At the beginning of October I wrapped up an identity project I had been working on for a restaurant. The project continuously spanned the course of about two weeks, which was longer than most of my daily designs had before. I let my blog shape itself, with my one rule being that something must be posted by midnight each day. I was really enjoying the process of this project, so I ran with it and applied the elements across a variety of platforms.
Over the course of this month I dabbled in illustration quite a bit which lead to the creation of some of my favorite pieces. I had been posting some of my designs to Twitter and received a tweet back asking for more color in my work, so I broke out the watercolors. I continued to play with watercolors paired with pen line drawings on top, but as I became more interested in these doodles, I found myself craving better tools. I posted a question to Twitter asking for fine tip pen suggestions, and received a wealth of advice that helped take my doodles to the next level.
October 1: Bringing some of the elements to life and starting to think about materials and display. Ideally I would have used a box instead of a bag for the take-home vessel, but I have not found what I am looking for yet.
October 2: Inspired by something I saw in passing today, I wanted to play around with this cut and shifted idea. The piece that inspired this was vertically moving, so I thought it would be interesting to apply the idea diagonally, but it’s not really doing anything for me.
October 3: Pulling together a few final pieces so that I can photograph the whole identity system this weekend.
October 4: For days now, I have been carefully choosing places to eat that might have this specific type of take-home box. I crept through google images and Yelp pages hoping to come across an image of what I was looking for, and dragged my friends to restaurants based on the type of take-out containers they might have. And then yesterday I get to work and my wonderful co-worker had brought me just what I was looking for! So thank you Emily Chen, this is exactly what I had in mind.
October 5: Spanning about two weeks, this identity system ran longer than most of my daily designs have in the past. I let this blog shape itself, with my only rule being that something must be posted by midnight each day, which allows me to follow whatever inspirational path I might be on. The Ray Radigans Identity System was a fun project that I enjoyed working through.
October 6: After seeing a vintage, Egyptian-inspired, beetle necklace on an episode of Antiques Roadshow (a guilty pleasure of mine), I started thinking about beetles. I did some research and decided to draw a few.
October 7: I thought I would like the simplicity of these scarabs more than yesterday’s somewhat realistic beetles, but I thought wrong.
October 8: I wanted to do something with the beetles I drew, but when I got home tonight I was drawing a blank. After cruising through my favorite inspiration sites and pushing things around for a while, I finally landed on this idea for a newspaper/magazine cover.
October 9: My pal Christian tweeted at me this morning asking to see some color, which made me realize what my recent designs have been lacking; so I broke out the watercolors.
October 10: I really liked how yesterday’s arrows came out, so I thought I’d doodle some more today. I’ve been reading about archery and decided I’d try a more accurate arrow design.
October 11: Some bows to accompany the archery items I’ve been doodling.
October 12: Put some tracing paper over a few of my favorite arrows and trying to figure out how to incorporate some text.
October 13: Attempting to incorporate yesterday’s text into some of my favorite arrows, but I’m not crazy about any of these. I tried dropping in a few different fonts as well, but those really weren’t working for me.
October 14: I’ve been wanting to photograph some of my favorite buttons from my grandfather’s collection for a while now, and then today I got an idea for a identity project that involves buttons, so I thought it would be a good time to sort through them for inspiration.
October 15: Looking at my grandfather’s button collection for inspiriting while sketching out some buttons.
October 16: My pal Abby Maker and I used to joke about opening a store some day called ‘Stitch and Bitch’ and I thought the name worked well with the button Identity I’ve been thinking about.
October 17: It’s almost time for a new notebook, thus I plan to create some new prints and such to fill the signatures with. The monotype methods I use lend themselves nicely to linear drawings, so a doodled this today.
October 18: I manipulated yesterday’s drawing over the photocopier which resulted in many new interesting patterns.
October 19: A couple of my favorite prints from today’s gelatin printing.
October 20: Using a couple of the prints from this weekend, I made my friend a happy birthday/happy fall card.
October 21: Notebook in progress: sealing the book covers, selecting and trimming the prints.
October 22: I’ve been going a little paper crazy lately and had to put my new notebook project on the back burner so that I could play with this idea. I find it fascinating how the words and letters change drastically when the paper is folded, and change even more so depending on the perspective.
October 23: Playing around with folded paper/folded typography some more. I’d like to extract the letterforms and see how they hold up alone.
October 24: Extracted the type from a few of my favorite folded images and started to play around with new compositions.
October 25: Signatures assembled and ready to be bound, the new notebook process continues.
October 26: A notebook is very important to me, I carry it with me at all times and am constantly jotting down thoughts, doodling, etc. Over time I have established a certain aesthetic, but each new one grows out of the previous.
October 27: Page one doodling.
October 28: Laying down watercolor and gouache washes with the intention of line drawing over them.
October 29: Added some ink to yesterday’s gouache and watercolor washes; the process was a very calming experience. I’d like to find an even finer tip pen and continue to add to these tomorrow. (p.s. my scanner is doing these colors no justice.)
October 30: Yesterday I asked Twitter for fine tip pen suggestions then ran to Blick’s today to pick some of those suggestions up. I purchased a few Copic Multiliners, a LePen Drawing and a Rapidograph, and am having a lot of fun experimenting with them.
October 31: I find the orange/red versions to be very weird. The blue has a more calming feeling about it, where as the orange is somewhat unsettling. So it being Halloween, I decided to play it up a little and add some Poe.