08.13/05.14First YEAR idea book

OF

Fengchun mU

Fengchun Mu, also called as mspring, is a Chinese illustrator, who studies in ILP, MICA .website: mspringthing.com

contents

SKETCH BOOK PROJECT

image harvesting project

Pattern workshop

REaction piece

art market

HAND LETTERING

WORDS ON WHEELS

iNDEPENDENT pUBLICATION

EDTORIAL WORKSHOP

STOPMOTION ANIMATION

iNDPENDENT PROJECTDARK FAIRY TALESSCREENPRtINGS

SKETCH BOOK PROJECT

It is a project in which we got another new theme every week by trading the sketch books with different themes. Doing it gave us an oppotuniy to experience new skills and have some brain storms.

<This list> Sep, 2013 acylic, watercolor, pencil

<First Aid> Sep, 2013 gouache, watercolor, pen

<A Simple Place> Sep 2013 gouache, watercolor

<This is not about you>, Oct 2013Acrylic on black paper

It was the first time I used acrylic to do my artwork on black paper. During that period I was very impressed by a Japanese picturebook illustrator, Komako Saika, and this theme just gave me a chance to try a new skill of drawing on black paper and explore more possibility in me.

<Accident>, Nov 2013crayon

<Strange Neibourhoods> Dec,2013ink, ballpen

<Atlas> Oct, 2013color pencil, collage, watercolor

Image harvesting Project

This is a 4 week long project designed to help us to develop our previous stuff that means a lot to us into something fresh? Profound? Marketable? The answer is not one and only in my opinion, and I just LOVE IT!

As for the first week in this project, I chose my favorite fantasy story <Cat Cafe>, and developed it into 10 different ideas, like picturebook, illustrated novel, pop-up book and even games. And finally, I picked the idea of making my Cat Cafe characters into 3D sculpy figures.

After talking about our ten ideas in group, we narrowed our ten ideas down to two in the second week, and still we need to pick our final idea of this project. Sculpy figures finally won pop-upbook!

As for the later 2 weeks, I started to focus on making sculpy figures. The process was difficult because I have never got touched with sculpture before, I had no idea about material nor basic technique. I did a lot of experiments, and asked help from my friends,finally I came through the difficulties and decided to use a more simplified way to create my characters.

I made eight characters and some ralated stuff like furniture, food and so on. After completed all of the sculpture things, I still had some time, so I drew a conceptual poster of <Cat Cafe> and used the elements in the background to make w hand-made food menu for this project.

Conceptual Poster of <Cat Cafe> Oct,2013digital

<Cat Cafe> Figures, Sep 2013Sculpy, acrylic

PATTERN WORKSHOP

It is a workshop that designed to teach us how to make patterns, which gave us a chance to create three themes of patterns, and each theme has 3 cohesive patterns.

BRAINSTORM AND SKETCHES

Lively Butterflies and Sleeping Planets

Butterflies can live only for a few days, but they spend their whole lifetime playing, dancing, and lov- ing, their lives are short but flourish.For planets, they are described as the Gods in the sky, they exit almost permanently, but life in the universe is lonely, that’s why people say, Gods are the loneliest. My proposal is to show the double contrasts in my pattern, and use an elegant way to show the beauty of both of them.I think the appropriate market for this pattern is the people who long for elegant, indie stuffs. The pattern could be on the collar and cuff of a shirt, can be printed on the bedding stuffs, can be an inter- esting toe bag pattern and so on.

Vivideer, deadoll

I use a little language trick for nam- ing my pattern, vivideer means viv- id deer horns, deadoll refers to the doll’s joints those are broken and could never find their belongings.When I go to the flea market, I often find the parts of vintage dolls and also the beautiful deer horn. I think the similarity between them is, they can never get back to the body they used to grow on. I combined the two elements together, since they are both orphans who are lonely for a long time. At the same time, I think horns metaphor the power of males and dolls are often played by girls, I think the combination is also an interesting contrast.

