UCA Final Degree show 2011, Graphic Design - Long Live the Art School.

Me with my newly professional bras, on the way to our successful futures!



My final degree show went quite well, I enjoyed the private views! Here's the image I exhibited in a tiny A3 frame, next to a billion other A3 pieces. It's promotional artwork for my game Maidens, Pirates, Steampunks & Zombies.



Que the embarrassing photo by my Dad- I can't even reach my picture! lol



The hustle and bustle of the private view (me talking to Rian Hughes in the bottom right corner!).



To be perfectly honest, the only thing that I was disappointed with about the show was that I felt like one of the few students that were ushered into a corner and hidden, like I was something to be ashamed of. But you know, so what?! I LOVE the work I do, and without sounding like too much of a pompous arse, there are plenty of other people in the world who like my work too! So there, I will have an awesomely successful career dang nabbit! XD

xLouisax

Geek Game for Girls - when History met Zombies

Maidens, Pirates, Steampunks & Zombies
Dress up Game!



Maidens, Pirates, Steampunks & Zombies is a quirky new Dress up Game, featuring the option to ‘Mashup’ some of the more boyish and overlooked genres.

I challenged myself to make this game as the Final Major Project of my Graphic Design degree at The University of the Creative Arts, Epsom. A true labour of love, it gave me the excuse to study not only the gorgeous aesthetics of 18th and 19th century fashions, but also the culture and ideas behind some of the coolest fantasy genres on the planet.

The majority of Dress up Games at the moment only tend to feature modern fashion, Justin Bieber, or Unicorn-riding Princesses, vomiting rainbows. Though we can all enjoy such frivolities at times, for just one moment, come over to the dark side. Bring out the geek within and make your own Pirate-Steampunk-Zombie-Lady!

Click HERE to play the game!

Let me know what you all think!

xLouisax

Zombies Zombies Zombies!

Recently I've been making the zombie graphics for my Dress-Up game, which have been fun! I read a book about zombies and drew and analysed a few zombie features.

The zombies glorified by Hollywood films are called 'Romero' zombies which are the ones that are viscious and hungry for human flesh. Because 'Romero' Zombies are essentially a fairly modern idea based on the Zombies created in George Romero films, I wanted to create modern zombified clothes (because they are the true zombies) but also have zombified versions of the other costumes, because it mashes everything up which is the theme of the game.



I learnt that zombies look best with sunken in eyes, torn off lips and pale faces and they don't usually wear shoes? Oh yeah, and their clothes are ripped or in the least covered with blood (from their own wounds or from their victims).

So here are my zombies, complete with complimentary Zombie head (which you can select in the game. :) Also a couple more accessories:









I am just about to put the zombie stuff into the game but here is my game so far, you can now select different backgrounds and turn the music off if it shivers your timbers.

xLouisax

Louisa Rose Brooks Portfolio

Hi guys, here is my current mini-portfolio.

Open publication - Free publishing - More brooks

xLouisax

Dress-up Game Dolls

Here are some sketches of some of the dresses to be featured in the Dress-up Game I have been working on for my Final Major Project.









As well as this, I feel that I am getting closer and closer to designing a suitable layout for the game, which will be fun and easy to use. This was my rough mock-up today of how I think I may lay everything out :s



I had originally planned to have two characters, 18th and 19th Century, who would have wardrobes featuring upper class and lower class clothing. Since the start of the project however, feedback has encouraged me to have even more variety than this, to make the game something really original, and a sort of 'mix and match' idea.

Now, the game will feature one character/doll with one huge wardrobe featuring different periods, classes, and even non-fiction fashion.

I've been trying to get my head around how to program this so that it will be easy to use, and so far various tutorials have been helping me out, so hopefully this trend will continue.

xLouisax

Epsom Characters - Activity Pack

The idea is that you can go out into the town of Epsom, Surrey, with this activity pack, track these people down and then give yourself a phat tick when you do!

Open publication - Free publishing - More epsom

I'm submitting this for my Uni project, and I'm finally happy with how I've rounded everything off. It's based on my Epsom characters series which I hadn't really applied to anything else before.

Now I am very happy with the direction my project has gone, and I'm very excited to move on to my Final Major Project (which I am planning to also make into an activity pack).

Weeeeeee!

xLouisax

P.S Critique is very welcome, hit me baby!

New Beginnings

At last, after all this time, after all the trials and tribulations, I HAVE A MAC!





This bad boy is going to help me work through my Final Major Project and generally elevate me to new heights in the future.

I'm not blogging this to rub it in anybody's face; I've had to put up with a rubbish PC for ever. If I open a folder containing 20 photos, my PC crashes and then moans that it has no virtual memory left. It's painstaking.

But Maccy is with me now, and I won't be slowed down or held back any longer,

Weeeeeeeee!

xLouisax

[EDIT] I've had my mac for a few days now and things are going really great ^_^ It's so fast and powerful. They say that technology can't make you happy but I actually wake up every morning and I see it, and smile - it's like waking up to someone. ;)

No Added Sugar Exhibition

The No Added Sugar Exhibition, which took place on the 14th and 15th December 2010 in humble Epsom, Surrey, was an exhibition entirely funded and organised by 3rd year Graphic Design students of The University of Creative arts, Epsom.



It featured current project work by me and some fellow students on my course, and we even had a shop to sell our postcards, cards and little books.

My wall space featured my project, Epsom Characters of course! I was especially happy with how well my set of postcards printed - such good quality prints and they looked amazing! I made £4.50 selling them!




