Sculpture Baby :P

So today was the beginning of the second rounds of electives and I'm doing Sculpture for the next two weeks.  I chose this purely out of curiosity if I'm being honest.  I'm crap when it comes to 3D but having gone to the talk and intro about the Sculpture and Combined Media awhile back, i thought it was really cool and something i could maybe do.

Today we got our "information sheet"....which we're not allowed call a brief cause that's too restricting apparently.  And we're not in a studio, we're in a "laboratory"....the next two weeks are going to be mega craic I'd say!

I found it really vague when i first read it, it didn't have much structure or direction...which of course freaked me out just a tad.  But then we started a group brainstorming session which actually turned out to be really useful and kinda fun to do.  we were split into groups of 3 and 4 and each group had to sit at a massive sheet and brainstorm a different topic, which ranged from Touch, Sight, Smell, Blood Pressure, Respiratory, Taste etc.  once you had one sheet done, you moved to the next until you had visited all the sheets.  and of course with everyone going around, it got more challenging to come up with new words and ideas.

But i found this really helpful as it pushed you to come up with kind of out there ideas.  we then had to re-visit all the sheets and pick out words and phrases that popped out at us.

What i noticed was that i picked a lot of words like to panic, to stress, to hyperventilate, to faint, to shake, to explode etc.  I think i probably did this sub-consciously as they are all the feelings and thoughts you have when you're experiencing panic attacks which i have unfortunately suffered from for years now.   I am claustrophobic so i don't work well with crowds in small spaces...which is why i cant go into TK MAXX without having a panic attack, it's happened quite a few times!

so because of this I've been looking at materials like balloons, tyre tubing, elastics, rubber-bands etc. basically anything that can be stretched and have tension.  I think these show the feeling of panic and stress that come with a panic attack so for now this is what i will focus on.

I havent a notion what i'm doing or where this is going but apparently its what they want.  Thankfully video can be used in Sculpture which i love working with so that should keep me sane.  We were also told not to make any art for the next two weeks, because art college doesnt work like that...who'd have thought?!

Is it Friday yet?

The past two weeks have been the busiest in a long time!  The fact that we only had the bare two weeks to focus on the print project really pushed me to work faster and make decisions quicker.  I found that i wasnt obsessing over things being perfect....more a case of just doing things and seeing how they work out.

I have really loved doing Print though and genuinely think it's the discipline for me.  I love being in the workshop getting messy and designing prints.  I find the whole process of printing really interesting and fun to do so would love to study it further and learn more about that area.  But with the high interest in Print, it'll be a miracle if i get a place....so hopefully i get good marks!

Speaking of marks, got the results of Semester 1's project and low and behold, I PASSED!!!! Genuinely thought i was going to have a freak attack afterwards, was delighted with how i got on.  And my mommy was mega proud of me too, so you never know now she might feed me at the weekend as my reward!

Des decided to give us a mini project to do along with the project we were already doing.  He gave us the title of "Clutter" and we had to design a print with regards to what the word clutter means to us.  So seeing as I'm an expert in the area of mess and clutter, this suited me great!

I decided to look at clutter with regards to a girl's everyday life...how much more cluttered could you get like?

But when i went to take photos for the project, I found that for once my room was immaculate.  This NEVER happens, so why would it have to happen when i actually needed mess?!

But thankfully, i slept in one morning and got ready in a mad rush which resulted in make up and hairdryers and clothes and shoes and what not being thrown around my room.....it was a bitch to tidy up but brilliant for research!

So these are the photos I decided to go with out of all the clutter in my room.  For my actual print, I decided to go with the last one which has the close up of my boot which i actually squeezed myself into my shelf to take...the things i do for art!

Thought this would make a cool print once done.  So working from a standard photo size of 4x6, i etched on to a sheet of acetate using a scribe and then printed it.  I really liked the way they came out once I had decided on using the rusty orange, red tones of ink.

