Today has been a pretty productive day. I have bought this domain name! Yay! I have an actual real website. Very happy! I have also been working more my main project with creating the website, I haven't gone back to the video since I last worked on it as I thought it would be smarter to make all the scenes and elements before diving in, and then just add what I need when I need it. I have been adding more elements to my website, such as information and my survey info graphics:

Not terribly impressive, It has been a rather slow job and if I am honest. I am hoping the video will look better than the website. However it is early days still. That is it from me today, I am currently trying to get new characters drawn for the video, my graphics tablet is however being funny with me, which is a bit of a worry. But i am hoping it will sort it self out.

Oh I am also getting my business cards designed. I just have to figure out the exact information I want to put on them, here is a little sneak peek into what I may be getting printed:

So today, I'm a slight disappointment. I didn't do any work today. I actually had to go and run errands today and what not, and I took out some time to meet up with old friends. I will however be back to normal, with lots of work to show. So due to being a slight disappointment, I hope that these very famous works of art with a twist will entertain you enough.

So today I have started to edit my video, So happy with it so far, although I am still getting to grips with the whole program again, also slightly freaking out about rendering the video and such :/
As I am planning to do this all on my little laptop. I'm not too sure if that's being silly or not, but if I at least get everything done on here and it doesn't work out. Then hopefully it'll be just a point of adding the images I already have and then just getting the movements and so on and noises. Here's hoping eeeeeeeekkkkk Google is my best friend right now over this. 

Here's a screen shot of me in After Effects, I have just started to edit the first 40 seconds of my video. So far this has been alright, although I haven't started to add any movements to the graphics so far. But this is literally just how I have gotten on today. I am hoping to get a good bit done tomorrow, although this is going at a snails pace due to making the graphics, then adding the graphics to the video, as well as looking up millions of tutorials. I am still optimistic but this whole process so far I am actually terrified. I'm not too sure how this is going to work out. Although I haven't yet put up a time limit for this video, I can't imagine it being  any longer than 3 minutes. So currently this video is set at 3 mins, So I am able to cut the time, make the time longer if I need to. This may seem silly, But I am still figuring this whole thing out and I don't want to pressure myself. 

So yea scary stuff. Short blog today, hopefully more to show tomorrow or at least more development of the video. 

I have done so much work today and I am actually still working away after I write this post. So I have designed a few new bits and pieces for my surveys:

So the 2nd image is simple, but I actually really liked how I gave the answers a facial expression. I also tried my hardest to have a the scales of all the heads to the correct proportion of the percentage I got from my surveys. The rest of my surveys I kinda felt because I want to make a small video of my findings and give people the results of my surveys. I think sticking with pie charts and graphs will go a long way, although they are traditional I think this will make more of an impact. 

So here are just some of my pie charts that I made. very simple, all the info is there though, now down to real buisness. and start designing what I want to do for my video, so here are a few images from my sketch book on how I have been designing so far:

So one thing I am noticing about this is half way through drawing everything up, suddenly I get a new idea and I want to move things about and change my layout. This is where I have gotten so far with designing my video, I am getting nervous and excited about continuing on and actually getting this made. I hope I get everything I want done on time for hand in, as I have said before I have used After Effects, however it has been over a year since I have used the program. So yea, thats all from me today hopefully Ill have a bit more colour and things to show tomorrow.

So today, I did a bit more work to my sketch books, I am now on my 3rd sketch book for my main project which is crazy, especially because with my first sketch book I actually added more pages to it before just buying a new sketch book. It has taken me only two weeks to fill one sketch book for my main project, and to be honest I feel like I am just getting started with my project and really getting down to business of what I want to do, so it's pretty crazy and I can now say I definitely feeling the pressure starting to mount. This is the last week of April, I have pretty much only have a month to get my work together and 6 weeks to actually hand in my work to find out if I am graduating with honors or not. 

