his work, Matt likes to describe his work place as a sort of playground, meaning as when you would go to a playground as a kid you would have fights, fall over but also learn and grown there too, all relating to how he feels his work does to him. He shows off how there’s things that as an illustrator that he wanted to do but throughout doing them he gets frustrated and gives up halfway through, similar to how many artists may feel when doing works of their own, he had been commissioned to draw a stormtrooper and despite loving the series he only partially drew half of the helmet even after planning it through.
He talks about one of his works he created inspired by Pan’s Labyrinth the whole way through he was thinking that it was terrible but he didnt know it was going to turn out to be one of his most famous pieces, he has relate twice to people on how they would think similarly and is telling them that by the end it might be better than what you think of it. It was so good that it was used as the official cover art for the special Blu Ray/ DVD edition of the movie
This was a texture that Matt had created just by using ink and water, he said when creating it he just starting swiping without looking then once he finished he looked at it and thought it was terrible, but he ended up using this same texture later on to create another piece of art for DUNE that managed to gather a lot of attention, showing to people that keeping the old things you make may be able to provide help in something in the future, even if you think it is terrible.