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!