Life plan starting to change somewhat...

In my last post, I was finishing up on my first week of doing Collograph prints and was focusing on scars and how they become part of a person's identity.  I focused on this again for the final part of my project, simplifying my prints down to the bare minimum and trying to make them as effective as possible.

i was given a lot of advice in which i was told to represent the body part that's scarred etc.  I did try this but i think personally that the more simple the print, the stronger the impact.  By showing the body part i felt as though it was closing the meaning and with how people would relate to them.  I think the most successful of my prints were in fact the ones with single scars and the ones with the band aid, which was my favourite of all.

The final crit for this part of the project went really well, with my prints getting good feedback so was delighted with how that went.  I really enjoyed working in Collograph even though it was so messy and started out quite boring.

So after a nice long lazy Easter break, it was straight into Silk Screen.  I was pretty anxious about this as there is so much involved in preparing a screen for printing.  This type of print is created using a mesh screen, with holes of differing sizes; an image broken down into tones using Photoshop; a blue emulsion which the image is burned on to using a light and then massive printing beds and different inks to that of Collographs.

I decided for this part of the project to still focus on scars but to approach it a different way to what i had been doing.  I wanted to show that sometimes a person is hidden behind their scars, in the sense that it becomes the first thing someone notices about you and you can end up somewhat losing your identity in a way.

So to do this, I took a close up picture of my eye and decided to use this as my main image.  The eye as they say is the window to the soul so what better body part to choose?  By choosing this image, i'm also keeping my prints and the actual printing process quite simple to thankfully so no more being scared to print!  The idea is to again try and use dreary, depressing, shitty (great technical terms there) colours with the eye just being different variations of the same colour.  Afterwards, once these are all printed up, I want to destroy each print and then put them back together using sewing, stitching, glueing etc. to give across that idea of being damaged and broken/scarred.

Zee eye

I think this is the last week of this project so i need to try and get a lot done! Summer is edging ever closer and I really cant wait for the freedom.  Been doing some serious thinking lately though and the thoughts of not returning to Art college in September has crossed my mind many times.  Art college isnt what i thought it would be.  I feel that after a full year here i've learned very little and have thought maybe i might be better off leaving this course and doing something different.  We were visited during the week by the head of a certain organisation who basically told us that our Art degrees are going to be worth nothing when we leave, that a life of poverty and dole queues await us on leaving because Artist are basically not recognised.  I dont want to be a self-employed artist however.  My dream was always to go on and become an art teacher or art therapist so hopefully i wont meet the same fate that 86% of artists are currently going through.  Guess i have until August anyways to make up my mind...