A week of Balls, Bulls and Sexual Innuendo....

So a severe reaction to an over-dose of cheap Tesco red bull has resulted in me being slightly ill all week, thus meaning that I didn't get half the things done that I originally wanted.  Essay work has been playing on my mind a lot lately. Thinking I had 2 weeks left before the CCS essay was due, finding out Wednesday that it's actually due next week gave me some severe heart palpitations that could have been caused by the red bull but I'm guessing it was more the panic of the looming deadline!  However, with regards to writing, I work better under pressure.  So I'm hoping that this essay will be the same story.  Well fingers crossed anyways!

As I stated in the last post, I've been looking a lot at the human figure, the posture and how it changes through the years as a person ages.  At last Friday's crit, I got some really good and positive feedback from both the tutor and my studio buddies about my project which really gave me a boost and helped me to decide where to go from that point.  I decided to overlap the images of people walking together to form crowd scenes which are filled with people of all ages and body types.  I think it is more effective when I used just purely the silhouette of the figures rather than put in detail, which resulted in me deciding to focus on the silhouette and look to artists like Kara Walker for inspiration.

My crowd scenes

With all of these crowd scenes, I was never going bigger then A3 paper.  So inspired by the amazing artist that is Kara Walker, I decided to blow up all my images and work to a more realistic life size scale.

I'm finding this part of the work really fun to do and a lot more freeing then being stuck in the sketch book or working on a smaller scale.  Its proving to be challenging also though seeing as the figures I'm working with at the moment are 6ft tall or more....which means I'm forced to stand on chairs while I draw and cutting them out is proving to be slightly hazardous too for my 5ft 4" frame!  They're harder to do then they look!

Aside from these drawings, I've still been doing research on people around the city so my days of creeping arent over yet!  I headed into the city lately and sat in the upstairs level of McDonald's so that I had an overhead view and could creep without getting caught.  So whilst my dear fatty friend Paul tucked into his student pocket friendly meal, I set to work with my camera to creep on the innocent people below.

As you can see, I have an unnatural shake in my hand which is why the pictures are slightly blurry..but we'll just say that I totes meant for them to come out that way cause I'm arty and creative and all that.

I have so many more pictures but this Blogger yoke is ridiculous when it comes to uploading photos and I dont have the patience to deal with it :]

So now for the weekend, essay writing here I come.....

That low point after a bank holiday weekend...

So to say this past week has been quiet would be a bit of an understatement.  Everyone is suffering from that post-bank holiday depression where we know we wont have any more major sessions until Christmas...bar the random week night out of course..but alas, college work shall be the focus for now, as essays as well as the project begin to get more intense.

The past while has been spent trying to further my ideas on from that dreaded assessment...which turned out to not be so bad at all!  It really helped me to focus on the area in my project which had the most potential and the one which I had the most interest in.

I'm definitely gonna stick with people as the focus for my project as I'm starting to really enjoy drawing them and studying them.  I've grown to love drawing with marker and Indian ink rather than using a pencil which is strange as I always refused to experiment with other materials when it came to doing work in my PLC course.   Even charcoal is something I'm getting used to using on account of the life-drawing classes on Tuesdays which I find really good and really relevant to my project.  I find that the class really tests you as you're drawing quickly, doing 1 minute long poses to start with before moving on to 30 sec poses aswel as 10 secs and also drawing when the model is constantly moving.  This helps a lot when I'm trying to draw people on the move around the city or even when I'm trying to draw my niece and nephew...kids are so hard to draw!  The class teaches you that you don't need to catch every single detail of a persons form, as long as you get the shape and posture down, the basic information in other words, you can do so much with it.

Creeping on the family unknown to them...

My Sister 

My mommy 

So that's what I've been focusing on in the past week.  I've been working with the photographs that I took to make a timeline of sorts and instead of focusing on the age of the person, I've been focusing on their postures.  I've been simplifying down all the photos until I'm left with the basic shape of the person.

From here I did some layering of pictures, to create crowded scenes based on the basic shape of the bodies aswel as focusing on one body shape and layering it to make it seem like there is movement in some way.

I also did this on a much larger scale.  My next plan of action is to make life size drawings using lights to project a person's outline on to paper and focus on the posture of their body but on a larger scale using different materials.  As well as that I'm thinking about doing a print of some kind with these drawings, to start with just a simple lino print and then depending on how that goes I'll then decided where it goes from there.

That Friday feeling is fast approaching but a weekend of essay and project work lays ahead...oh well...