Love Drug

My inspiration comes from alchemy and botany. In the old times, people believed alchemy can catalyze some- thing to happen; it can make people fascinated about somebody and can also make people hate somebody.I make a conceptual pattern to depict the scene of making love drug; the fair- ies use the different plants to complete it, sometimes they even use their life to make it work. But the results divide; the main point of making love drug is to use your own heart, different plants also lead to different results. The other two patterns all have two versions and they are the two sides of love drug, also love.This series’ bright versions are good for a wall paper, fabric and so on in my opinion, and for the black version, I think they are good to be on some small accessories like socks, bolt tie. Just imagine a gentleman wearing a bolt tie with last pattern on it, it’s playful.

REACTION PIECE

This is a project designed to check our ability of combining skills of the workshops we used to have together, and we need to combine at least two skills of the workshops.I created a sad picturebook called as City Forest, I drew the illustrations with watercolor and wrote the story, and the work- shops I combined are the book binding workshop, pop-up book workshop and pattern workshop.

CITY FOREST

POP-UP BOOK ELEMENTS

PHYSICAL BOOK

SINGLE TO MUTIPLE!

City Forest is an experimental picturebook I made for the isloted city people. In this forest, everbody has their own wishes and bad tastes. It is an ideal world in the book, where everything is not ideal. I created five characters in this picturebook, maybe at first sight monologues or apperances are kooky, but I still hope readers can empathize with them. After all, we all have some dark side, I just amplified them in this picturebook.Since I have the above motivation of creating this picturebook, I really wanted more people could have an access to read this book, and feel the excitement of seeing the pop-up page. So I contacted an indipendent publisher, who is also an illustrator in China, she promised that she would help me to publish my book. And in March 2014, 400 copies of City Forest with pop-up page in it just came out in China, and they were sold out in a month. Regardless of the amount of the books, I still feel proud of myself being accepted by the readers, and honored to see all the good feedbacks from them.

ART MARKET

Wishing You An Indie Life

The products I created for art market were handmade magnets and illustrated recipe cards. I applied my products to convey some relaxed and positive attitude towards life. The adjective word "indie" usually refers to "indipendent", but here in my products, being indie also means to live as a member of LOHAS, which is short for "lifestyles of Health and Sustainability." LOHAS people live healthily and enviromental friendly, so that's why I wanted to make these recyclable stuff to fulfill their needs.I made 20 copies of recipe cards and 15 handmade megnets, I also designed the overall package of them. Especially for the meganets, they are all one of a kind, I think it is fun to have one or two of them.

PROCESS

FINAL LOOK OF THE RECIPE CARDS

HAND LETTERING

It was a fun workshop that taugh us how to make hand lettering. For the first part of this project, Whiney used three different ways to help us get familiar with the compostion of English letters. Actually, this workshop was out of my comfort zone, because I have never done hand lettering before. However, as I got touched with it and did research about hand lettering, I have got some good inspirations about it. For this project, we need to make an alphabet and a valentine card with hand lettering on it.

PROCESS

This was one of the most difficult workshops I have ever had in this programm. At first I wanted to make a mushroom themed alphabet, however, the combiantion of mushrooms and letters was to hard. Knowing my difficulties, Whitney showed me some of the undergrads' works of hand lettering, and they gave me a lot of inspirations to figure out what I really wanted to do for this workshop. My final proposal for this workshop was themed of girls with diffrent looks; in order to make them more cohesive, I chose a main color, which is jacinth. Still, I need to set the way I want to depict them, and make them work. We only have 3 days to complete the alphabet and the valentine card, I stayed up all these 3 days, but I like what the result turns out.

Alphabet

Valentine Card

Application

When I was doing the workshop, I was also thinking how to give the alphabet a chance to be applied into other fields, like market. Since later I have got a chance to collaborate with my friend's poject of making illustrated tapes, I used the letters elements to complete my tape.

