Easter Break

So I had a kind of productive two weeks, though not as productive as I'd hoped, but still it''s more than what I normally do on holidays, which is when I look at the stuff I should be doing and think to myself "I should probably be doing that right now" and then go on the internet. However this time around I think I balanced my time better, but there is definitely still room for improvement.

Journey

So the first thing that I did over Easter turned out to be a bit of a disaster. My plan was, since my grandad immigrated from Ireland via boat I was going to incorporate salt into my work somehow. So I did a few saw tests which i was going to go over in different media to see what effects they had , which turned out okay. I then mixed in salt with poster paint, and my idea was to paint with it, and this turned out pretty good, I think it looked quite cool and had a really good texture. I then left it to dry, once it was dried the salt was a bit flaky so I needed to seal it, so I sealed it using PVA glue. And this is where my plan disintegrated. So it turns out that adding glue to this mixture of poster paint and salt, not only makes the paint go gloopy, but creates water, and I didn't actually notice what happened until I went to put my sketchbook near the radiator so it would dry quicker, and poured water down myself. This meant that the water took ages to dry out, and also soaked through the page and on to the next one, which I just happened to have stuck down things to do with one of the artists, and all the ink that I had written in had bled all over the page. So after a week all I had achieved in this topic was a salty, soggy sketchbook.

As well as this salt test, I glued in some salt squares which I tried different media on them to see the different effects. I like the effect the ink and the watercolours gave.

I also made a collage of newspaper headlines, which were words or sentences that are related to my grandad, as this  was how he initially learnt how to read a few words. I also reserved some books from the library which are immigrant stories. 

Since I was looking at trying to make my book into some sort of map, I looked put the few that are lying about my joust. My plan is to split the book into nine sections, and each of these sections will be one page of the book. I will hopefully be able to fold these pages, so that when you are looking through the book you will be able to open out the different pages. I'm also hoping to be able to incorporate sound into the boom somehow, as one of the ways my grandad reminisced about Ireland was through singing songs, also I want to try and use the sounds that he would have heard on the boat going to Scotland. 

I plan to so some image transfers, with some of the photographs I have in my sketchbook. I wanted to make them darker, so that when they were transfers, they would be clear. So I edited the brightness and contrast, and also dodged and burned some areas to create these.

 I think that these turned out pretty well, as the images appear to be of higher quality.

Transformation

For this I caught up with almost all of the annotation, which I left to the minute once again, I don't have that much to do now so hopefully I will be able to complete this next week. I also tried out a couple more bookmaking templates as I only had the ones that I had done during class in my sketchbook.
I also started to brainstorm some ideas for my final piece, and decided to paint a ribcage that is being rotted by wood mould.

See you next time-
Róisín -x