My Favourite one

So now, the 3 groups that are doing print over the coming weeks are going to do this same project so that these prints are going to be put together to make one huge collage....about 120 in total which should look cool!

As well as that i've still been working on my main project and did a few more prints with regards homelessness.  i also did a lot of contextual work this week and came across an amazing photographer called Tom Stone.  His photographs of the homeless were truly inspirational and i used a lot of them in my research.  Each picture shows the eyes of the homeless person and gives their background stories.  Shot in black and white they are simple yet extremely effective.

Homelessness was never something i gave an awful lot of thought to prior to this but on doing research i actually really got affected by it.  Just reading these people's stories would kind of get to you and i think they helped me to get a better idea of what to present in my prints.

Gonna miss doing print seeing as tomorrow is assessment day and i've finished the two week elective! On to Sculpture next week which i'm kinda iffy about...not sure if i'll be any good at it but sur we'll give it a go anyways!

I'm beginning to change race...

So 4 days into Print workshop and really loving it!  It really is a shock to the system to be coming into college at half nine every morning and actually staying till half 4 or so and not being bothered about it...I'm seriously starting to change!!

Only downside to the workshop is how messy you get.  first day doing print and i decide to wear a white t-shirt...not one of my greater ideas now i'll admit.  But it's the hands that are getting to me, they've been permanently black since we started! the ink doesnt come off very easily...so i look like i've been doing some serious hard days in the bog or that i'm slowly dyeing myself black!

But aside from all that, it really is such a cool thing to do.  I'm still working with my homeless images and find that i'm just doing the prints off the top of my head with no real planning...but they're coming out ok and thats the main thing.

they're quite time consuming as i normally put each print through the press 3 times to get the different colours and effects on them.  Gonna have serious muscles in my arm from turning the wheel on that yoke!

While my prints are quite simple atm, i'm hoping to change tac a little bit and try some different ones tomorrow.  I want them to be more abstract but not in a crazy way.  i just think that at the moment they're too obvious so I want to go along the lines of hidden messages and do that for my next ones....i hope.

So an evening of brain-storming and contextual work awaits me.....

Finally moving on!!!....well kinda..

Soooo i dont know what the story is with these blogs or whether or not i'm supposed to keep writing them...but i'm feeling full of energy today, new start and all that so I said i'd throw up a new post.

I'm surprisingly getting to like writing these at long last!  Maybe I should have stuck with the auld Journalism course after all...

Anywho, finally the disciplines have started and I'm on Print for the next two weeks!  Totes excited as this is the area which I want to get into.  I'd say there'll be major competition for places though so will have to work my ass off for the next while...me and hard work just dont get on like, it's gonna be tough.

The given brief for our Printmaking project is a bit of a quare one.  Basically we have to explore the nature of space in our immediate environment.  The aim is to develop an understanding of our impact on the space around us through compositional studies and to visually explore these possibilities through print.

...sounds fun right??

Well when i saw the brief this morning, panic stations took over and i couldnt think of a thing.  However, after using the amazing technique that is mind maps, I came up with my idea pretty quickly.

When i thought about my environment, i thought of the city landscape.  from there crowds and people.  but that was very like my first project and i was afraid that i would get sick of it very early if i stuck with the same thing. so i started to think about the types of people in the city.  Beggers were the first to come into my head as unfortunately over Xmas i saw plenty around.  then i thought of the homeless.  from there doorways and cramped spaces, on to fear and being alone.

I did some quick sketches just to get some ideas on to paper...and when i say quick i mean sketches that took me like a minute to do. 

Mind Map

I have quite a cartoony, animated way of drawing so hopefully these will come across well in the actual print.

Now I just have to come up with some more ideas before tomorrow's workshop! 

I've forgotten what it's like to sleep...

The night before assessments and I am doing another all-nighter.  the plan is to stay up, go to college in the morning and then sleep when i get home...that sleep is going to actually be epic like!!!

