Blog Essay

Blog Essay

For our last major project, we were told to sign up 12 to 16 sections of workshops to help us create and design a book. The book title can be anything you like, and the name of my book is “My Journey”. Why I choose this name is because this is a journey around London and a journey of my university life.

The first workshop I attach is contrast. The place that I am living in right now is at Oval and Rickmansworth. So there are two places that I can design for my Coat of Arms. In Oval, there is a cricket field that nearly everyone knows about it and there is a park in between Oval station and Kennington Road. So I used all this information I got from the research and made this Coat of Arm. Simple but express the detail clearly. The images in the squares and the details around the shield makes it looks like a royal symbol and a sign of warmness.




The second one is where my auntie lives, She live is Rickmansworth and it’s out of London. The place is quiet and always contains fresh air. Although the place is simple and plain, but it has an amazing park and the environment is all green.
So the Coat of Arms for this area is trees and swans, it means peaceful and calm. Pattern around the images represent the falling leaves and the warmness of the area.





The second workshop I attached was “movement”. Movement’s definitions are moment-to-moment, action-to-action, and time-to-time. For example a trip from my accommodation to my university, it will be: 1. Wake up ten minutes late. 2. Have a quick shower. 3. Lock the door. 4. Miss the bus. 5. Top up my oyster card. 6. Took the wrong train. 7. Saw a pair of twins on the train. 8. Rush to university when out of the station. 9. Search for Student ID card. 10. Rush up the stairs. This will be called moment to moment.

The third workshop was “Emphasis”. By using texts to create a map, this is a simple progress on illustration, but if you play with the text, you can make a piece of work that is outstanding by adding small details on the map. Here is a simple example of what I mean. It is simple, interesting and it show clearly where the place are without the lines, because the texts cover up all the details you need to know.






Workshop four, Scale. Scale can be meant a lot of things like big and small, long and short, fat and skinny. But scale can be meant by board games as well because board games are make out of steps and the scale of the board game is different, it can be large in some squares and small in the others. It’s totally up to you to design and there is no limit in scale.


Workshop five is typography. Typography is one of the important things in art. Different typography express different feeling and meaning about the work. Typography can be make in 3D and many other styles; there are typography for stencils and images drawing. It depends on what kind of work you are doing and the methods. It will look weird if u put stencil typography on a piece of work that is nice and neat. So use of typography is really important.

Workshop six is colour. What can you do in a workshop for colour? The answer is that you can use colour to describe an area of place and using colour to express the feeling of what you think of something. For example, using orange to describe London is over rate, dirty, stinky, desperately poor… etc. these are all the feeling we feel when we use orange to describe London. Here is an example and the feeling this logo gives us is so disgusting and polluted.





Workshop seven is positive and negative. What do you understand about positive and negative? Positive and negative can be described by colours, composition, images, sound, lighting…etc. nearly everything can link to positive and negative. Why is it important? It is because everything needs to be balance. Nothing is fully positive and nothing is fully negative. Nothing is perfect and nothing is impossible. Red is negative and blue is positive. But the most mysterious thing is love; it can be both negative and positive.

Workshop eight is repeat pattern. This is exactly a good example for a book cover. Using repeat pattern to make a piece of work stand out more and the images can attract people to look at it. Repeat pattern can be simple and complicated. The more complicated one, the more time it takes to make one coz of the detail and texture needs to be matched and presented well. But if the repeat pattern is simple, it brings out a childish feeling and makes you feel calm and happy.





Workshop nine is mono print. Mono print is a workshop that contain scratching and printing. Even though the scratching progress is quite irritating, but it’s quite interesting and fun to work on a plastic. Each stock that you make on the plastic needs to be making a careful cause there is no turning back when you have scratched the mark. The printing progress is fun too, and looking at a positive outcome, makes you feel happy and positive.

Workshop ten is direction visit. By using only text to record what happened in a period of time is not a difficult things to do, but if you are sitting in the London tube and recording how long does the train takes to reach the next station, what happen when the train is moving, how many people leave the train and how many people went on board…etc. these are going to be a bit too much just by using text. But it can be enjoyable as well when you are doing it with a friend.

Workshop eleven is reduction (CD cover). What I did is used a London song to create a CD cover by using the lyric and the song name. The design is up to you and the best thing you can do is only cut and paste, using the information you have got in your hand and challenge yourself by using different tactic and composition to make a nice CD case out of it. Like overlapping, different font size and the use of space is important as well.





By using these entire workshops to create a book, I think the outcome will be quite interesting and entertaining. Different details and different outcome of works from different workshop make the book more interesting. Different colours and different texture, different tactic and different composition, different layout and different pages. Which page goes first and which pages match each other are really important as well. I am looking forward to complete my first book of “My Journey”.