A few thoughts...

I haven't posted on here for a while as I haven't done any design work. I'd say I've been too busy but it's a poor excuse. Although I've been working 5 days a week so it takes up most of my time, I've just been procrastinating on my days off instead of doing some more work. So instead of a design blog, this is more "bla bla bla here's how my mind works".

Full time work is dragging a bit already. I was one of those arrogant kids who never believed that stuff grown ups would tell you about school being the best days of your life and so on, but now I'm in full time work, I wish I was back at school. Things were easier. You could get away with murder and just get a slap on the wrist. Being late, pissing around in lessons... the most that generally happened, (unless you actually did something completely ridiculous like shit on a teacher's desk), was a teacher might have a word with you and tell you to calm it down. You mess around or are late to work, you've got a manager on your case and risk losing your job.

There was the social aspect as well. I wasn't a popular kid at school, I didn't have loads of friends, but the few I did have I could see everyday. We went out clubbing each Thursday, would get horribly drunk, wake up Friday morning with a terrible hangover and still make it into school for 8.30. And everyone would do it. But now, now we all have jobs and have to be at work for 9.30 or something, and we just won't go out in case we're too hungover for work, or we're late... it's an entirely new system, and it's bizarre. At work, I'm not a sociable person. I find it hard making friends, and whilst I now have a few people that I'll see away from work, it's taken some time for me to reach this stage, and it's simply because everyone is at Uni or has their own job to go to. Most of the friends I made at school were through other people, friends of friends became true friends, and so it went on.

I think this comes down to me being different in the long run. I think what's stopping me from talking to people at work is that I'm concerned about their prejudices. I don't have any sort of accent, Kidderminster or otherwise, and so apparently this makes me posh. I don't wanna start talking to somebody at work and have them instantly thinking I'm some uptight snobby posh boy, cos I'm not. It's something I've faced abuse for all my life and it gets so old. It doesn't wind me up or annoy me particularly, it's just cliche and dull.

Despite feeling nostalgic about my school days, I'm aware I still have Uni ahead of me... which should be a return to social life as I knew it before, mixed with some work. But is it worth it? Taking a gap year is like seeing the future, entering full time work, making your own way in the world... and just thinking, "Is this what the rest of my life will be like?". While I'm aware that my current job is COMPLETELY different to what I hope to do in the future as a graphic designer, it's the same routine. Get up, go to work, get home, sleep. Limited social life. Looking at my parents, are they content with their jobs? No. That said, I don't believe either of them are doing what they wanted to do, whereas design is something I REALLY want to do. But is it worth sacrificing all the social life, the messing around, the FUN just for a career and money? I wonder. I'm dead set on going to Uni though, just so I can attempt to relive those glory years at school that were a large part of my life, and shaped and formed me into the person I am today. I hope it offers me a new perspective.

x

Work all day, work all night.

Finished work at 10.30. Since then, got some food, chilled a bit, before continuing to do some design work. This pic was done for my sister, and I experimented a bit from my standard line drawing in Illustrator, experiment with blend mode in Photoshop to create some neon effects, as my sister lovessssss neon. Also started using Ps brushes a bit more, always naively thought they weren't too great to use, but build up layers and stuff, and you can make some ace effects. Also downloaded some lightning bolt brushes the other day, they are amazing. Gonna try and find some more brush packs and build up an arsenal of brushes. Not sure if I went overboard on neon and brushes here though, might continue to play around, strip it back a bit maybe. But we'll see.

However, instead of staying up late tinkering with this and that, gonna throw myself into bed and surrender to sleep. Day off tomorrow, don't wanna waste it doing fuck all when I still have a lot of people to do designs for. Really setting my sights on building up a large portfolio that shows all my graphic capabilities. And one day, I will be a graphic designer. It's gonna happen. Stand in my way, be flattened. Simple.

Ambition reigns supreme. Gonna be doing my artist profile thingy tomorrow as well hopefully. Gonna be wickeddddddddd.

x

Alsooooooooooo.

