Edinburgh trip 3 - The Finale

My last trip to Edinburgh for this project.

For my final for this project, I decided to go back into Edinburgh and then stick up my own designs for stickers. So here are some of the photographs that I took for this event.

bye for now
Róisín -x

October Break!!

So with a week off from college I decided to try and catch up with college work I probably should have done way before now.

Our PDP homework was to finish off the pathway work sheet. 

With Multiples I sorted out all the pictures I needed for my sketchbook. 

Our homework for Contextual Studies was to watch Scarlet Street also have began thinking about what to write my essay on. I'm thinking of looking at degenerate art again but this time applying it to modern times by looking at things like the turner prize and the opinion of modern art.

Other than that not much to report
Will post pictures soon when they are in my sketchbook

Until next time
Róisín -x

Edinburgh Trip - The Sequel

After finalising my concept for Multiples, I decided to go back to Edinburgh and find more marks left behind, there was some more graffiti, and also I took more pictures of chopped down trees in the graveyard, and some of litter and worn staircases and railings.

Bye for now -
Róisín -x

The Identity Crisis

Week 6

There seems to have been a lot of talk about our chosen pathway this week, and now I'm in a bit of a crisis. I like installation and also painting and drawing and don't want to choose between the two just now. I think at this stage, I am more of a 2 dimensional thinker, but I am going to keep installation an open subject. 

Creative Practice

In 3D we doing doing the clay again. I really like working in clay, as it's kind of therapeutic and I like building up a three dimensional shape. Anyway, one of my classmates has moved onto the next step of the mould, and it looks ammmmmmmmazing. It involves throwing plaster onto the clay, which really is enough to keep me happy. (although probably not the cleaners - they probably already hate the art department anyway) So I can't wait to get my clay piece finished now :)
I also filmed Amy in our next class, I felt kind of awkward at first but I enjoyed it after I got into the swing of things.
I got my ned page all finished up and then began writing "neddy" type things on top like "pure mad mental" to make it look like the page had been graffitied all over.

I thought about my concept a but more, as I wasn't sure quite where I was taking it, and so I thought about looking at the contrast between the positive and negative marks we leave behind. Positive being things like charities and reviving nature etc and negative being litter, chopping down trees and destruction etc. With destruction in mind I had and idea that I could bleach ink drawings to lift the colour out of them. I did little samples of different media to see the effect bleach had on each of them.

Acrylic -

Charcoal -

Marker Pen -

Ink -

I then did two larger scale tests both backgrounds were made to look like a brick wall, except one was in ink -

 The other in acrylic -

I am going to stick these into my sketchbook and for the background, I squirted poster paint over the two pages and then dried them with a hair dryer.









In class, someone had spare newspapers from Edinburgh, and so I took out the more positive stories and glued them in almost like a scrapbook. I then added some brown ink to give the appearance of age, to show these are long lasting marks that have been left.

PDP

Today we were given a task that is mostly to do with finding our pathway. This task involves putting down our art heroes, listing our skills and what skills we would like to develop in the future. This task has made me think more seriously on what my pathway is, and when I was thinking of my art heroes, they were mostly installation artists, with a couple of painters. I have always been slightly confused as to where I want to take my art, but I think this task showed me, that it is definitely one of these two. The task has to be completed for the next class, which is in a fortnight, because of the October break, so I have plenty of time to think about it.

Contextual Studies

First we talked about our homework assignment, which was to colour in the map of the college in a way that showed how we felt about it. I mapped out where I had been and when, and the classrooms I had visited. I then coloured in the outside, bright green for the grass and bright blue for the loch, and then left the inside of the college the grey colour it was already in. The reason for this is I think the majority of the college is made using this sterile grey colour scheme, and I find it very off putting. The outside always seems beautiful, because of where the college is situated, and then the inside seems to take its inspiration from a hospital.

We then spent the rest of the class talking about other stuff that was kind of related to our theme, and I thought this was really fun and interesting. 

Anyway that's all for now, until next time-

Róisín-x 

Neds

Week 5

Creative Practise

We're still claying in our 3D class, :) hopefully I'll be finished with it next week and can continue on to the next step, fingers crossed.

What I started doing in my sketchbook was drawing some well known artists and dressing them up as neds.