People who buy it not only can play with the every single element, but can also combine them together to make words the want to.

words onwheels

Words on Wheels is a good tradition of our programm, every student in our programm need to do this project.Each of us got two poems from students in primary school, and then drew illustrations for the poems.We need to pitch 3 ideas for each of the poems firstly, and then decide the best one to be illutrated.Finally, the judges picked the best one for being displayed on the MTA bus.

PROCESS

FINAL WORKS

INDEPENDENT PUBLICATION

Fungi's Letter is what I have done for this project. Fungi is a mushroom look guy that I have been drawing all through this semester. He is a tiny little creature; he is on a journey to look what does the world outside look like, but he can never find his way back. I drew a picture book of him, and handmade 20 copies. Also, in China, I got this stoty self-published.

When I was creating the story, I kept thinking of the sea I have seen in Califonia, it was the source of my inspiration.

EDTORIAL WORKSHOP

Knowledge Is Power Editorial WorkThis was a good workshop that even changed somebody's perspectives towards creation. I got some good feedbacks after the critic, and did some modification to make it easier to be understand.This piece shows when Alice is absorbing knowledge from books, no poker soldier can harm her. People have some confusions about the content of the book in the above piece, so I turned the picture of a man fighting with dragon into math questions. And I also moved the rabbit hole that makes no sense in this picture away

stop motion animation

The inspiration of my stop motion animation Love Island originally came from a piece of doodle I have done. I wanted to produce an animation diffrent from what I usually do; the characters are more mature and the story is more abstract. I hand made the movable puppets for my animation and produced a 1 minute and 30 seconds long animation.The outline of story is about a girl's dream. In the dream, she meets the items she used to have floating in the universe with her, but she just ignores them. She keeps floating in the universe until she meets the boy she loved. And she wakes up.

LOVE ISLAND

DOODLE 1

DOODLE 2

STORYBORAD

PUPPETS AND ELEMENTS IN THE ANIMATION

SCREEN SHOTS

independent Project

DARK FAIRY TALES

This is my studio independent project, which is called as Dark Fairy Tales. I chose the characters from the fairy tales those people are familiar with; I redesigned them and wrote some new stories. Some of the stories happen before or after the fairy tales, and some of them are written in the supports' sight. Finally, the pictures were gathered together and made into a book with a pop-up page in it.

SKETCHES

NORMAL PAGES

ENDPAGE PATTERN

POP-UP PAGE

PHYSICAL BOOK

SCREENPRINTING

I made this screenprinting during the process of the independent publication, I was very addictive of drawing mushrooms and this character. As my first screenpringting piece, this piece means a lot to me.

SEARCHING

LOVE EXPERIMENT

When I was doing this series, I was also shooting my stop motion animation, so this series also has some relationship with Love Island. I still wanted to try some themes different from my old stuff for children, so I drew this story of the relationship between a rabbit and a girl, which is abscure and a little sexual. There are some mature details hidden in the series, I love to play this game when I am creating art works.

PINK NIGHT

I made this series for the final of my screenprinting class, and I love this series the most, as it is bigger than what I usally have done, and I was not that trapped with the choice of color. It is a 3-layers screeprinting series. I only use neon pink, sapphire and yellow, so the printing process was not that hard. But I thought a lot that how to use limited colors to make the best result. I spent more time on figuring out the composition and every single detail, and I enjoyed the process very much.

Pink Night is about, for citizens nowdays those live in the same city forest, even they look at the same scenery, share the same interests, lots of them still feel isolated. Sometimes the city is just too big, and people's hearts are just too small. They live in each single square of the big buildings, like living in a cage. They gradually communicate with others only with wireless signal, and never have a chance to know what do they smell like, touch like. So the light in the two character's hands, is a visible signal, like saying, "hey, I am here, nice to see you."I apply these two pieces to be my ending of these two semesters, because I keep illustrating the lonely citzens, from City Forest to Fungi's Letters. To explore the relationship between human beings is very important for my creation of art. Maybe sometimes the real story behind my illustrations are not as bright as they look like, I still believe they can become a treat for citizens' lonely minds.

-FIN-

mspringthing.com