During Creative Futures week guest speakers hold seminars for all the design and communication students at Glyndwr University. It’s a great event that’s aimed at guiding and inspiring the students in their future careers as designers, illustrators, photographers etc.; I really enjoyed myself and found it very interesting to hear from others who’ve made a success with their own artwork or talents.
The first guest speaker was Barry Purves who said that “everyone is gifted, but some people never open their package”. Barry showed us a number of animations (below), including his own, and described how he loves to breathe life into his creations and how no matter what you’re doing, if any detail is not relevant to the storytelling, then delete it.
“John and Karen” by Matthew Walker
“Overtime” by 2 French students as a tribute to Jim Henson
“Next” by Barry Purves re-enacts all of Shakespeare’s plays without using a single word!
My friend Tracey Green wrote one good post on her blog about the whole week, but I plan to break it up a little into two further posts…
Emily Speed spoke to us about her work. She’s a fine artist who creates installations made from found materials such as card and has recently written a post on her blog called Getting Paid.
Daisy Dowe came and showed us her new book Get Ahead Fred and also told us about her previous work as model maker for Warner Bros, Hot Animation and Aardman Animations.
And finally Joe List spoke to us about his design and animation work. His seminar was really entertaining and he himself graduated from Glyndwr university 6 years ago. Since then he has worked for a design company, sold his own comic book Freak Leap online and also started his own very creative blog The Annotated Weekender. His blog is worth a look; every week he doodles over the Guardian’s weekend magazine and puts the rather amusing results online!
Joe List gave us all some good advice on what we can do to succeed in the creative market;
- Stylise – but don’t make your illustrations look too real, or they will look “guff”
- Keep on drawing – do competitions, projects, fill a sketchbook, maybe collaborate
- Don’t work for free – unless you really want to
- Don’t hide your work – create online space to showcase it
He also told us about a few of his favourite sites/blogs by:
Until next time, happy surfing!
