year long project - 3rd year

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCy5DJb24_s - "It takes 350 balls of cotton to make a single t-shirt!" "Bees are responsible for 1 in 3 bites of food that you eat!" "Running the tap can waste as much as 6 litres of water per minute!" https://www.thetrainline.com/sustainable-travel - "Travelling by plane rather than train makes 7 times more CO2!" https://plasticspolicy.port.ac.uk/ - "11 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year!" "Almost 40% of all food goes to waste!" "Around the world, 79 tons of food is thrown away every second!" "Almost all plastic ever made still exists!" "30% of our CO2 emissions are absorbed by our oceans and 70% of the oxygen humans and land animals breath is directly from the ocean!" "It takes between 2 and 13 litres of water to produce a single A4 sheet of paper!" "One sheet of A4 paper produces enough water for 6-8 people!" "...

  https://www.winter-company.com/en/basket/ This is a really cool and impressive product! Not only is it getting plastic out of the ocean, it is minimising any extra materials needing to be made which is exactly what I have been trying to do! I haven't been quite as successful in this mission but that doesn't mean that I can't use what others have managed to do within my project.  I ordered a sample of the book cloth and it looks and feels pretty much like any other book cloth, with maybe just a bit of additional texture but the paper itself will be textured so whyyyy not! Sadly to actually place an order it would cost way too much; Perhaps it was being mass produced it would be different but I don't need that much nor do I have those kind of funds. It's odd though that they can send me a sample for free but put such limits on orders... but anyway, it would have been great but it's not applicable to this project really. That is pretty much the only option I foun...

I wasn't overly happy with how the plastic collage was working out so I tried image trace on illustrator to see it worked any better;    hand drawn & edited Illustrator image trace Digitally traced from the layout plans & edited (using a scan from the t-shirt I did the tote bag with) Illustrator image trace (needs to be a lighter colour) Photo taken of flowers Digital collage Image trace I quite like the effect image trace has, it's certainly stylised and will allow the imagery to be scaled up as much as needed without worrying about pixilation. I think it only really works for the rubbish heap, the other imagery looks oddly pixilated... without actually being pixilated... the tree especially just loses something, the visual texture just not quite being the same. I may keep it for any photo collages that I include but I think in general I will just stick to original scanned illustrations.

Following on from the tree studies I did a more developed version of the protesting tree which I absolutely adore! I love this as a visual and I really think it brings the idea of a fairy take world to life. I have made the choice that this book will be digitally composed from a small selection of hand drawn elements which will be duplicated. This is both to save time and to save using endless sheets of watercolour paper to draw out the trees! Much like why I have done a digital letterpress type. The addition of the protest sign to the trees 'hand' doesn't really work in a hand rendered manner so editing them all digitally was always going to help with that. I produced a selection of final tree ink drawings to be scanned in, alongside the water colour tree rubbing; And protest signs on the handmade paper;   I don't necessarily think that they are my best tree studies ever but they certainly now look more realistic and individual - before they all looked kind of samey. W...

 In order to save both time, paper and ink, I thought it would be a good idea to create a font using letter press, to add that authentic feel to the protest signs/art without having to each one individually because that's simply not a viable option for this project. I did the entire alphabet out of the font I have been using throughout the project, only using the caps because of what it's for (doesn't really need lower case and it's time consuming process!) and the punctuation. I just laid out the blocks to fit an A3 piece of recycled paper from the art shop (and did half and half for the the handmade paper) and then just played around with the ink and different textures; It worked pretty well but due to the consistency of the ink I used (it was a bit gluey as it had started to dry) it just didn't really dry so I had to take photos in the light box. Here are a few of those; Not overly ideal but with a bit of photoshop magic they were perfectly fine - just not as hig...

 Making wood varnish from beeswax - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEbqQ1Z8AYo Varnishing wood with only bees wax - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBK4ZKOinhc Varnish with beeswax and coconut oil - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6VINWpRgPc How to use varnish - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9I-xqd8QlU I have a block of bees wax from last year - part of the book making kit - that I tried first, using a heat tool to melt the wax and coat the wood but it was difficult to get an even coating so I got some bees wax pellets which I melted alongside some coconut oil; I applied a few layers using some calico and buffed it in but in truth it's still not the best; It's kind of getting there but still not the best. I think a few more layers and potentially a bit more wax than oil but I think I will just have to leave it at this point and move on to other things as I'm not sure the wood will ever work completely perfectly without industrial level equipment. I'll apply multipl...

It was a real challenge getting down my thoughts/ideas in relation to the instructional illustration and even more so thinking about how to do the page layouts! So I roughly drew out the elements of each page individually so I could physically move each part around to see how they could fit on the page together. It's not perfect as such but it has actually given me a better idea of how I could do it... these photos aren't the best and they all seem to be the wrong way around but it's good enough! Colour & collage is another thing entirely but for now this is good! I currently have no idea how I'm going to do the protest poster activity page but is probably something I will probably have to come back too at the end!