Manchester UCAS visit feedback

Our visit to Manchester UCAS fair was an experience that has helped me see what Universities have the right courses and the right oppertunities for me. From the stalls we visited I found that Teesside, Nottingham and Lincoln Universities had the most appeal to me in what they had to offer. I'm not actually sure what I am aiming for yet career wise and I am trying to keep my options open, I think I want to go into design or illustration or even something to do with photography. I think the best thing to do would be to incorporate all of these into my work, especially the photography part. It will show that I can use all kinds of media in my work. I think that visiting the UCAS fair has made me realise that I really do want to go to University.

Researched artists

RALPH STEADMAN

He started as a cartoonist and through the years diversified into many fields of creativity. He has illustrated such classics as "Alice in Wonderland", "Treasure Island" and "Animal Farm". He embarked on a hugely successful career, drawing satirical cartoons for Punch, Private Eye, The New Statesman and the Daily Telegraph. He is also a printmaker. His prints include a series of etchings on writers from William Shakespeare to William Burroughs. Steadman is renowned for his political and social caricatures and cartoons and also for illustrating a number of picture books. In the USA he worked for Rolling Stone. Steadman has won numerous awards for his work including the V&A's Francis Williams Book Illustration Award in 1973, the Designers' & Art Directors' Association Gold Award in 1977, the American Institute of Graphic Arts Illustrator of the Year award in 1979, W. H. Smith Illustration Award in 1987, BBC Design Award in 1987, CAT Advertising Cartoonist of the Year Award in 1995, 1996, and 1998. Steadman uses pens, brushes, inks, acrylics, oils, etching, silkscreen and collage, and has also produced sculptures in iron and steel. He has an often brutal, savage style. His work isn't as defined as the others and more carefree and sketchy with less material work.

LAURA  MCCAFFERTY

Laura McCafferty is a textiles artist who blends Textiles and Illustration to create snapshots of social events and environments with warmth, sensitivity and humour.  Her technique of combining stitch, surface pattern, print and illustration. Laura's work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally and featured in books and press worldwide. Recently won a 2008 Nottingham Creative Business Award  for Crafts and was shortlisted for 2008 Wesley Barrell Craft Awards. An early preoccupation with the elderly in her final year of art college was the first attempt to grasp and capture something before it vanished. All the images are taken from real life personal experiences. The she visually records human interaction and converts it to art with craft based techniques. She starts an image with a pen drawing then works through different stages, screen-print and hand embroidery. Fabrics are carefully selected from vintage, recycled and new cottons. Each artwork is unique and hand made by Laura in her Nottingham workshop using traditional techniques. She found inspiration from a visit to Japan, North America, Greece and Spain; although most of the work is inspired by people closer to home. She develops a new collection each year, which is inspired directly by travels, experience and people. I am not really interested in her style of work however it is skillful. She uses many techniques that match her style of work.

PETER CLARK

Peter uses a comprehensive collection of found papers as his palette which are coloured, patterned or textured by their printed, written or worn surfaces which result in a wonderful three dimensional image. He shades with density of print and creates substance and movement with lines plucked from old maps or manuscripts. His pieces use mark-making in an innovative and humorous way to create a collection of beasts and clothing which display character and wit. His career started as an illustrator and designer of animation for television. A long time collector of ‘things' Peter travels around different markets and collects old stamps, faded maps, love letters, labels, buttons, dress making patterns, playing cards, textiles cotton webbing that binds books and paper boxes for the basis of his work. Clark's approach to paper collage is three dimensional. He first draws the outline in felt tip and then spends hours choosing from his collection of found ‘things' the right materials and colours to define the muscles, features and tonal effects which finally bring to life the finished work. Peter uses more material than actual illustrations and I much prefer his work to the other two artists, there is something unique about his work that makes it different and much more interesting. His use of layers make his work eye catching and personally, I think it makes it more appealing to look at.

Vector Graphics

Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygons, which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics. Vector graphics are images that are completely described using mathematical definitions.  Computer displays are made up from grids of small rectangular cells called pixels. The picture is built up from these cells. The smaller and closer the cells are together, the better the quality of the image, but the bigger the file needed to store the data. The size of the file generated will depend on the resolution required, but the size of the vector file generating the bitmap/raster file will always remain the same.

Birgit Amadori, was born and raised in Germany and graduated from HFG Offenbach in 2002. She is now living and working in beautiful Redondo Beach since 2004. The primary software that she works mainly with is Adobe Illustrator and her main fields are advertising, book cover illustration, fine art and web. She shows her love for complexity, detail and pattern in her work and states that she ‘loves the cleanliness of vector art – even colours and straight, smooth lines – even in a very detailed image.’ Being a long time student of Asian and Japanese culture, a lot of her work is based around these themes and for her designs, Amadori chooses to introduce images of women along with flower images.

