My favorite things from CSM pop-up shop!

There is a lot of really lovely stuff for sale but I only had about £20 to spend so I only bought 3 objects that I coveted the most from the beginning. They're one of Kar Mun Ho's pill boxes and one of Lucy Verrechia's handmade woolen bookbag and information booklet. (By the way, I'm a bit of a pattern&colorblocking freak so I think these 2 products look phat together) I had them both wrapped up in Sophie Sampson's giftwrapping. Awesome work guys, soso proud! x 

Sophie's product for the shop was a gift-wrapping service, such a brilliant idea! She screen-printed 21 ribbons with all our names on them (they also kinda function as businesscards for BAGD2 too) and had our logo printed on the paper and stickers. She did well, her product sold out on the second day. 

Kar's product is a medical box classification system. She designed packaging for 7 different existing drugs with the intent of "re-selling" the drugs for their side-effects rather than their actual purpose. She's obviously not selling the pills for real but I really like the concept and I veryveryvery much like the graphics.

Lucy designed a woolen bookbag, it comes in 3 colors with different patterns on them. Its concept stems from research into book preservation and in particular the ways that we can look after our book collection. I LOVE IT; the concept, the execution (I've somehow developed a craving for fluorescent pink detailed objects), the pattern, the material and the fact that it's made to fit 2 A5 Moleskin notebooks, and I've been looking for something to carry my sketch/scribble Moles around as a set, for ages. Needless to say, Lucy's done brilliant, she sold out on second day aswel!

Setting up CSM pop-up shop

In approximately 3 days the interior team managed to decorate and stock the whole venue with our 2060 products. We had our first customer when we were still busy setting up the shop, there were a lot of curious passerby's who walked in without knowing who we were and what we were doing, so location wise we're blessed. (We're only a 10 minute walk from Holborn tubestation so we are pretty central.) We opened the shop on 31 May and we sold £500 worth of products within the first four hours of opening. 

Buy my stuff!

For the past 2 months I've been designing and producing 21 products that will hopefully all be sold at the pop-up shop that we've set up to raise money for next year's graduation show. This pop-up shop isn't just a fundraiser but it's also our end of the year project. It was all about 'the designer as producer.' It's been hella intense at times but it was fun and I learn a lot too this term. We all had to keep blog-diaries and having the opportunity of following the work-processes of a 100-something other students, step-by-step, was so helpful. I wanted to get away from the magazine/book/poster design niche for a bit so I thought I'd get crafty again and designed a herbal pillow that functions as a natural sleeping aid. (This involved a lot of Laura Ashley-ing; buying and testing textiles and herbs, -pastel- color matching, sewing, excuses for trips to Liberty's...;) For this project I've played with the concept of worrying about environmental damage and not being able to sleep because of it. I've always been a fan of pandas, so I took this occasion to create a product dedicated to one of the most endangered species out there. The Giant Panda is also the international symbol of conservation, £0.50 of every herbal pillow sold will be donated to the WWF. So yesterday we had to hand-in 1 boxed item with a step-by-step instruction sheet and a product photograph for evaluation and 1.5 kg. lavender, 1 kg. lentils, 500 gr. cloves, 4m2 satin, 1m2 cotton, 1m2 felt, 80 m cotton thread,  5 sheets transfer-paper, 30 sheets sugar paper, 35 brown paper bags, 5 hours image research, 10 hours silkscreen printing, 25 hours hand stitching, 8 prototypes, 1 Martha Steward bitch fit, 2 lovely tension-releasing dates and about 100 change-of-plans later, it may as well be called official; my 2nd year is over! I'll be a 3rd year student for the first time ever and if all goes well I'll be graduate next year, which is a big first for me too. In other news, my previous boss (the creative director at the Jewish Chronicle) thought I was graduating coming June and offered me a job for a year as one of their art directors was going on maternity leave! How great is that? I'm soso thankful for these people. But I'm not graduating this year, let's just hope that next year job offers will come at me just as easily :)

Here they are; my 21 herbal pillows, lined up as proud little environmental activists . The bags, notes and pillows are all hand cut, hand silkscreen printed and hand stitched and go for £10 a pop. So buy my herbal pillows; help the Giant Panda and help me graduate.

