Love being high from White Spirits....

So i've finally got over my sickness and have started printing, yay!  Love being in the print room, it's nice to be in an environment that isnt a studio!  It can get seriously boring and repetitive when you're stuck in your studio all the time.  Plus the welcome addition of having music blaring is always a bonus to get you through the day.

As i stated in my last post, I've been focusing on scars and marks for my prints.  I've done about 10 so far which have included self harming scars and car crash marks.  They are quite abstract which is different for me as i normally like to do things very literal and obvious.  But with Collogaphs you can only do so much. 

I've been working with wood plates and have either carved into it with a knife or used tile filller to create a textured, raised base to work on.  Once this was done, a layer of varnish was put on top to seal it before putting on the ink. 

The ink.  Totes not my favourite part.  I like to be able to do my work without thinking about how messy i'm getting.  But alas i think i take it too far when working with the ink.  I was beginning to look like i was morphing into the Incredible Hulk yesterday as I was covered up to my elbows in green ink.....very attractive looking obviously but the fact that i now have ink stained finger nails and a strange hue to my skin colour is a serious bummer.  Also been suffering from a White Spirits induced headache since I started printing.  We use it for cleaning plates mostly so there's always a lot of it going around...resulting in me being like I'm stoned :)

My studio wall



Plate ready for printing

So on from that I'm waiting for the last plate to dry so that i can start printing that up as well as a few other ideas i got from browsing good auld Google.  Fabulous weather again today, fingers crossed it lasts for end of week when i'll be officially on Easter Break!!!!! YAYYY!!

Now I must return to the Print room for some more one on one time with that bottle of White Spirits....

So like, I'm a Printer now and stuff...

So after a whole pile of freaking out and thoughts of "What the hell am I going to do with my life?!" I finally found out that I got into Print!  Was frickin delighted because I had begun to have some serious doubts about whether i'd get the marks needed for a place.  On the day that the results were out I couldnt even go to find out so waited for Ms. Lauren Wilmot to ring me with my results....only to hear "Oh i've really bad news for you Ange, this is totes awks.."  She kept me in the dark for ages before telling me I got into Print...the woman is supposed to be my BFF, but she's a cunt :P

Anyways off into Print I went where we were given the brief of "Notion's of Identity".  A pretty broad brief which has it's pros and cons.  When a brief like that is so broad it can be hard to focus on a particular area so a hell of a lot of brainstorming had to be done!

My initial thoughts whilst brainstorming were to focus on Athea, a village near where i'm from but to give it a universal meaning so anyone could relate to it.  Athea is a pretty place but it has a bad name.  I myself never say i'm from there as it's not the best place in the world to be associated with...a thing i know that the likes of Damien Ahern will attack me over!!

On starting to draw my ideas, I focused on the nice aspects of the village and also the bad.  but this was not just about Athea, I wanted to show how the good and bad in society make up the identity of a town, city or village.

The Goold Momument

Flower outside the Library Window

But this idea dried up pretty quickly.  I liked drawing the images but I couldnt see myself sticking with it long enough to get a whole series of Prints out of it.  For the first part of the project, I'm focusing on Collographs which are a lot to do with texture so twas back to the drawing board for another brainstorming session!

For my next idea, which is the one I'm going to focus on, I started to look at marks and scars and how they become a part of a person's identity.  Each mark or scar has a story to it, whether it be something simple like memories from childhood where you scrope your knees or something more serious like self-harming, they all have some meaning to them.

I myself have scars from burns and an unfortunate event when i was 8 and slid under a wardrobe, slicing the skin on my leg off like a rasher ...but they're not as prominent like other's scars so I had to go on the hunt for what I wanted.  So whilst slightly under the influence on Paddy's Day, I told a number of people that I promised I wasnt a freak but if they had scars could I take some photos of them...and thankfully many obliged!

I also wanted to include prints of things that would give you scars....as in if you were in a car crash so tyres could show this or self harming with a knife etc.

So now I just have to start printing.  Because I've restarted my ideas and stuff, I'm pretty delayed with the whole printing.  But hopefully I will get all the ones I want done before next Friday's Easter Assessment!

I never wanna see a cucumber again...

And so Graphics is over.  To be fair I don't think I've ever worked just as much as I have in the past week.  The idea of working all day in college and then coming home and doing another 6 hours or even longer of work, was always a foreign concept (Jesus I'm even using the Vis Com lingo now!) to me.  But alas I feel like I actually did put in the work on a more regular basis for my final elective.

For my first concept for illustration, I looked at the whole ideas of hippies because they are totes cool.  with them, I began to replace items associated with relaxing such as cigars and cigarettes with cucumbers.  I also took the metaphor of "As Cool As A Cucumber" literally and used cocktails with ice.

And yes I do realise that some of the drawings of cucumbers and hands look especially wrong and perverted....which would explain why i took great care in actually colouring them in green almost straight away!

As well as that on my last post, I was just beginning to develop my idea of incorporating war with cucumbers into my work.  I began to replace missiles and bombs with cucumbers as i wanted to take a different approach than using cucumbers in their traditional way.

So I drew images of leaders in the world who you would associate with war so I looked at people like Hitler, George Bush and Saddam Hussein to name a few.



While I quite liked the look of the hand drawn images, I decided to do my final piece in photoshop.  I originally focused on George Bush for the final piece before changing it to Hitler as I thought it made more sense as he would have been directly involved in bombings.

And so I'm finished Graphics!  Even though it was a hell of a lot of work, i really enjoyed the past two weeks.  I also made my discipline choices for next year.  Print is still my number one, followed by Graphics, Ceramics, Painting, Sculpture and Fashion...needless to say, I have no notion of doing either Sculpture or Fashion.

So now, home for the first time in 2 weeks....Seriously cant wait, been living on €2 since Wednesday and I am STARVED!

Beware family, I'm on a munch mission!