Wonder Room Studio (Steve Hockett workshop part 1)

Today we had a workshop with the graphic designer, publisher and artist Steve Hockett; Wonder Room Studio. His work mainly consists of various media including printed matter, illustration, motion graphics and creative/art direction. He likes to create work in non-traditional graphic design techniques, Risograph print is one of the main ways that has work has changed and been influenced, he has been using this method for around 8-10 years.

"Rad Bad" when something is so bad its good- Steve Hockett. He is particularly interested in using methods of production to produce error.

When he first graduated, he used a simple technique of using black text, with an overlay of colour, with a different coloured background, I think this aesthetic is fun as well as simplistic. He also likes to work quite illustrative, as well as spray painting.

In the morning, we got set an extremely fun task in groups of around 10. The task was to each draw a brand logo using black marker pen and then pass the drawing to your left for the next person to draw, the process was repeated 10 times. The logo that I drew was the Apple logo. As the drawings were passed around, they started to get more and more distorted and some were even unrecognisable by the end. The next exercise was using the same technique but this time we had to draw our 'spirit animal', of course mine was a cat as i'm obsessed with them. However, this time around the time for each drawing got shorter and shorter making the drawings look more rushed and a little bit crazy. The end drawings for both processes were extremely humorous because of how different drawing 1 was from drawing 10. The process of these two tasks was really fun and I'd enjoy doing tasks like this to create future work.

After lunch, we were set the task to make zines using the drawings that we created (in 2 hours) in pairs. Mine and Jakes initial idea was to use my cat drawings to create a fashion magazine, as each drawing had a new accessory which we found humorous and felt that we could experiment a lot with this concept in terms of layout, collage and colour.

We begun to photocopy and cut out the cat heads and then placed them over vogue magazine pages to generate the funniest imagery to use. We found this process really fun, it was also interesting how certain cat heads work only look good on certain model bodies.