Glad to see I'm not the only one staying up though.  Went for a stroll downstairs to No. 4 and the amount of people still up around Grove working is hilarious.  it's fair to say that everyone is sharing the last-minute panic.

I just finished another stop motion video, this time with music because the other ones are a bit boring to watch.

Youtube is being a bitch and totes nearly gave me a heart attack because it wouldnt publish my video, so I have to upload it myself and it's taking ages...why do things always happen like this??!!

Tiredness is starting to kick in but I suppose that's what to be expected after doing three all-nighters on the trot.  At this stage i'm afraid to go to sleep incase I don't wake up in time in the morning.  

Do I think I'm prepared enough for these assessments?  

Ahhh that would be a big fat NO!

At this stage I just want to get it out of the way so that  I can forget about it.  I don't know what way they're going to go or how the assessment even works.  All I know is that I'll be glad when it's over and done with!

So now to keep myself awake and motivated, I'm going to work on the personal statement that everyone seems to be freaking out about.  I'm also on my 5th cup of tea and will be tearing into the Berocca in another few hours.

PLEASE don't let these assessments turn into a "FML" moment! 

You know assessments are coming with all these posts....

These blog posts make me think I've loads done...and keep me some way calm...so purely for that reason, I'm gone into Blogger Overload!!

I was creeping through everyone's blogs there and noticed that a lot had put up their self-portraits...which I actually had forgotten about!  We were given a self-portrait project a few weeks back in which we had to take a photo that represented us and how we felt we were seen by others.  So here's mine:

I showed this to a few people and got the same reaction "Amm, but you're not in this?"

If you look closely, I actually am.  What I wanted to show with this photo was how I felt invisible at times, that even though I'm known for being loud and a tad mental, I actually do have a serious side where I feel that I'm not good enough and therefore am not noticed by others.  You see the reflection of my boots and legs, in other words only part of me.  This was just my way of representing how people pretty much only get to see one side of me, my loud bubbly happy side...I rarely let people see my serious side.

The use of reflection in this photo got me thinking about how I could bring that into my main project.  An artist called Claire Curneen gave me some inspiration as to where to go for this.  Even though she is a ceramicist, she uses reflective pieces in her sculpture figurative pieces.

So armed with this, I began working with reflective paper and materials such as tin foil and mirrors to produce a piece of work.  I wanted to give the illusion of there being many people in the crowd scenes and how you can almost put yourself right into the work.

I really liked how these came out, even with the flash of the camera being reflected as well as my reflection.

Now I think this will be the last post for tonight, I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open....But thanks my bambino Marion for keeping me motivated all evening! You're as good god bless you :')

And also this song is working surprisingly well to keep me motivated during these all-nighters, I've had it on repeat....sur they'll surely pass me on Monday on my taste in music alone right?

Bitta divine inspiration wouldn't go amiss now..

Seeing as I was supposed to keep this blog properly updated over the holidays and subsequently didn't (totes by accident!) I may as well throw in another post seeing as I cant sleep.  How I'm going to get my body used to going to sleep at a reasonable-ish hour for college next week is beyond me!  Glad lectures aren't starting back yet.  3 hours of CCS after very little sleep is so not fun.

Guess it's about time I mentioned the artists that i've been looking at for some inspiration over the course of my project.  I was amazed to find just how many artists base their work on world's made of paper and how simple yet extremely clever a lot of them are.  Of course when I came up with my idea of paper people becoming 3D I thought I was brilliant and well on my way to being a famous artist of sorts....then  you do the research only to find that someone else pretty much had the same idea as you.

For me, that someone would be Peter Callesen.

The man is a genuis!  All of his work is soooo simple yet so effective.  The fact that he can have just one figure on a big plain white sheet of paper, and still produce such thought provoking and entertaining work says a lot.  Like my work, he uses the negative and positive to produce his work.  they both tell a story, the negative producing something new in the positive or vice-versa.

