So first of all, Happy new year!
I realize I didn't put a post up in December. Mainly because I had done nothing, unfortunately this month is the same. I have just been working away and laughing at cat videos.

Last time I blogged I had spoken about getting a new toy. I am still waiting on it!

I will get it eventually though. 

Look at that DAMN SEXINESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am getting back in the way of drawing and it seems like forever since I had a sketch book, so I am kicking myself in the bum. I have been pretty boring lately, I have even taken major steps in becoming an adult, I am starting to learn to drive and even getting a mortgage..... yay.....

So yea, I promise to be more exciting in the next short month. I may even have real images of what I have been getting up to and such. This is just me checking in and letting you know I'm still alive!

So I may have accidentally left it for more than a week since my last post. I think I am going to have to set a day in which I now do my blog. I think Sunday or Monday of every week I will make it my blogging day.

So nothing much has really happened in the past week. I have been asked to be a curator on the View Bug website, However, I have to admit I was very skeptical and with good reason to be. I don't get paid, I am not an actual representative for the website, I don't get to run things or share any of my own ideas or comments on how the site could run a little easier.

Literally they have more or less asked me to just talk to more people on the website, welcome new comers and in a way just help the site to keep growing.

Have to admit I didn't feel as special anymore when I read that part of it.  The website did however try their best. 
Speaking on photos, I finally got around to looking at the images I had taken when the Tall Ships were here in Belfast:

I have plenty more, to be honest I just found seeing Belfast from the water more interesting than some of the boats. It was almost like a different world, I know that sounds lame. 

I have also signed up for an online photography course, I think I really need to brush up on my skills within photography as since being home I have to admit apart from job hunting, I haven't actually been taking any photos of things.

Although with also saying that, I have been booked for a photography gig next month. I am to photograph a mad hatter tea party, show casing the ceramic pieces done by Megan-Rose McCully. I am really looking forward to it, however the weather has been nothing but miserable here.
I would give a little link to her website but the wee woman doesn't have one at the moment.

I am also looking back into creating some patterns, I think I have previously spoken about this I am a little unsure. I haven't yet done much although I have ideas coming out of my ears. I have just been consumed with meeting up with friends and job hunting. But fear not as I am going to kick my own arse and come up with at least one design a week. Whether or not I get the design from a sketch book into illustrator or photoshop, but at least I will be keeping my skills more active. 

That's all my random ranting for this week, next post will be either Sunday or Monday ;)

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.

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.

OK, So I again forgot to blog yesterday, I have to admit I had done a lot of work yesterday I just completely forgot. Today was no different, although I have gone back to my cards project making cupcakes and researching cupcake designs. So below is some of my research, I hope it makes you as hungry as I am!

So first of all what I really like is that, most of these cupcakes are unbelievable looking, I don't have to worry too much about the design being believable looking or not, as the things people can create with cakes and cupcakes is pretty brilliant to be honest. Here is one cupcake I made last night, I have to admit I'm very happy with this: 

There is still a lot of things I would like to add and change about this, I also have a slight problem with making cupcakes looking masculine and feminine.  So I have saved this image as my Queen of Hearts, but I may end up changing this to possibly being the Jack of Hearts. 

On a separate note, I have been doing more research into my main project. I have previously looked into the most expensive cities in the UK. However, I was concerned that I didn't see my own university city showing up, as it is incredibly expensive to live here in Aberdeen. So I looked up one of the main private student accommodation companies prices. I went through every city writing down the new prices for 2015-2016. I have previous lived with this company, looking at the price that I paid per week when I was there in 2012, to the prices for next years students. The price has gone up a clear £30 a week, that's pretty much an extra tenner per year that the rent goes up. This was also at the time the cheapest student accommodation available, what is scarier, is that this still seems to be the case, even though the prices are going up. 

Within the list of cities the student accommodation has housing. I looked at the prices of the cheapest accommodation within ever city, out of the 20 cities I looked into Aberdeen was #14 in the cheapest, Sheffield was the top for cheapest student accommodation offered with this company.

What my research is showing me is that, although the government says that higher education isn't just for the rich. The reality is that it truly is going back to those old ways, this may not be due to just tuition fees. But companies like private student accommodation, are exploiting students. This makes it harder for students who are not as well off as others to study away from home.  My project is to help students, by giving advise on how to save the pennies and still have a full university experience.  The advise I am giving is all from my surveys from past students and current students from all over the UK. 


I am still looking into my own research and have even looked at cheapest cities to live in judging by the price of pints. Not an exact science, but still good to know.


That's all from me today.

didn't realize the time, so slightly missed a day of blogging.... by about half an hour, whoops. Today I have to admit, I didn't really get up to too much, I got woken up by my flatmate  over the Solar eclipse, I managed to get a few photos of the event:

The moon looks a little like a banana.... Just saying.  I also went out today and got a padding pool. Yes, a paddling pool.

I'm hoping to continue on with experimenting with  my underwater photography, I had meant to do some today. But I think I am starting to get sick :(

So here's hoping I will get to experiment a little more tomorrow. Just not sure if I will be putting this bad boy in my kitchen or the bathroom. Either way, lets hope the flat mates don't walk in and fear for my life. 

