D&AD FUND RAISER.

It would seem that D&AD New Blood can play a massive part in getting your fresh, post uni face noticed in the creative world. Having spoken to a good handful of graduates, there's been quite a mixed response when the topic of New Blood is brought up. The majority or people came to the conclusion that it can be hugely beneficial depending on the style of work you produce and if you put the effort into it. Having recently spoken to Lord Whitney about my portfolio they suggested I took advantage of the opportunity to go and really make the most of it as some of my work would benefit from it. 

Having got together with other members of the 3rd year illustration group that were interested in show casing their work, we decided we needed to raise cash, a lot of it, and as quick as possible. As far as I'm aware, college's funding has been drastically cut over the last few years so if we want to go down to London to showcase out work it'll be up to ourselves to raise the money needed. As well as us drawing folk, the graphics bunch are wanting to take part as well so are splitting the costs in half which is a massive relief on out behalf knowing we can share the load.

 After a short meeting we decided to take advantage of the festive times and make some lovely screen printed Christmas cards and a range of delicious hand baked treats. The group was split in two groups, specially delegated make sure everything ran smoothly. The cake sale made an absolute killing at college and I think we managed to make about £40 in the end. Just shows that Stockport people love cake.

The idea behind the screen printed cards was mainly that it wouldn't cost us anything other then the materials to print on. It was also a good opportunity for people to have a go at this process as quite a few people in the group hadn't really had the chance to play with it in the past. It brought us together nicely as a team and we had a dead good day in the print room helping each other out making the prints. We managed to get a successful little routine working so that everyone had a helping hand but we weren't getting under each others feet and overall it worked really well.

It was especially good to see how people's art turned out through the means of screen printing especially if it wasn't their usual means of working. It gave the final result much more charisma and life where you could see the process behind the images. Some designs were a bit of a pain to line up and others didn't print perfectly but I think that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. The mis-registration and broken tones played to the whole hand generated image making side of things and made each card much more personal. 

Doms card: first and second layers of ink.

On a whole, the coming together as a team and working on our own live brief worked really well. The people interested in D&AD showed real dedication and put lots of effort in to it to get the best result we could in order to raise funds. Once the cards were dried, signed and paired up with envelopes, we sent them off to a print fair with Mil in the hope that we could sell the bulk of what we'd made. It turns out that the weather was massively against us and not many people turned up unfortunately resulting in not many being sold. However, we didn't let this phase us so each took a handful and bullied our friends and family into buying them even if they'd already bought others. It was an nice eye opener to how we could do something similar in the near future and later for our final exhibition.

A selection of prints and my finished card.