It was also great fun spending the day there setting everything up, splitting into teams to get certain jobs done. I was on the refreshments team so it was our job to go to Asda and buy all the booze! Then we had to regulate the refreshments while the exhibition was running. Other than that, everybody helped to set up the room and workshop together. During the second day, I joined the Workshop crew who were all making live arts and crafts, so I took the opportunu=ity to catch up on some bookbinding. On the whole it was excellently organised and we all worked very well together!





We were all of us appaled at the complete lack of support from out University's PR and of how dismissive they were about the whole thing. We really could have used their help to promote our exhibition, and they shouldn't have taken all of our posters down around Uni (which we had permission to put up).

Nevertheless, this made us even more determined to pull it off, by ourselves. It must just be embarassing for them to now be hearing about how wonderful it went and how much kudos it ultimately brought our University. For them to not have taken this opportunity to promote us, and show prospective students just how organised and determined our University students can be, must mean that they're idiots.

This is not to say that our tutors didn't help us; they were all very supportive and encouraging throughout the whole process and we were very thankful for this. :)

Weeeee!

xLouisax

Bookbinding Workshop

Taking part in Mette-Sofie Ambeck's bookbinding workshop at Uni was one of the best ideas I ever had! She taught us how to make a hard-back book from scratch. Here is the book I made during the workshop, using random paper for the pages.







And here's one I made earlier... Some friends and I went to the bookbinding shop in London to buy some vital bookbinding supplies, and since then, using my ever growing pile of dissertation books as a home-made press, I was able to produce a small black hardback book.









I made much more mistakes this time (especially with the spine!) so I learnt a lot more but I managed to emboss the front cover.

I wanted to learn this skill, not just because it's completely awesome, but because the project I am working on at present has to be made into a book, and I may also make books for my FMP. It's also just a really nice skill to have; I could make little mock-ups of something I need to publish, or simply make quirky limited edition books featuring my Illustrations.

It's an amazing skill to have, I strongly recommend doing a bookbinding workshop, if for nothing else, just for the fun of making books.

All the best,

xLouisax

Hello Kitty Fanzine

Open publication - Free publishing - More zine

Making a Hello Kitty fanzine for a day-project at Uni was very very very fun. It is now complete! Muahahahahahahaaa!

All the best,

xLouisax

Girl Pirate Dress-up game

My tutors set me the task:

"Do Something you've never done before; something outside your comfort zone. Something you never thought you'd do but perhaps have always wanted to do."

So I decided to make a flash dress-up game!! I recently found a tutorial that showed me how you can program such a game in flash so I decided to give it a go. I've always wanted to make one of these, I'm glad I was given an excuse to do it.

This was out of my comfort zone for two reasons:

1) Flash I have used Flash in the past, but it is definately my weakest program. Every time I use it (which is hardly ever) I have to relearn the way it works.
2) The last day Spending all that time vectorizing the pirate and girl and all her clothes, and hoping that I would be able to program it all to make it work on the last day was not an experience I enjoyed!

I'm planning to make some kind of activity pack for my FMP, so this was a lovely way to test out one of the things i was thinking of doing. Of course this is a very basic game, and if I was to take this further I could be much more ambitious with working buttons and changing backgrounds etc. Also, I could make her clothes look more realistic. Not having the time to add folds and shadows to the clothes made me die a little inside. :p


Play the game here!


Enjoy,

xLouisaxx

Stop-frame animation cherry!

My tutors set me the brief "Make a 3 minute video....". So naturally, if any subject is groovy it's going to be about art. I love motivational quotes and I love art, so I've made a stop-frame animation about art quotes.



To be honest, not bad for my first ever stop-frame animation. The problems I had with this brief were:

1) I have no video-editing software or powerful computer at home so I found this brief to be horrificly unfair for people in my situation (especially with a shoddy University library that is barely open).

2) The video-editing software I opted to use was IMovie which I've never used before. It's a bit rubbish though isn't it, I mean, you can't do any faster than 10fps which means that I had to delete TONS of photos in order to make it less than 3 minutes long. This also added to the horrible jerky movements of the animation.

But whatever, I can't change it now, this is what I am submitting, and in general I am proud of it; cock-ups and all.

What have I learnt?

Well, now that I've made my first stop-frame animation, and made just about every mistake you possibly can with this method, hopefully this means that when I have to make another stop-frame animation IT WILL BE AMAZING!

All the best,

xlouisax

An amazing 'No Smoking' collection

You always find gems when you're not looking for them. That's how I felt when I stumbled across Daniel Eatock's "ongoing collection of alternatives to compliment the archetypal ‘No Smoking’ sign(s)".

You can check out all of them on Eatock's website. You should, some of them actually made me lol!
http://www.eatock.com/project/no-smoking-sign-request/

xx

Louisa Rose Brooks' mini portfolio

Open publication - Free publishing - More portfolio

To round this up...

I've just finished my second year of my Graphic design degree. It's a great course, despite the fact I don't see myself directly doing graphic design in the future. My favourite project of the WHOLE YEAR was a group project where we had to design a crazy restaurant under the theme 'steampunk'.





We had to design everything; floor plan, furniture, menus, shop front, interior, it was amazing! I will never forget the night before hand in when we didn't sleep, we just stuck at it trying to put the project portfolio together, twas a hoot! We were 'Group 4' LOVE YOU GROUP 4!!