Football Scout & The Festival of Football Ideas

 
Physicality, determination, awareness, creativity, aggression.

Football Player Scouts evaluate the talents of footballers with the aim to sign new players to a club.
Boy & Girl Scouts collect merit badges to demonstrate their achievements in various pursuits and activities.

These metaphorical merit badges are collected by football players to show off their skills and technical attributes.

… or you can buy them and sew them onto your jacket!



Football Scout is also a 3 colour screenprint for the Miniature Print exhibition at The Festival of Football Ideas, Bristol

The Festival of Football Ideas explores football art, literature, music, comedy and much much more, and runs from May 30 – June 14, 2014. There is loads of events for everyone – you don’t have to like football!



The print is on show with 32 other amazing artists at the festival venue (which happens to be a big silver football! see!) and also at the Beatroot cafe on Lower Park Row, Bristol.

Process

As always, the best place to start is the sketch book. You can see a few ideas forming on the pages below, including football scout and bacteria football which I would love to do sometime.

The lists helped to figure out the final badges to bring forward to artwork and produce from all the possible choices. I suppose this also shows the set could be expandable in future.

 

Digital embroidery

Inspired by embroidered football club emblems and scout merit badges – I originally wanted to make my submission for the Festival of Football Ideas as the embroidered versions, however there was not enough time left for me to do this due to how busy the facilities were at the art school, but I booked in and started teaching myself the embroidery software which is Wilcom EmbroideryStudio e3.

The software was a bit tricky to begin with, having already started digitising the badges in Illustrator, trying to work between the two programmes was a bit of a waste of time. After spending a bit of time doing some tests, playing around with the different tools and redrawing artwork, things started to speed up and the symbols were all looking really good. The text was the next issue…

I wanted the badges to remain very small, all are between 30-40mm. At this size the text is unreadable because it is impossible to stitch – so it will work better to only embroider the symbols – was worth a test to see how far it can be pushed.

Sample testing different methods for stitching the text at a small font size:



Next was finalising the colours and the order of stitching – then going ahead to get them embroidered…

Video of badges in progress:

Buy Football Scout badges

Football Scout

£5.99

 

Buy Football Scout screenprint

Prints are priced £25. Please contact The Festival of Football Ideas.
Email: hello@fofi.org.uk  twitter: @bristol_fofi

El Bosque

Studio Oh! No! recently printed and hand bound El Bosque.
El Bosque is a small edition of artists books written by Danixa and illustrated by Beto Jet-o. The book was printed and finished completely by hand by Jono Sandilands.
The book pages and covers were first screenprinted. This time-lapse video shows the process of hand finishing the book: trimming, folding and binding using the Three Hole Pamphlet Stitch with red waxed thread.
In real-time the finishing process alone took between 10-12 minutes per booklet.

Careers in Facial Hair

Artwork

This project stemmed from sketches done whilst thinking about badge designs for the recent Button Badge Design Competition. Thinking circularly I sketched a few ideas based around character faces, and noticed they each had facial hair, not something that was originally planned!
Pushing this idea forward, I asked: which jobs require you to have facial hair? It’s pretty much standard that jobs don’t really require this so there is scope for a bit of fun, my ideas were lumberjack, french chef, pirate and English gentleman. I don’t know if there are much career prospects in some of these jobs, so maybe don’t come to me for career advice.
After scribbling down the initial thumbnail sketches, I knew I wanted to do some experimentation and practice in printmaking and work on a larger scale than the button badges… Looking down at my glass on the table it suddenly comes to me… Coasters! Screenprinted onto wood.
My final drawings were done on layout paper full size. I have developed a method for art-working some of my illustration work and want to describe it as it sort of covers a part of my background and understanding about some past work.
First draw basic lines of the piece in reverse. Next add areas I want coloured and shadowed in marker pen, I want it to bleed through to the other side of the paper (which will be the front). Finally and most laboriously I use a scalpel to cut the areas I want as black lines and detail. I find this method to improve the quality of the line work from my pencil lines, it’s a bit like a stencil but I am using the scalpel like a pencil in a way… a stencil pencil? No? Anyway, the lines become more organic and grow, from my initial basic lines into something which just seems to work so much better than I can ever draw in pencil or pen.
I think this method is good and bad – it’s sometimes a total pain, yet I feel attached to it in my artwork generation because everything I do with it seems to work well. I’m trying to move away from the method, and there is potential in some of the new printmaking techniques I am learning on the course at UWE. Certainly as I learn more about relief print, but also perhaps there’s something in etching.
Anyway, for now my artwork ready for the next stage:

Printing & Production

Thinking of production now, I look at pre-cut coasters, but quickly scrapped that idea, as thought it would be too fiddly to print 2 colours onto a circular shape and retain registration. The next obvious choice is lasercutting.
Lasercutting has been something which I’ve always wanted to explore. As I started researching about how it is done and where I can get them cut – I found a few places in Bristol (forgetting about UWE at this point as I need induction which is scheduled in January). I came by Bristol Design Forge, a bespoke laser cutting and engraving company. Perfect. After some advice how to set up the files from Neil, I convert my final drawings to vectors using Illustrator.
The plan is to lasercut wood which has already been screenprinted. I will also set the files up to etch the areas of detail into the coaster so all that needs to be printed is the solid areas of colour. It’s an experiment, and a learning curve but hopefully you agree, one with a good outcome!

Artwork to be Screenprinted

Lasercut vectors (red cut. black etch)

First colour printed on the wood

Lasercutting & etching in progress

Packaging

The packaging is a box which holds the set of four together. The box is screenprinted, cut and folded completely by hand.

Buy

The coasters are available to buy online here.