‘I was able to fly by shooting beams of light from my palms, yet as I was up in the air, I was shot down by fear.’  This image was produced from a dream she had, where she could fly from beams shooting from her hands. Her work is very original, the colours are bright and it’s a very powerful image with a red spear through her body named ‘fear’. A lot of her work that is based on her dreams is similar, they all have similar colours and similar themes. All of her work is bold, eye catching and unique. This is personally my favourite image and I really like her work, it stands out to me a lot and I like how her work looks visually.

Iker Ayestaran was born in Spain and works as a press illustrator in several newspapers in Spain such as Público, El Correo, ABC and La Vanguardia and also abroad like The Boston Globe. He has worked for numerous magazines both in Spain and abroad including Fortune, Wired, Inc., Man, Barcelones, Tiempo,  and has designed book-covers and film Posters. His style of simple geometric forms, subtle backgrounds and color washes, Ayestaran illustrations are simple, effective and clever. The works of Iker bring to mind of illustrations one would see on the cover of The New Yorker or in political sections of serious newspapers. Iker generally starts with a pencil sketch which he vectorizes in FreeHands and finally expotrs in Photoshop, finish off his work. He prefers working in FreeHand as it gives him freedom to compose his illustrations and realises changes where and when necessary. His work is original and interesting to look at, and they all follow similar colour schemes. They theme of his pictures seem to be focused are the season autumn, and the deep colours of brown and cream.

Charlene Chua is original from Singapore and is an award winning illustrator and her work has featured primarily in Southeast Asia, the UK and Austrailia. She covers diverse subjects as retail promotion, real estate, children's comics, CD covers and even jigsaw puzzles. She is now part of an illustration group called Sketch Motel in Toronto, Canada. She persues personal projects such as her graphic novel series  and describes her style as 'vector-based, stylized illustration with Eastern and Western pop-culture influence.' She is fond of gradients and details possible with an airbrush and likes to bring similar techniques into her work in Illustrator, particularly through the use of masks, but with far more ease and precision than with a traditional tool. Chua finds that drawing the initial sketch is the most difficult part in creating her work. I think her work is very distinctive and very beautiful. Each piece of work has similar themes to it but are all original in there own ways.


Russell Tate was born in the UK and is now living in Australia. He is a freelance designer who has worked on record sleeves, music magazines, logo creations and designing layouts. He has worked for McDonalds, Coca-cola, Volkswagen, Telstra and many more. In the mid 90's, he set up his own design business with his wife, a fashion stylist. Illustration work takes up most of his time however he still enjoys logo creations and designing layouts. He thinks that his work is 'cheerful retro' showing themes of childlike images in his work depending on who he is working for. He nearly always starts with a drawing in pencil on a sheet of tracing paper, as he is developing he finds it easy to and a sheet over the top, and so his work might exist on four sheets of paper before he does a final master trace. He then scans the completed sketch into Illustrator and finishes up his image there, using a limited colour palette in muted tones, simple vignettes and blends of other things. 

Raymond Pettibon (born June 16, 1957) is an American artist who lives and works in Venice Beach, California. Pettibon earned an economics degree from UCLA and worked as a mathematics teacher for a short period, before completing his BFA in 1977. Known for his comic-like drawings with disturbing, ironic or ambiguous text, Pettibon's subject matter is sometimes violent and anti-authoritarian. From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, he was closely associated with the punk rock band Black Flag and the record label SST Records, these were founded by his older brother Greg Ginn. In the mid 1980s, he became a well known figure in the contemporary art scene. Pettibon works mostly with Indian ink on paper and many of his early drawings are black and white. He often introduces colour through the use of pencil, watercolor, collage, gouache or acrylic paint. Pettibon started working in collage in the mid 80's with simple newsprint collaged onto black and white images. In addition to his work in black and white on paper, Pettibon has also made animations from his drawings, live action films from his own scripts, unique artist’s books, magazines, prints, and large permanent wall drawings. With most of Pettibon’s work being in black and white, it makes them quite distinctive and original. Also the way in which he draws makes his work memorable, they are pretty detailed and different to other artists. His work cannot really be compared to the other artsits I’ve chosen, his style is very inimitable and unique.

Frank Shepard Fairey (born February 15, 1970) is an American contemporary graphic designer and illustrator who made his fame through the skateboarding business and his work is very different to that of Raymond Pettibon. In 1988, he graduated from Idyllwild Arts Academy, and in 1992 graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration. He first became known for his "André the Giant Has a Posse" OBEY sticker campaign. His work became more widely known in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, specifically his Barack Obama "Hope" poster. He created a series of posters supporting Barack Obama's 2008 candidacy for President of the United States and became even more popular when Obama went on to win the election. Fairey’s art, which has its roots in the skateboarding and punk rock scenes of the 1980s and early 1990s, fits easily into anti-authoritarian and freedom of idea. Fairey has been arrested several times for vandalism, like most street artists, Fairey considers this as honourable for what they believe in as they are making a point to the world around them. At first, Fairey considered the “André the Giant has a posse” stickers as just a joke and nothing serious, but as the stickers began multiply and as people began buzzing about what they meant and who was behind them, his attitude began to change. What started as a joke became a way to get people to question their surroundings. In particular, Fairey took aim at the consumerist messages in ads, billboards and other form of mass media. Since then, the André the Giant image has become Fairey’s signature image, appearing on everything from his fine-art prints and paintings to a line of commercially licensed skateboards and street clothes. Most of his work consits of very bright colours, mostly blue, red and yellow. This makes his work as much as distinctive as Pattibon’s but in a very different way. They are easy recognisable and there are examples of his artwork all over the world they are that famous. They are contrasting in artwork as Pettibon’s is black and white and Fairey uses bright bold colours. You could say that Fairey has better technique as the use of the colours makes his work much more memorable and it sticks with you longer.