So the above our my sketch books for just my main project. 
Besides my main project, a mini project was emailed to me. There are some students in my class taking part in New Blood, I have spoken about New Blood previously, it must have been just before Christmas. They have an idea for the end of year show to sell some tea towels with Communication Designs portraits on them, just like the ones you would have done in school. I originally just took a photo of myself and started to trace it in Illustrator. But the more and more I started to draw it, I got bored of it. I mean this is a graphic design course, I can be very serious about things, but myself taking a photo, I have actually been told off by friends mothers for not taking a photo properly...

These are sort of a small range of photos of me not being very serious and so on.... 
So here are the images I originally created from for the tea towel task:

These pretty much are Illustrating my "Resting Bitch Face". I have to admit I look kind of scary, and I do like to think of myself as a nice person, obviously I'm a little mental, but a good mental. So below is the face I pretty much pull in most of my "Selfies" on Instagram. You can follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/craicin_designs/

I have to admit as well, because this is going on a tea towel. There is no point in doing shading, this needs to be all block colours and lines and they have to be black and sharp, so that they can pick up on all of the lines here to print on the tea towel. I asked my boyfriend and my best friend which they preferred out of all three. Both chose the 3rd saying it looks very like me.... not too sure if I should be insulted or Yay!. I think I am going to go with the image above. 

With this exercise however, I actually thought it was really good and I actually really enjoyed it. It cut out a lot of the usual things I would do and just went straight in with the basics. I actually really like this, it's simple yet really effective. I'm very happy, this is something I think I will be doing a lot more of, it have been a while since I have done this kind of line drawing. 

That's all from me today, tomorrow I will hopefully have a lot more Illustrations for you with doing my info graphics

SO, I am very excited to FINALLY! have my logo above being an animated gif! It took me forever to figure out the code of the website, although I have to admit, this had made me more interested in wanting to learn how to code websites. 

Which brings me to my main project, I ended up going to the website generator, "WIX" and I have to admit there are a lot more themes that I can really see working a hell of a lot better rather than the ones here on weebly, I signed up with them, and began to test out their websites, here are just some little snippest from the website on their themes:

I have to admit, I truly just find their themes a lot more inspiring, I have also noticed that they are easier to use to design the page, I did have a wix page years ago when I was first starting to make myself a website, I remember the editing of the website was highly difficult. Due to the fact that if you clicked anywhere on the page, suddenly you had activated 50 different components at once and your stuck and cant do anything. 

Also going over everything that is in my main project, I am really worrying as I am now in my last year of university, there is nothing that really pops and stands out, so I was thinking about perhaps doing a video as well as some of my photography Ideas I had previously had. I need to get my act together and get my portfolio looking amazing, oh and try and get a job. 

So for the nest few days I will be playing about with different looks for the photography, as well as drawing out stuff to make a video with, I have decided to do a simple video, mainly due to my experience within After Effects. I would like to use purely animation and not so much film. I have taken inspiration from some of the Buzzfeed videos that have done videos to exactly the same way I want mine: 

I just like how a lot of the illustrations are very clean cut and they float in and out of the space and a lot of the animation techniques they have used in making this video, I have done before. Its just going to be a case of getting the illustrations to be the way I want them to be.

I also have to apologize for not posting yesterday, all the above was my thoughts, feeling and what I did yesterday, I simply fell asleep early and didn't get a chance to post.

So today, I simply have been writing up my project to make sure everything is up to date, due to having a lot of projects, i usually will take one day out a week to just go back and write everything out and have a good think about the directions I am going in and just keep myself up to date, so for today I dont have anything really to show, I have just been updating all my work to make sure it's all up to date.

I have missed another day of blogging due to illness, I was so determined to go to uni yesterday, despite feeling unwell. I got ready, got the bus and began to feel worse. I got three stops away from my flat, got off and walked back home. I have to admit, I am so happy I got off and went home when I did, as I got so much worse. I did however manage to get a few illustrations of my cupcake done yesterday for the diamond suit. Although I have to admit, these aren't brilliant and my heart really wasn't in it. I just felt so ill but I wanted to do what I said I was going to get done yesterday, done. 