This piece of work by him is one of my favourites.  The fact that it's so simple I think makes it all the more effective.  there's an almost comedy to his work that yet still manages to tell a story.

Stop motion, which a lot of my work is based on, is of course an age-old practice.  It's the most simple thing to do, however obviously it is very time consuming.  But when done well it can be so effective.  the following video, which was made for a Converse ad, is one of my favourites and was probably the one which started off my interest in Stop-Motion animation.

I have the bodyclock of an Owl....

Don't you just love when you're nice and calm about everything....and then all of a sudden, the panic hits you like the wave of a tsunami?

Well that happened me yesterday.  Why couldn't it have happened me like 2 weeks ago when I'd have time to do something about it??!!!

To try and over-come this panic I decided that i'd skip sleeping last night, so armed with jaffa cakes, cans of coke and ryvita biscuits I took over the dinning room and went about creating some master pieces for the night.  HALF SEVEN this morning I went to bed.  To say i was tired was an understatement.  However, I did get some stop motion done that I've been wanting to do for ages.

This one is different from ones I've done before in that everything was made from paper and the only similarity between this and the last ones I did was that I didn't have a clue what I was doing.

It's a bit rusty but I can barely keep my eyes open at this stage so it will do!!

Looking forward to going back to Limerick tomorrow, totes missing all the gang.  If the assessments werent on then everything would be grand!  I'm on really early Monday morning though so at least I can get it out of the way.

Now I must clean the dinning room before my father has a heartattack and then I have TO SLEEP!!!

Planning on going to bed at 9pm on a Saturday night, how cool am I?

Night night people x

2-kai-double-6 bAbEzZzZz! xXxXx

So Xmas and new years are over....boo, sad face.  Have to say it was one of the best though, bar me losing my voice.  It was absolute torture I tell ya!! And of course I took that as an excuse to totes not let my creative juices flow so to say i was unproductive over the break is taking things lightly....although i did buy clay yesterday so hey, that's half the battle right?

I had a tutorial just before I left for Xmas holidays and it went really good.  Des and Elaine are really good for giving me ideas and especially for giving me artists to research as I find that that is where I fall down.  My contextual notebook is really tiny!  But Elaine pointed me in the direction of some really cool books which deal with artists who work purely in paper and wire, which is along the lines of what I'm doing.  I found them a great help and got so many ideas from them.

For quite some time I had had the below picture on my wall...

Innocent enough looking right?

Well this picture caused awful grief for poor Elaine and Des because basically they hated it.  I wasn't gone on it either to be honest but we still fought on a regular basis about it, bit of entertainment to get us through the day like yano yourself.  But I eventually decided to re-do it and see what happened.  And this is what I came up with:

And I think I did a far better job on this one.  It's so simple and literally took me 10 minutes but I think it's really effective for my project.  I love using purely silhouettes now.  I was always a sucker for detail and would spend hours on one piece but I'm starting to work faster now on account of these.  I always hated drawing people, right back to when I was at school.  But now i really do love it!

But the one downfall to my project was that i had very little 3D.  Everything i make is paper and obviously is flat on a page.  Now I am certainly not one for building things so was pretty stuck in this area.  However, I happened to pick up a pop-up book belonging to my nephew lately and got the idea to make a pop up of some sort.  My first few attempts certainly didn't work, basically they turned out shite.  So I changed my approach and instead made a scene with what looked like free-standing figures with their shadows cast on the ground behind them.

So this is what I've basically been doing for the past while.  They take a surprisingly long time to make because each figure has to be cut with a craft knife...my fingers do actually be bent backwards by the time I'm finished!

On from these, I have a few more videos to make as well as different variations of pop-ups.  Assessments are on Monday morning so the plan is to cram for the next few days and just not sleep Sunday night if I have to....I refuse to fail these!!!

Now, productivity (which so does not look like a word to me..) has got to be kicked into high gear!