the-curious-girl: Hello London

I manage to have found reasons to go to London 3 times in the past 12 months... It started with a trip to get my Visa last year where I went with friends and did a lot of drawing in the free galleries the rest of the time we were there. My last trip was to get a tattoo from my cousin, and this one was to go to a poster conference at the V&A.

I went with my friend Jess, getting a 6 hour night bus from Plymouth. It is a fairly uncomfortable experience, getting in at 7.15 am all bleary eyed and achy from sleeping sideways on bus seats... Being a student though, needs must and it means I can justify staying longer :).

We walked past Buckingham palace and through St.James park to go to the London college of Optometry which has an Optometry museum. I am currently working on a brief to design the walls of the Optometry centre at Plymouth uni and this was basically research for that (and the excuse to try on lots of funky glasses)

We then went to the National Portrait gallery and the Tate to do some drawing before visiting an old friend of mine at his bar next to the Thames and managing to get fairly tipsy in the middle of the afternoon! This resulted in some very confused walking to the hostel and me getting angry all the roads near Elephant and Castle tube station looking the same...

The next day we got up bright and early to go to a conference about posters at the V&A. The day consisted of a wide range of speakers from those analysing how posters are viewed, people who hold different collections, and artists using the idea of the poster in different ways.

I most enjoyed the talks from artists, David Mccandles from www.Informationisbeautiful.net who creates infographics to help us process large amounts of information more easily, watch his video "debtris" here.

Also work from "the space highjackers" which is pretty self explanatory and very interesting, click here to watch!

We finished up that day with Yo Sushi in Harvey nicks. I don't like fish but just end up getting all of the deep fried things which are amazing :)

The last day we left the hostel and headed straight for the science museum to play around with fun things like heat sensitivity cameras and liquid nitrogen.