Josh Norris OCA logbook

This assignment was the biggest, in my opinion, it allowed a lot of creative control and I will admit it did make me feel a little unfocused to start off with, I had this feeling that I would pick an idea and then think of a better one and I would be going round and round in circles not being able to land on something. The first thing I did was dive straight into my sketchbook and to previous exercises, this is the final Assignment of Illustration 1 and I wanted to just brush up on the different techniques this course has taught me in lots of different areas, I created quite a few mind maps and took a look back into my previous hand-ins. When it came down to idea generation I stuck to mind maps and then a spider diagram, for me getting all the ideas down on paper is just the best way, I am a visual thinker but in terms of ideas I find it much easier to write down everything I'm thinking that way I don't miss anything. One thing that kept going round in my mind was the ide...

Assignment 4: I was very much looking forward to this assignment, after reading up on it I was excited about the creative freedom it would offer me. The assignment wanted to me really show off my developing style and use of tools and materials. That is why I wanted to make sure that I was getting the most out of this assignment, I found it helpful that it gave me these parameters. I wanted to make sure that my work had a lot of experimentation present and that it was clearly thought out and developed. The topic I picked was 'Discovery' when I initially read the word the first thing that came to my mind was the idea of Self Discovery. I thought that would be a good basis to begin my assignment. I thought it would be a different direction to take the assignment in. It is also something that is relative to me currently, I am wanting to become more mindful and discover more about my self. I often find this helps to calm stress and focus my mind. Because this has such a connection...

This exercise wants me to produce an illustration for a new educational book called Animals around the world. To begin the exercise off I started reading some blog posts about book cover design.  https://www.designhill.com/design-blog/evolution-of-book-cover-design/ The first blog post centred around the evolution of book cover design and how it has changed over time to fit the tastes of the era, one thing I got from the post was that you should embrace the trends of the era. If you are trying to get your book to be seen on the shelves you have to make it visually interesting and pop.  I was then intrigued to find out what these trends were, I found a blog post centred around the current book cover trends of 2019 and it was so interesting to see. What was interesting was I look at a lot of book covers but actually seeing these trends listed and makes you step back and think, "Oh Yeah" that is a trend. This was the list of 2019 trends, what I did was gather s...