Hi everyone,

Week 2 at Bottle Blonde Studio and I’m absolutely loving it.

This week now the website has been launched it was back to print designs and so I began drawing very graphic icons of various pieces of technology from the 70s/80s/90s. In my second year we were challenged to represent a brand without stating the name with 5 photos, here I learnt how a brand’s image is very important and can allow you to identify how well different silhouettes, colours and items would fit in with a brand. I used this skill this week by doing more research and looking round the studio to understand the vibe of the brand better,  I concluded that retro tech prints and postcards would fit in well with the brand’s vision. Everyone has their own drawing style, mine tends to be very detailed whether it’s sketchy or precise which as I’m doing drawings of vintage products helps me to style the pieces of tech to fit the brand more. Developing my own illustration style will be very useful for my final year as it helps clearly define my work from everyone else’s, as I’m now onto my second print design placement my personal style is ever developing. My first and second years have helped me to understand how to develop an idea to its full potential rather than leaving it at its initial starting point and I use this with each pattern as well as my drawing style.

Record Graphic

I’ve decided the best way for me to go about developing prints is by drawing segments/icons which can then be layered, repeated and positioned in prints. As Bottle Blonde has a very bold neon colour scheme I needed to make sure the colours I used where bright too and when necessary match the Bottle Blonde pink. I learnt that to perfectly match a colour when you go on the colour picker if you type in the # code at the bottom then it matches the colour. This is incredibly useful to me for my final year as I have 2 shades of purple I personally use in everything I can as my own identifiers, knowing this fact saves so much time making sure I have the exact same purple for whatever purposes I need.

Colour Number

As apart of my jobs I’ve been asked to design some postcards that can be sold on the BB website along with prints. This week I have been researching styles of postcards and potential quotes I could put on a BB postcard, as my personal style is very graphic I have been doing graphic drawn cards that can be given as gifts or kept and pinned up for yourself. As BB loves bright colors attempting to put quotes over a vibrant background can be difficult, but outlining a white font can solve this issue and make it much clearer to read. So I learnt how to outline a text in photoshop and this enhanced and completed the design. This is generally helpful for when text is needed over several colours as it can be very difficult to read, outlining in another colour defines the texts and allows the reader to read much clearer. So far over my industry year I’ve learnt a lot of Photoshop skills for which each new one I make a tutorial for my own personal use as the human mind can only hold so much. These files as well as the skills they hold will be useful in my final year to make sure all of the work I produce is at the highest quality for my abilities.

  • Before
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Finally in my personal life this week I have been doing some other designing, a very long time ago a stranger contacted me on Facebook and asked if I would be interested in doing some TV inspired graphic t-shirts. After way too long because of personal issues I finally got round to doing some designing, I haven’t done much because of other priorities such as uni and my internships however it’s just a nice little pocket money earner whilst I do my placement year. Personally I have designed ‘’Peaky Blinders’’, ‘’How I met your mother’’, ‘’Friends’’ and ‘’Stranger things’’ inspired tops. Designing for graphic tops is very different to the prints and postcards I am designing at BB however furthers my design skills and knowledge.