Amy Blay

My brief proposes I either choose the religious side to design or the commercial side. I have chosen the religious side, I was brought up and went to a church school, so I think its a really nice opportunity for me to produce something I used to have a deeper connection to. I also as much as I love the commercial side to christmas want to use this opportunity to 'remember' and illustrate all the small religious parts of christmas I had forgotten. All of the below illustrations are by Amy Blay, the first is an example of what I dont want to produce for my christmas products. The characters and miss match of different images, as I have chosen the religious illustrations I wouldn't be using this anyway, but its too cheesy and not the warm christmassy feeling you want to get from a Christmas card.

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Although I wont be using characters, I do prefer this second illustration much more, the background adds so much to the whole image, the textured background looks liked cracked ice bringing life to the illustration. Although I dont like the whole cheesy character design on christmas cards I love snowflakes, and these alone could tempt me to just illustrate them. When I wrote this brief I wanted to use it as a chance to have fun an experiment with a new style and not necessarily use imagery, the illustrative type looks really original, I could use religious songs or words and illustrate them in a christmas way modernizing the traditional theme.

I love the next four illustrations and these are perfect examples of what I want to design for my set of christmas inspired products. Its a chance for me to play around with illustrative type and introduce illustration, rather than having this as my focal point. I have also restricted my colour pallet to 2 colours + stock, this is a completely different way to how I normally work but I think it will push my boundaries and help me illustrate something really amazing.

The blocked colour works so well and keeps in with the traditional christmas colours, I dont particularly like the character design, but its the over all affect which makes them work so well.