There is a lot of different variations of the same sort of design, there are at least two designs here that I really like and I want to use in my final designs, such as the 1st cup cake on the 2nd row and the very pink cupcake also on the 2nd row. I also really like the elements of the very first cupcake. This cupcake was actually the last cupcake I made of this set before I really started to take a turn for the worse. These cupcakes are in no particular order, just the order that they have been uploaded on here in.

Today I still feel very much under the weather, so I have decided to continue with my cupcake design suit. finishing off the diamond suit and continuing on to the spades and clubs suit.

So, I have finished the whole set of cupcake cards. It took me a little while, I started on the spades and clubs and got a little confused on what I was doing, so I looked up chocolate and coffee cupcakes for inspiration, warning this may make you hungry:

So here are all of my designs from today with the club and spades suits:

So with the coffee and chocolate cupcakes as my inspiration, I created all of the above, there are of course some that I prefer to others. But I am just so happy t now have two different themes of cards pretty much done. Here are the finals, the following orders and in threes, So they will be in the order of King, Queen and Jack:

So yea, these are my cupcakes, of course a few need wee tweaks, here and there. Over all very pleased with my results. I am hoping to continue on with my cards, my next theme will be monsters. I have previously spoken about maybe merging cupcakes and monsters together. 

Tomorrow I am going to continue on with my main project. I am going to go back to the drawing board with the website and really draw out how I want everything to look. Then I am going to experiment other website builders to see if I can really recreate the look and feel of what I want my website to look like. I am also hoping to go out and do some photography, depending on weather and hopefully feeling a lot better tomorrow also. That's all from me today.

Today has been a pretty productive day, I managed to get a lot done despite being pretty ill today. I have finally started to design banners and layouts for my main project. 

The poorly photographed image on the left was my original concept idea. I then finally put this into illustrator and created the image on the right. This has even developed  further, as I realized the pound sterling sign, the euro and the dollar sign didn't really go together. Especially as my project is aimed at universities within the UK. So I went back in and made them all sterling pound signs, I then began to play about a little with the design as, I felt everything was sort of floating in space. So I added shadows, banners and back ground colours to see how this would look 

Here are my mini experiments above, I do really like them a lot, although I have definitely decided against the green background. I was thinking a long the lines of the little piggy bank being free and running around. It doesn't look like that at all in my mind. I then began to look at the white and blue banners. I wasn't even too sure why I had three pound coins on display, so I went back in again and changed the display a little.

So as you can see my piggy bank is trying to be a horse, ready to charge into battle. Well that's what I get from it's pose, which I really like to be honest. So as you can see I have made it look as though the coins are going into the piggy bank, or flying out of it, whichever way people see it. I'm pretty happy with it, although I do realize how cartoon like it does look. I'm worried it may look even too childish. So I started to finally get started on making a website. I used Weebly as my website generator. I have to admit, when trying to make a website for a specific thing, weebly sucks. I was on here for about 3 hours playing around with themes, trying to get things to work, change menus, messing around with the HTML codes (which I know very little about). I have to admit, for the amount of work I was trying to accomplish today with the website, it really didn't happen. So now I am currently struggling with the idea of wither, just creating what I want the website to look like on paper rather than actually make the website, or go to a different website developer and try again. I am going to have a break from it for now, here is the home page however:

Currently it's very bland looking, there is a lot of restrictions within the themes which makes it difficult if you don't know HTML code. I have been trying, and I don't easy give up on things. I think I just need to shower my brain over it and think what else I can do. I also added my little protest character, he was a lot bigger but again on weebly, I found that once I got it to a way I liked it. As soon as I saved it, He was twice as big and took up all the space of the text. 
Here is all my sketch books where I also seem to brain dump all of my thoughts and feeling over my project:

So these are just the pages I have done in my sketch books today. Tomorrow, as I said I am going to be just concentrating on my Cards project to try and get the entire suit finished tomorrow, and possibly even start another suit, I would love to say Ill have the whole set done by tomorrow, but there are a lot of design issues that do come up, like I've seen today with the website, so we will see how that goes. 