Thinking of expanding this blog out a bit in terms of subject matter. Maybe talk about music? As I'm not talking to anyone in particular here, I can do what the fuck I like. Let's face facts.

Sticking with art/designy for a bit though, artist profile style thingy coming up soon. Boooooooosh.

x

Yuk yuk yuk

So full time work has done what I was worried about and raped my soul and all my free time. Constantly tired, constantly wanting to do something and can't cos I gotta walk through those big ole automatic doors and start shovelling greasy chickens about to stuff into the mouth of Greedy Britain. Fuck. My. Life.

However, before working 9-5 devoured my enthusiasm, I managed to get a twitter background done for... well, twitter. Cos yea, I got that back. I came out of hibernation and stopped saying "fuck you" to the world quite so much. I still say it, but maybe with less venom. A lil bit of spit though. Anyway, Bendycakes twitter exists at; http://twitter.com/bendycakes. Also, facebook exists at; http://www.facebook.com/bendycakes. Funny that ennit? Currently subscribed to www.iwishihadabetternickname.com/fuck for assistance. Anyway... oh yea, the pic.

Ashamed of the pose I pulled for this so was too embarrassed to even show anyone. The graphics are ace, but I'm not a vain man and don't look back at pictures and think "Damn I look good here". Generally the opposite actually; "My god I look like a tit". Luckily this picture is edited sufficiently and cast into enough shadow for me to actually believe I look cool. For all of 2 seconds before I remember I'm not. Bwahaha.

Going to try and get up early tomorrow and do some design work before I go to work, it's a possibility that probably won't happen. But I can't work for shit at night. I dunno why. So it's bed for now.

Bendycakes. x

P.S. I got told I bitch too much on here. This post was no exception. Fuck the fuckity fuck fucking world and all the fuckity fuckers in it you CUNT. Line = crossed. x

Once you pop you just can't stop...

Today I was going to try and learn how to do something completely new, but fell back into the whole pop art design element. First thing I did when I woke up, was create a pop art can of Red Bull, a 21st Century version of Andy Warhol's classic Campbell soup. The final product looked like this:

I'm planning on expanding this into a series, changing colours around and repeating the image over and over again, as Warhol first did with Coke bottles and Marilyn Monroe, the coke bottle series being a commentary on consumerism, the Monroe series depicting the idea of celebrity and idolisation, how these celebrities can live on through the media and are never forgotten. However, this backfired on Warhol somewhat ironically, as his prints of Monroe became incredibly famous and iconic as well.

Making a series of these Red Bull cans would be a comment on consumerism as well, but if anything, it's a comment on my own consumption of energy drinks. I had a big bottle of Tesco Kx again today, accompanied by fuck knows how many coffees.

Moving on, I then decided to offer to do design work for people on Facebook, posting a status asking if anyone wanted a picture edited of them at all. The trouble with this is, that people can be a bit vague about what they want, so it's up to me to just experiment with whatever picture of them I ended up using. At times it's hard, at times I'll look at a photo and know what I want to do with it.

The first one I did finally strayed away from pop art territory, instead creating a more graphic novel style piece. I threw in a few blood splatters for good measure, and the end result was great. Accomplishment of the day:

I then roamed back into pop art/retro style graphics for the 2nd picture, and added a big fuck off baseball bat. This was one picture I looked at and decided, "Yeah, I know what to do here". His hand position was convenient for holding something, and I knew I'd have to put something in there. Maybe a dildo would've been funnier. Neon colours, retro thunderbolts, more us of halftone, (I should probably ease up on using this, but let's face it, it looks fucking mint), some experiments with filters and layering, a bit of text and bammmmmmmmmmmm...

Proud of this one too, but feel as if it's missing something. May go back and experiment some more, but for now, I have 3 other people clammering for profile pics, and time is precious... these are gonna have to wait til tomorrow afternoon, as tomorrow morning I return to my day job, selling pies. Times is hard.