I still need to finish these off, and I'm not sure how far I'll take this, but it's fun to play around with right now. Also my lecturer suggested I branch out and look at Edinburgh based writers and artists, which is still something I need to do.

I'm also going to make a page on the stereotypical neds of Scotland, and this is what I have so far.

 I was also looking at spray paint this week, and looking for different ways I could use it. So I made a stencil with my name on it, considering this is the most common form of graffiti - tagging.

 I also spray painted a couple of sketchbook pages, just to look at how the paint runs, blends, and what sort of effect the spray has.

In our film class this week's video is to be a profile of someone in our class, and how they produce their art. So the next day we drew names out of a hat, and I picked Amy :) My video isn't done yet, because we didn't have that much time to film, but I'll upload it next week ;)

Contextual Studies

This week we had a guest lecture by a student from Glasgow School of Art. She talked about gallery space that new artists use to promote their work. I thought the lecture was really interesting, as this has been something I have been thinking about doing, and this lecture showed me that it is possible to do in your home town, you just need to put the effort into it.

In other news I finally downloaded photoshop, and it only took about four months of thinking about doing it. I only downloaded it today, but got a chance to play around with it for a couple of hours. I realised that I was quite rusty to begin with but the more I drew with it, the more fluent I became with it. I'm sure I am no where near knowing how to do most things with photoshop, but I think I've got the basics pretty much covered, and hop I can be a little more advanced with it, as I am going to try and get at least an hour of practice with it each day.

So that's all folks - until next time
Róisín-x

Making Connections

So for this week were to draw a mind map about ourselves and our futures

Here's mine:

After this we were to stick all of our mind maps on the wall together and with string join up similar aspects about ourselves and where we want to go. 

It started off a bit hectic and disorganised but once we all got started it was easier to see different connections and similar ideas we all had. Something I found interesting about this task was that we were all given the exact same brief, information and time to complete this task, and yet our results were all different. Some people had stuck pictures onto theirs, some people had turned their mind map into a picture and others drew pictures on theirs. Some were organised - almost like a map of the London underground, where as some looked a bit more jumbled (mine). I think this gave us an insight into each others mind set and personality, for instance, I don't know how people can manage to make any mid map look neat and organised, as as soon as I start with a mind map, it becomes hectic, almost as if instead of a mind map, mine is more like a mind explosion.
It was also interesting to see the different ideas everyone had, and where they wanted to go and what were their life goals. There were a couple of people who wanted to live in a fancy house and go on holidays etc, and some had careers as their life goals, like costume design and police officer. I think this was the area that we had the least connections in. This task showed us that the vast majority of us want to go in completely different areas, except for teaching, which was an option that came up in multiple mind maps, although I think it is only one persons ultimate goal.
I liked this task as I feel that I got to know my classmates a little better than I would normally, as we usually don't talk about this kind of stuff. (It's mostly random crap and or tv shows.)

So that's all - until next time
Róisín-x

Go Pro eat your heart out.

Week 4

I think I'm going to start uploading these blog posts on a Tuesday, since that's sort of like the end of the week for me since with the college days I have Monday and Tuesday off, so it's kind of like a long weekend. I'm going to try and stick to this routine, as I'm starting to get confused as to when we did stuff in class.

Creative Practise

So Wednesday was our deadline for handing in our PLP's D: I think mines is okay but I think that I rambled a bit in it but I should find out if it is okay next week :/
In our 3D class we continued on form what we did last week with the clay. I think next week I am going to raise some square shapes in it based on the amount of stickers I took pictures of in Edinburgh. 

This weeks video was based on the theme of dreams, so I decided to make mine entirely first person, and was going to attempt to make it look like one continuous shot which I found out was even harder than I thought. For the first person part, I bolted my old camera to a baseball cap - in other words who needs a go pro?

(Again I'll need to upload this to youtube. Blogger has a 100Mb limit for video)

This week in printmaking we were doing silk screen prints. this process involves drawing ink onto a silk screen, and then pushing the screen down on to a piece of paper, revealing the image. here are the prints that I made:

PDP

This week we were to create another mind map this time based on ourselves and our futures for a task we will complete in next weeks class.

So until next time -

Róisín-x

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