Hoping to also get a bit more deck of cards done, even get another deck entirely started. As I am beginning to get a little bored of the ones I am currently doing. They are too traditional, so who knows, i might go back and make them all rock starts or something for fun.  That's it anyways for me tonight/morning. Will update in  roughly 20hrs time

Long time now speak, I have been travelling and setting back into my flat. So i did what I said and went and took some night time photography. I  did have a few technical difficulties, as I had borrowed some of the equipment  from friends. Anyways, here is my incredibly blurry star images taken on Friday night

First image was my most successful image taken, unfortunately it  is of course, blurry. My camera also started to act up and not showing images once they were taken. As well as just shutting it's self off. I plan to however go out sometime next week to take some more images, however. This will mean I will miss the deadline for this particular  challenge. Which sucks, but to be honest, I'd rather miss this challenge, practice a bit more and be prepared for the next challenge. I do however have a choice, of uploading a past image.

This is the closest image I currently have  of stars, just the moon is very much dominating the image.  I still really like this image, it is however still not right to upload for this challenge.  I also have a really good Idea for the other ViewBug challenge , which is playing with light. When out in a forest of the outskirts of Belfast, where I took the top two images. I had my assistant holding a torch for me so I could set up. He however had other Ideas. He started to play with the torch as all of us have done as children. Making animal shadows with our hands. It was pretty creepy. Being in a forest late at night, alone and creating shadows on the forest. I really wished I had gotten a photo of it, It was creepy, but really amazing looking. So again hopefully when I go and take more starry night images, this time with fellow photographer. I will be able to do this, again though I really hope this will be possible due to the deadlines. 

Also going back to my underwater photography, I have been thinking about doing more of it, perhaps for my main project. I was looking up paddling pools and was surprised that they can be as cheap as £4. So I may get one and practice, only problem  is filling the small paddling pool up and also being able to empty it....... In student accommodation.  WHOOP!

I am unsure when I will be doing this, but I have been thinking and taking a lot more time with my main project, I previously mentioned  that I was looking up some student help guides. I wasn't very surprised to find that there are many.  This has disheartened me a good bit. As I feel my project will get lost in a sea of student self hep books. Even with some of the topics the books had within their blurbs. They had topics I had never even thought of. Such as sex, drugs, freshers week,  and exams.  I personally have no interest in touching on these subjects. I would prefer to talk on topics such as: Money, mental health, social life,  and  "life hacks". This is still all possible, but do I now aim this towards people who just go to my university or do I continue to aim with the idea in mind, of any university. I have started to think about what sort of questions I can ask people, however I have so far not written them down as of yet. I  plan to do a bit more research, and go to my student union to get some leaflets to see what they offer. Hopefully I will get more ideas on how to move forward with this project.  

I have also thought about my deck of cards project, I had originally said I would design a new set every week. So I am starting this tonight, continuing on from what I have currently done, however I feel that these may not be completely, completed. To make it easier for myself I think, I shall just have sketches, this will also help me balance my time between my side projects and my main projects. I am beginning to feel I am procrastinating too much within my other projects. I will choose which suit style is the strongest  to go forward with. I also have to still design the back of the deck of cards. This I am hoping to keep neutral so whichever design I use, the backing will suit all. That's all from me today, a little bit of an information overload.

Today I got back to designing my deck of cards, I have now finished one suit of cards in this style. However this is just an experiment at the moment, as there is still lots I am unhappy with.  I firstly designed  these  in a darker red, I wasn't too sure how the colour would look, So I also brightened the  red.... it's very in your face though, so yea, don't like it much.  I tried to make these all  very minimalist looking. So keeping them simple and sticking to one colour. I chose to reference my  King of Heart on King Richard Lion Heart  of England he ruled in 1189, then died a few months later. As I spoke  yesterday, Queen Wilhelmina. Although as I write this I have actually drawn her as the Queen of Hearts when , I have actually put her down as my queen of diamonds... whoops, not a biggy though, it can be easily changed.  My Jack is referenced  on Prince Louis Fredinerd of Pruissa.  So, yes hopefully more designs tomorrow, I am thinking of giving myself a different subject every week to do for this project. So now that my dissertation is ending, you will hear more about my deck of cards, view bug and  my main project. That's all from me today!

So I started looking at my dissertation today..... then I thought the dishes needed done, Have to get my finals ready for the interim show. So may as well add the blurb to the book covers.  Had to then  change some of my elements within the book covers around so the blurb would fit.... And about two hours spent arguing with myself on which fonts to use.... so yea..... em, didn't get much of anything to do with my dissertation  done today. Whoops!

I have to admit though, I really under estimated how much time it would take to not only tweak one of the covers to look semi finished,  as the others do. But to then get the elements to change about and try to make them identical to the other. Such a pain in the arse!
I did get it done though, in between cleaning my flat and any other distraction that I let take me away from my laptop. I got it done!

So this was the first font that I really liked. Also just to let you know, the colours are a little funny due to me being lazy about putting the images into RGB mode. I have uploaded too many so look through past blogs to get an idea of colour. I want you to look at the font anyways. So as I was saying. This was the first font I liked. I then tested a few others and finally landed on this one:

Now this is actually the font called "Chaparral Pro", this is it in bold. So I realized I  had to move all the elements on the back page. I was determined not to move my guide lines though. The gun, smoke, bullet holes. ALL had to be moved to have room for the blurb. Took me a good few hours for each of the book cover, to try and get the placement exact on each one.  So, eventually I got this working for me. I then decided to still have the font "Chaparral Pro" in regular.

So these are my finals ready for print and hopefully mounting on Monday.