Work and the Cold

Week 3

So I got some part time work at Primark, so I now work weekends and can get some overtime :) I worked this weekend and Monday Tuesday. Also I got the cold, meaning that I haven't had too much time for art stuff this week unfortunately. 

Creative Practice 

We started to design a sculpture to be made out of clay and then cast in concrete. So we started out by sketching  out what we wanted it to look like and how big it was going to be. I wasn't sure what I wanted mine to look like, so I looked at some of the graffiti I saw when I was in Edinburgh. I then chose an M shape from the word Miro, (which I am assuming is an Edinburgh gang or something) and began to think of how to make it 3D. For the base I decided to make it look something like a footprint as I am going to start playing around with the idea of legacy.

To make the sculpture itself, we began by making an armature to build up the clay around. My armature is made of two pieces of wood, of different heights to make my m. I then wrapped chicken wire around these and made it curve inwards between the pieces of wood. To make the armature secure and stable, I padded the inside of the chicken wire with paper. 

That was all I had time to do this week, so next will be when the fun begins with clay. 

In our film class we watched two different types of documentaries, one was a cameraman who sat in a lift for hours each day in a set of flats and filmed the people using it. I thought it was really interesting as you got to see different people stories and personalities coming through, even if he was only talking for them for two minutes. Also you got to see people open up to him more they saw them in the lift, as at first most people were a bit stand offish, some even refusing to get in the lift while he was filming. 

The next video was The King of Kongs, which was a documentary about the people who hold the record for the highest score in different arcade games. The main story was of one guy who was trying to beat the highest score in Donkey Kong. We didn't watch all of this, it was mostly just to highlight the different ways of doing a documentary, with the first one being very artistic and only in the one space, but with multiple shots, and the other being a very traditional style, with the bulk of it being interviews all done in the same way. 

We were then to go off and film different spaces around the college. I chose the revolving door and filmed people going in and out. Our homework for the week was to make a video diary of the next few days with the theme of happiness, and here's mine:

(I'll need to upload this to youtube and then post a link here, so stay tuned ;))

To make the backgrounds more interesting for my graffiti pictures, I used acrylic paint to try and give the impression of a wall, just to give it a bit more texture, and get it away from just the plain white sketchbook paper.

These were the graffiti pictures that had graffiti written mostly on walls, I put the graffiti on bins and electricity boxes and bins in other pages.

 There was also a fair amount of stickers and labels stuck to these as well as lamp posts, so I thought that these should be classed as graffiti as well.











Last week's homework was to do a piece that featured scraffito and frottage with one of the themes of fear, danger, lust, jealousy and happiness. I chose fear (although it could maybe be classed as danger as well)

I thought that arachnophobia is a pretty common and well known fear so I decided to paint a spider.

I used frottage for the background; I did a pencil rubbing of a sanding belt, just for texture. 

In the photograph I was working from, the spider had two stripes on its abdomen, and so for scraffito I scratched away the pain to reveal the red ink I had used as a background.

I chose red because this is a colour I associate with fear and thought this was relevant because of my chosen theme.

In the class itself we were shown how to do mono typing. This is a printing technique where ink is rolled on to a piece of perspex and is then placed in a mangle with paper on top of the ink to leave the impression of the ink on the paper. With this technique you can roll different colours of ink and place bits of paper etc (nothing too sharp or you'll break the mangle or the covers on it ;)) You can also put the paper through multiple times to build up layers. Here's the one that I made:

Mine is based off of graffiti that I took pictures of in Edinburgh. I feel the final layer I added, I made the ink a little too thick, so the colour stands out too much. I like the effect adding the different layers gives the print.

PDP

We listened to a lecture by Marcel Duchamp and were then to create mind map based off the lecture whilst listening to it again, and were then to do the same thing a third time, but relate the second mind map to our multiples project. I found out in this class that my mind maps aren't exactly organised and are more like unorganised chaos.
In this class we were to go through our successful and unsuccessful moments in our life. We also than had to fill out a creative personality questionnaire.

Contextual Studies

This week we had a focus group on designing a Scottish Super hero.


And that's all for this week, until next time :)

Roisin - x