Love love.

J x

Tesco Kx Energy Drink is my fuel.

So here's the extent of today's photoshop fiddlings... a nice retro effect pop art styley image of... me. Vanity's a horrible thing.

I'm well aware this stuff I'm doing is FAR from groundbreaking, or original... but it's just me picking stuff up as I go along, learning, fiddling, experimenting. Cos as a designer who can design pretty well but has no training, what the fuck else can you do? Over the past week I've been trawling through random tutorials, learning how to do some stuff that may not seem essential, but in the long run, best to know some basics and stuff. Figuring out how to do pop art seemed a good idea to do, I'd forgotten how to do halftones, and now I know again! Ace. The newspapers were a last minute temporary addition, hopefully gonna build up a background with my own photos and use halftone again, then blend it all in, fiddle it about. And while I'm doing the retro thing, a few more neon colours and lightning bolts etc. might get chucked in. We'll see.

Cos that's the great thing about design, and art... it's never ending. Even when I see an image I've made and think, "Oh fuck, that looks awesome", I'll then go on to think, "but what if I did this...?". That way, I end up passing an hour just fiddling and tweaking an image, til I have a result that I'm happy with. And even then, I probably won't be happy. Sometimes, you just have to stop and walk away, which is what I did with the skull.

Also, the skull I posted the other day wasn't picked up from a tutorial, it was just done using skills I already knew, using the pen tool in illustrator, fiddling about with different art brushes then editing and piecing together a fill in photoshop. Came off better than I expected, and now it's my phone background, my mac background... nice.

Another day off work tomorrow, so I'm hoping to go heads down again, do some reading up on more tutorials, click a few buttons and see what I can knock up, as it were.

No idea if ANYONE at all is reading this, but it's good for me to just write and design and just keep doing stuff, to keep me entertained, busy and happy. I love the feeling when I've finished a piece of work, and I just wanna show it off to everyone. Even if no one does see this blog, I can still imagine that people are looking at it going "Awh that's fucking wicked".

I'll probably reinstate my twitter soon to promote this blog, and just microblog about the work I'm doing. I keep forgetting nobody's reading this and giving a shit either way.

Peace out.

Jack. x

An Introduction

Hello!

My name is: Jack. Or, as the blog header suggests, bendycakes. This is a name I used for my twitter page, and I've stuck it all over the internet since then. I've recently deleted my twitter page as well as my facebook, as I wasn't feeling social enough to social network. This was also as I wanted to get back to something I am passionate about; graphic design. Without the distractions of social networking, I am now able to commit my time to my job as a sales assistant in a supermarket, (Morrisons haha), and doing some design work, a far more constructive way of spending my time.

However, despite creating a few rad images, (if I do say so myself), I still didn't feel as if I had any way of presenting them, that they didn't have a purpose, and all sorts of other depressing realisations. So, I came up with a great idea, make a design blog! Here I'll be posting my designs and stuff, as well as photos and random facts about my day. All presented in a clear, well thought out layout... except for this one. I ran out of time, not enough hours in the day! Essentially it's photo journalism/blogging, but with slick designs.

If you like what you see, ace. If you keep coming back cos you're interested, ace. I'll try and post as regularly as possible, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to design, so I may take longer over a post than necessary. I hope I can keep it up, and I hope you enjoy.

Also, as someone who wants to design as much as possible just to keep practicing and learning, (I'm still really a rookie with little training, but have picked up a lot over the years), I'll happily do any design bits and bobs for anyone who wants something done, for free! So if you like my work and want something done, either comment me on here or email jackbendall@hotmail.com. I'll probably reinstate twitter soon as well, so if and when I do I'll post the link here, and if you have twitter and want to chat, go for it.

The image at the top is something I designed the other day for starters, it's a graphic study of Damien Hirst's For The Love of God. Hope you like it.

Love Bendy. x