Product prepared for final hand-in

And here's a bit of my workprocess.

Bring yourself.

Central Saint Martins 2nd year BAGD Pop Up Shop

Click on banner for more information -x-

Surprise! The subject of my dissertation will be the color black.

Popuphelp!

FOR OUR CSM BAGD 2nd YEAR SHOW 

WE'RE LOOKING FOR AN EMPTY SPACE IN CENTRAL LONDON. (IDEALLY)  

IF YOU 

KNOW OF ANY EMPTY SHOPS/

HAVE SPOTTED ONE RECENTLY/

OWN ONE THAT'S AVAILABLE 

BETWEEN 7-16 JULY, 

THEN PLEASE 

GET IN TOUCH WITH ME ASAP VIA:

BOYALATUMAHINA@GMAIL.COM

THANK YOU. X 

Margot Bowman.

These photos that I took of her don't do her loveliness and originality justice.

End of term rant.

My MBP crashed last week. Great timing. I'm now in my rehearsal/deadline week and this completely messed up my routine. It's actually a bit ridiculous; even though I've managed to borrow a MB for the week, (big thanks to Marcus & Tyrone) I'm nervous and can't eat or sleep right. I've had to re-photograph most of my work and redesign my presentation, not to mention the agony of having to re-write context. Can you see the big, angry raised up middle finger growing out of my forehead yet? Thankfully my presentation rehearsal went reasonably well today. (see selection of pdf thumbnails below, don't pay attention to the rubbish blurbs.) Now I'm going to finish context and get rid of this god-awful feeling in my belly. DO IT DO IT DO IT!

Homework II.

Pierre Soulages is also known as "the painter of black" because of his interest in the colour, "...both a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens up a mental field all of its own". He sees light as a matter to work with; striations of the black surface of his paintings enables him to make the light reflect, allowing the black to come out from darkness and into brightness, thereby becoming a luminous colour.

Word. You better recognize.

For a brief I had to collect a minimum of 50 and a maximum of 100 texts (or images). I was stuck for about 2 weeks. I then decided to pull the self-indulgence card so I collected 100 black things I own (yeah, not so hard) and had a little improvised photoshoot. Yay, photography + everything black = pins&needles&fun! After editing I ended up with 4 A3 5x5 grids of black stuff. Oh how purdy, I thought at first. But the longer I looked at and mulled over the collection, the more sickening the sight of it became. I felt that I had somehow managed to sum up my obsessions, wants, preferences, characteristics, virtues and vices with a visual collection of a bunch of stuff. So with the realization that this is actually all just stuff and it wouldn't necessarily have to be my stuff, I distanced myself from this collection as it being a personal collection and made the project about the material consequences of everything we experience and every decision we make. Aesthetically the blackness worked to the concepts advantage, so I was lucky. For the final crit I did a full color A1 poster, (see below). It's a first draft, it needs typographic changes and a little less obviousness. Will keep you posted on the end result.

Thinking Design presents Talk 14: Zamir & Antoine / 17 February / 4.30 PM / G12

Yeah, this'll be printed on A3 ascetate with a colored backdroppish version of the same placed behind it, but you get the point. Thank god for your effortless GDDANG EARLY morning coffee & push seshes Cole, you rule. :) x (And also much love to the Square Group for getting me my laptop back in no less than 3 working days. Go to them if you have a MacBookPro that suffers from Black Screen of Death, they're much faster at dealing with it then Apple's Genius bar.)

DO NOT VIEW the poster that's right in front of you.

What the shit, Central Saint Martins. What ridiculous rule will you impose on us next? No more making art in artschool? nlm

Homework.

The lovely art direction brief is over, time a for a break. BNZL wishes Andreas Christie Ryalen all the best for his future projects! x

A selection of spreads from our little magazine project.

The Lethaby Building, Southampton Row, London WC1B 4AP

HELP US REMEMBER SAINT MARTINS

I took these shots of my college for a 1st year magazine brief. We were free to choose a subject and as we were told CSM was going to move to King's Cross in 2012, I decided to portray this building, it's classic beauty and the cracks it was starting to show. (If you're thinking of using these for Amanda Lesters brief, you know who you are: they're copyrighted now :p)

Beautiful building, I will miss you.