We are very happy to announce that 4th year Morag McClenaghan has recently had her fashion illustrations featured on The Guardian fashion blog. The article explores alternative mediums to street style photography including a discussion on Morag’s role in shaping the underground illustrated street style movement.
Read the article here:
Explore Morag’s website here:
Join us in the beautiful ECA Sculpture Court today for BookMarks, an artist book and Zine fair. Browse the work of students, staff and alumni and speak with the artists themselves. A perfect opportunity to buy unique Christmas gifts or to inspire your own creativity. We hope to see you there!
Earlier this semester our students worked on a fantastic exhibition held in the Filmhouse Cafe Bar. In collaboration with the French Film Institute, each illustrator redesigned a classic french film poster in celebration of the 22nd French Film Festival UK. The chosen films varied in genre, tone, taste and era, leading to a diverse range of beautifully illustrated posters.
Students enjoyed re-imagining the original poster designs, considering composition, typography and of course the all important idea behind their image. Final artworks used portraits, collections of objects and metaphors to represent their chosen film. Students also experimented in medium, resulting in an exciting range of screen printed, digital, hand painted and mixed media posters.
With 25 participating students from First Year to Masters, the project was a great opportunity for different year groups to get to know one another and for younger years to gain knowledge from the older years exhibition experience.
The opening was a huge success, enjoyed by staff, students and the public. The posters were reviewed by a very impressed and impressive judging panel, including Richard Mowe, Ilona Morison and Dove Alarcon from the French Film Institute and Marc Jacobs from the Filmhouse. And in an exciting finale to the project, 4th year student George Douglas was awarded first place and a 6 month pass to the Filmhouse. Sophie Powell-Hall, Sara Ljeskovac and Kristina Karnilaviciute were also given honourable mentions for their thought provoking posters.
Many thanks to the French Film Festival and congratulations to all involved!
Much as I love to fill my first blog post with a selection of awe inspiring finished illustrations, unfortunately things don’t seem to work that way at the start of anything and so the start of my residency has produced more ideas and experiments than pretty jpegs.
Music is still a large part of my life (before coming to ECA for a masters in illustration, I studied music in York) and recently I have been thinking a lot about possible ways to combine illustration with music. I am keen to explore different intersection points between art and music and have been really inspired by Klee and Kandinsky’s writing on the subject.
I remain a card carrying lover of children’s books, and have been playing around with a few new characters in my sketchbooks including fleecy (pictured) the perfect sheep who hits adolescents and with it, an awkwardly anarchic identity crisis phase. Then there’s Shaun, the slightly camp sausage dog with a very lurid taste in trousers and his wee pal, Mike, the hedgehog.
Finally, before I bore you all senseless with so much text and so few pictures, I would like to try and find ways to incorporate my love for travel and for people into my work this year. I loved exploring the impossibly broad theme of ‘personal identity’ in my degree show last year since it afforded me the opportunity to dip my feet into anthropology and social sciences, subjects that have always fascinated me. I would like to further explore this theme, looking into how digital technologies have affected how we percieve identity but also explore culture in a looser, less academic context through travel journals.
All this may change if someone offers me £1000000 to draw them a dog logo. Being a poor, starving artist may loose it’s novelty and I may sell my soul to capitalism. In the meantime though, watch this space and hopefully more jpegs will be present next time!
Jessica
This afternoon our students will be enjoying a presentation from the talented Catherine Rayner, as part of our Friday Talks Series. As a children’s book illustrator, Catherine Rayner has created a hoard of endearing and loved characters including Solomon Crocodile and Smelly Louie. Her tactile and sophisticated approach to illustration challenges the traditional aesthetic of Children’s Books, earning her several highly acclaimed nominations and awards for her work. Best of all, Catherine Rayner is one of our very own ECA Illustration alumni! We look forward to having her back to share the path behind her many successes.
http://www.catherinerayner.co.uk
Currently I am working on a project for Dundee Rep, creating illustrations to accompany a new story written by Vivian French. Mammy McArthur’s Little Grey Mouse will be read to tiny wee baby children in a series of theatrical story-telling events throughout the festive season. In other news, I have recently rediscovered dip pens and am delighting in this wonderfully unpredictable and satisfying medium. I used dip pen and fine liner to design a poster for an upcoming multicultural fair, combining Western festive imagery and Middle Eastern mehndi style designs and patterns.
As an Artist in Residence I visit Edinburgh every Friday (I live in Dundee) to draw in the museum or zoo and to reconnect with the chatter of the studio. The residency is intrinsic to the evolution of my practice as it necessitates leaving home and working on ideas in a different environment. Listening in on studio meetings, wandering around the college library or even browsing the shop can spark ideas and push a project in a direction previously unconsidered.
Recently our talented third years have been working on a great professional practice brief with the National Museum of Scotland. The challenge was to design a unique children’s christmas activity that incorporated elements of the museum. It was also important for our students to think practically as the selected design will be produced on a large scale for this years festive season. Here is a small selection of the inventive entries, we look forward to announcing the lucky winner.
Hello! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sorcha and I have just graduated from ECA this year.
I feel like my residency has kicked off to a good start. At the end of September, I helped a group of the 4th years run an afternoon workshop at Portobello High School as part of their Literary Festival. The aim was to give them an idea of what Illustration is (an ambitious thing to do in a two hour workshop!) We started off by playing Game of Consequences, partly because it is a great excuse to play a fun game, but also to demonstrate the strong connection illustration has to storytelling and how words and images can both feed each other when creating narratives. Later on we asked the students to draw each other expressing various emotions. They seemed to really enjoy the workshop and it was great to see all the exciting and playful images that they made.
In terms of my own work, I have been spending most of my time in the print room. My main focus for this year is to just continue experimenting with various print processes whilst I have access to these amazing facilities. I have mainly been mono printing, which has been great after not doing it to four months. I also want to experiment more with screen printing and see how some of my handmade, textural drawings are translated through this medium. I am excited to see how my work will develop over the course of the year.
Well it has certainly been a playful week in the Illustration Department, as our students worked on the collaborative brief ‘Fun and Games’. On Monday morning our young illustrators were divided into groups of 3 or 4, mixing year groups, interests and characters. The teams set to work designing their own hand crafted games, which were tested in a whole department games session and award ceremony on Friday afternoon. The results were varied, inventive and thoroughly entertaining. We are looking forward to our next collaborative project already.
This project was inspired by the great collection of posters that emerged from the Modernist era. We asked our first years to promote an event venue in Edinburgh through designing and printing a poster drawing on Modernist principles. Edinburgh is a city full of events including music, theatre, comedy and more. Many historic buildings have been converted into venues offering a range of cultural experiences. This project was a great opportunity for our new students to explore the city and to trigger their curiosity. Check out their fantastic finished products.