Boleslav Felix Robert Sienkiewicz (born May 3, 1958) is an Eisner Award-winning American artist and writer best known for his comic book work, for Marvel Comics' The New Mutants and Elektra: Assassin. Sienkiewicz often utilizes oil painting, collage and mimeograph. Sieniewicz attended the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts in Newark, New Jersey. After art school, he showed a portfolio of his work to DC Comics' art director Vince Colletta, which led to his breaking into the field at age 19. His art style was heavily influenced by Neal Adams. His work for Elektra: Assassin is very good and detailed and similar in style to Fairey. There is  similar style and colour themes in his work as Fairey, the colours stand out in the comics and catch the eye. Elektra, the character is dressed in red making her stand out more than any of the other characters in the comic. His work is quite sketchy and much less defined than that of Fairey’s work, however his line drawings and sketches are similar to that of Pettibon.

Jonathan Glazer

Jonathan Glazer was born 1965 in London and is an English director of films, commercials and music videos. He started out directing theatre and making film and television trailers, including award-winning work for the BBC.

Reviewing Glazers's work, you can see how similar most of his work is however they are all original in their own ways. There are themes in each video that we watched that are comparable. In some of his work, his videos are black and white and this is shown in some of his adverts, such as for Stella Artois: "Ice Skating Priests" (April 2006) and Guinness: "Surfer" (March 1999). The adverts for these two products are set out similarly however, one has a voice over and the other doesn't. We can see how Glazer's style of work comes across in each of them. His work has won him many awards, especially the 'Surfer', which won more awards than any other advertisement before. 

Paint is a liquid, most commonly used to protect, colour or provide texture to objects. 

In 2011, South African archeologists reported finding a 100,000 year old human-made ochre-based mixture which could have been used like paint. Cave paintings drawn with red or yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide, and charcoal may have been made by early Homo-sapiens as long as 40,000 years ago.
Ancient coloured walls at Dendera, Egypt, which were exposed for years to the elements, still possess their brilliant colour, as vivid as when they were painted about 2,000 years ago. The Egyptians mixed their colours with a gummy substance, and applied them separate from each other without any blending or mixture. They appear to have used six colours: white, black, blue, red, yellow, and green. They first covered the area entirely with white then traced the design in black, leaving out the lights of the ground colour. 

By the proper onset of the Industrial Revolution, paint was being ground in steam powered mills and an alternative to lead based pigments was found in a white derivative of zinc oxide. Interior house painting increasingly became the norm as the 19th century progressed, both for decorative reasons and because the paint was effective in preventing the walls rotting from damp. Linseed oil was also increasingly used as an inexpensive binder.
In 1866, Sherwin-Williams in the United States opened as a large paint-maker and invented a paint that could be used from the tin without preparation. It was not until the stimulus of World War II created a shortage of linseed oil in the supply markets that artificial resins, or alkyds, were invented. Cheap and easy to make, they also held the colour well and lasted for a long time.

Since the time of the Renaissance, siccative (drying) oil paints, primarilylinseed oil, have been the most commonly used kind of paints in fine art applications; oil paint is still common today. However, in the 20th century, water-based paints, including watercolours and acrylic paints, became very popular with the development of acrylic and other latex paints. Milk paints(also called casein), where the medium is derived from the natural emulsion that is milk, were popular in the 19th century and are still available today. Egg tempera (where the medium is an emulsion of raw egg yolk mixed with oil) is still in use as well, as are encaustic wax-based paints. Gouache is a variety of opaque watercolor which was also used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance for manuscript illuminations. The pigment was often made from ground semiprecious stones such as lapis lazuli and the binder made from either gum arabic or egg white. Gouache, also known as 'designer color' or 'body color' is commercially available today.

Charles Burns

Charles Burns' drawings have a unique comic style that stand out from others. 'Black Hole' is one of his most famous set of comics. The comics follow a group of mostly middle class teenagers who contract a mysterious sexually transmitted disease known as "the Bug" or "the teen plague", which causes them to develop bizarre unique physical mutations. After researching the comics I found that they are very original, Charles Burns has created a unique comic series and Burns has said that the mutations can be read as a metaphor for adolescence, sexual awakening and the transition into adulthood.

David Shrigley

David Shrigley's animation of 'Who I Am and What I Want' (voiced by Kevin Eldon) is an unforgettable animation consisting of scribbles of disturbing but comical events of a character's life. It shows us how no matter how sketchy or bad you think your work might be, something good can come from it, even if it is just a line drawing with little detail.