I am also hoping to get some of my ViewBug projects started on Thursday, mainly if the weather is nice so I can get some underwater photography.... in fact even just to have the water to be calm, that might help me out more. 

That's all from me today.

So I have just being doing research and writing up my books today really. Today was a bank holiday in Scotland, so with uni being closed I have been working from home. I have been asking a whole bunch of different people which of my logo's they prefer. I have previously put up the different colours of my logo, a lot of people have more than one colour that they liked my logo in. I have finally managed to make it into a GIF. It looks soooo pretty. 

However, I have a feeling that the above image is not actually animated to show the different array of colours. (I'm currently viewing it as black) I have been having this problem with weebly for a while. I thought I had been just doing something silly, there is no reason for it not to work.... yet here I am, I have to admit it is really starting to bother me. I even tried to make it my banner to see if it just turned out I couldn't have it as a logo, and nothing. So yea, its annoying me, I keep getting on with other projects and working away. Although it is still in the back of my mind so every so often I suddenly find myself searching how to fix it on Google, looking through all of the Weebly help pages, trying to even re-save the logo in a different way...... notta.

So, I am now trying to discover or even just think is there a different way I could show this on my website, I am even planning to get business cards printed soon with all the different colours, so people who pick up my business card can get a colour they prefer. 

Ok, so besides my logo being a problem the rest of my projects are getting on pretty well, I have just had to kick everything up a gear. Especially with my main project and trying to get my side projects all up to the same sort of standard.  

Within my main project I am started to really gather all of the information I have and get it organized, I am actually planning on designing some info graphics once I post this blog and even a logo if this is to become a website. 

My ViewBug stuff has sort of been on a hold while I really get back to writing up all of my projects. Although I have already noted down some challenges I would really like to do before the deadlines, One of them involves getting to play with my face, with makeup and what not. So that's going to be pretty fun, I also have seen a few opportunities to again brush up on my underwater photography skills, so hopefully more things to show in the upcoming weeks.  

Card project, I am planning to take Wednesday out and just have that one day to design the Diamond cupcake suit, and who knows maybe even start getting on with the clubbs or spades suits. I am hoping to have all of the designs done by the end of the week, So i can get started on my Monster suit. I'm not too sure If I have mentioned it or not, I am planning to do this cupcake suit, then toying with the idea of merging cupcakes and monsters together. Not too sure if it'll even work but hopefully I'll have cute little twisted cupcakes. 

And of course, I have already ranted about my logo project. So, yea, that's all from me today, hopefully have more visual things to show you guys tomorrow.

So I seem to be blogging every other day... Whoops
So today I have been rather productive and I have actually completely one suit of the cupcake deck of cards

So, top right, I'm sure looks familiar, however I have made it more obvious to which suit it belongs to. I have decided that the top rip cup cake will be my Jack of Hearts. Top left cupcake, is to be my Queen of Hearts. I added pearls to the cupcake, I made the frosting red, to re-enforce the suit colour. The bottom two cupcakes I have made both of them for the King of Hearts. I wanted to keep the idea of making a cupcake more masculine. I firstly created the cupcake on the left. I didn't want to have so much decoration on it, I thought decoration on the cupcake would be in it's self very famine. Although once I created it and looked at it, it looked so boring, and I couldn't really tell that it was part of the heart suit, So I sort of went back on myself a little bit, and created the bottom right cupcake. which is pretty a collage of hearts all over it. I was going with the idea of Kings cloaks:

As you can see on this King costume, the almost dalmatian print on the white of the costume, I tried to recreate this with my cupcake.... So yea, It's a manly cupcake!

That's it from me for today hopefully more to show tomorrow.