Charlotte Walker Art Foundation Degree

  I made this fun retro style poster on photoshop to promote my cards which I want to sell in packs of 3. As with trading cards in real life, you won't know what you're getting. I have bought some recycled paper envelopes, and made round stickers with one of my motifs on to seal them in a branded way. I would have liked to use a stamp to print a logo onto them but I didn't give myself time to do this. Stickers are a classic childhood thing. I have printed my own series of stickers based on some of my kitsch illustrations, and bought compostable clear bags to package them in. I made this poster on Photoshop which uses the colour palette of the stickers and shows what designs are in the pack. This is what the sticker sheets looked like before I cut them out. I chose my favourite drawings from these sketchbook pages. These are the stickers that I am using to seal the envelopes - I bought this vintage elephant 'piggy bank' to collect money if anyone buys my cards or sti...

 

 Since the start of this project I have been using Instagram to find kitschy imagery to inform the style of my work. When I decided I wanted to make trading cards with text, I looked at an Instagram account called @wildsofa who collects Valentines cards from the 50s and 60s. I wanted to discover the types of fonts that were commonly used in that era so I could give my cards a more considered, vintage look. I did some sketches of a selection of the greetings cards to familiarise myself with the style. Finally, I searched online and installed various fonts that I felt were similar to the ones I observed in the Valentines' cards, then tested them out against my backgrounds so I could narrow it down to my favourite two. These are the ones I chose:  I liked the contrast between the first font which is itallic, lowercase and cursive, against the second one which is bold and uppercase; I think having two different fonts helps to break the image up in a way that makes it easier to pro...

Something I have collected since childhood is trading cards. When I was little I had a lot of football cards, and so did my dad in the 60s and 70s - it's a format that seems to never get old. I remember going toW H Smith to get Dr Who cards and Top Trumps too, and it's a kind of warm feeling to have these memories, so I want to explore cards further in this project. I have scanned some collectible cards that I have at home and I want to use them as inspiration for my own set of nostalgic cards. 'Drop Dead' cards Drop Dead is a British clothing brand who create fictional, anime style characters to market different series of clothes and add a sense of narrative, and when I bought some items from them recently it came with a couple of their trading cards for free. What I observed about these cards is that the artwork fills the entire space, while the additional information, like statistics, is minimised so that the characters are the assertive focal point. Some elements of...

So far, a lot of my project has been focused on objects like toys and decorations, but I wanted to still be able to incorporate my found objects from beach combing. I figured I could do this by including them in the backgrounds of my cards, so I experimented with creating patterns based on motifs that appear on my pieces of broken pottery, with a combination of organic and geometric shapes. I used a variety of colours so I had more options for each object's background, allowing me to choose a colour way that suits that particular thing best. I also wanted to use slightly garish colours to emphasise my themes of kitsch and nostalgia, which I don't personally associate with 'sophisticated' or contemporary colour choices like monochrome. For the first few samples I used my alcohol markers because I like the flatness and intensity, especially on the newsprint because of the distinctive way it absorbs the ink - I think this one is my least favourite because I couldn't fi...

Using my collected photographs as references, I started generating images using various materials in an illustrative style. I predominantly used pencil and watercolour because they enable me to create sensitive drawings that have a certain softness and human touch in the sketchy markings and subtle colours. I also used a black fineliner for certain details. Drawing in this style gives me feelings of nostalgia because a big part of my childhood was reading Roald Dahl books which had the iconic illustrations by Quentin Blake which are full of character and energy, so this adds a personal touch to the work that also relates to the theme.   Something else I experimented with was alcohol markers. I used them to create intense blocks of flat colour which remind me of a more comic style, compared to the book-ish look of the watercolour. In particular, the 'duck-n-dry' and frog candle drawings exemplify the saturated nature of the ink which reflects the bright, over-stimulating world o...