Friday, 28 September 2012

7AM starts and a drop of Guinness, sur twill be grand..

Decided i'm gonna be extra good and do at least one of these a week and be totes dedicated unlike last year....yeah we'll see how long that lasts!

So last week I was getting over my creative blockage and deciding on my idea, all before I could start the prep for my limestone.  This week was crazy and extremely hectic! My sleep was wittled down to the bare minimum, so lack of sleep coupled with being sick and casually pissed off meant Ange was not a nice person to be around this week!  Apologies to all who fell victim to my wrath ;) 

I narrowed down my idea to the structure of society: how the recession is forcing people to do things they wouldnt normally do.  Everyone has been affected by the current economic climate so I wanted to explore what can happen when a person is severely affected.  I looked at how people can lose their homes and are forced to live on the street; people becoming dependent on alcohol, drugs etc. leaving the country or even resorting to prostitution to help them get by.  I drew a series of quick sketches exploring each topic.





















I then put together a quick composition of things that I thought best described my project.


But with the image there was a lot going on that wasnt needed.  It was almost as if there were 4 different stories happening which in one way would have been good but literal images on Lithographs, personally speaking, don't particularly look well.  So i zoomed in on the trolley and decided to look at it from that aspect.  The simple image of the trolley can symbolise many things, it acts as an everyday item for people doing their grocery shopping; shows routine; but on the flip side it could carry all of someone's most treasured possessions after they lost their home or even the bars can show a feeling of being trapped or jailed almost. 

Sooooo because i'm such a dedicated student and all that craic, I obviously needed to do research for the trolley side of things.  So off i went to Supervalu where i "borrowed" a trolley which is currently acting as a clothes drying unit in my room...a dead handy yoke! But it shall be returned...at some stage :P










The bar detail on the trolley was actually really interesting to photograph and to draw and they do make cool drawings.  They just take plenty of time and patience which I was running out of at 2AM.  




When I had all my trolley staring done, I then took the images and formed compositions with them.  After seeing how long it took to draw a simple drawing of the trolley I wanted something simple to print.  But the more detail and tone used in them obviously made them more interesting....so I of course ended up going with a tricky enough composition.




The "Chosen One"

So from here, I transferred the image on to my pre-prepared limestone where it was then treated with Rosin, Talc and an array of different strength Gum Arabics.



I used Litho crayons 1, 2 and 5 to create the image which took soooooo much time to do...it's an image I dont want to ever have to draw again.  Bent over a stone for hours at a time drawing made absolute shite of my back so this week is not ending well!  But the drop of Guinness for Arthur's Day helped a shmall bit ;)

Next week is the last week of Lithography before moving on to Intaglio.  Hopefully printing will get done on Wednesday so I can say goodbye to this loooong process of printing.

3 weeks in to 2nd year....Verdict - still unsure...

Thursday, 20 September 2012

Limerick Citayyyy

So as we all of course know, tomorrow is City of Cultures night...

Yeah i didnt either.

But Des, my tutor from last year, asked us to get involved in a project he was doing for the night.  For the project, he wanted loads of lino blocks that each had something on it that represented Limerick.  He told us it could be absolutely anything we wanted.

Naturally, i thought of doing images of guns, knives, drugs etc....but then thought that a tad too obvious.

So keeping in with my theme of politicians being idiots, i decided to pick good auld Willie O'Dea, a Limerick man.  Sur who could forget his infamous photograph with the gun pointing at the photographer!  So i took that image, simplified it and transferred it to a lino block.  Then started the process of cutting.

simplified drawing

transferring

the finished lino block

And success! I only cut myself once, I'm getting so good :')

So this shall be inked up at the festival tomorrow and as far as I know lil kiddies are going to be the ones inking them....could get very messy very quickly! :P

Second Year LOLz

Well its that time again, back to yer news feeds being wrecked with my blog posts especially when it's assessment time!

Back to college now almost 2 weeks and officially studying Printmaking.  The first week was nice and easy, with lots of introductions and meeting our new tutors Sercan and Martin.  Sercan is our main printmaking tutor and Martin will be doing Photography and Multimedia with us.  As well as that, I've started studying "The Moving Image" as my seminar course so will be learning lots about Film over the next 2 semesters so lots of LOLz ahead no doubt.

For our first project of second year, we are split into two groups with one group (mine) doing Lithography and the other group doing Intaglio.  From there we were given our project briefs and titles.  My delightful title is "Spaces, Structures and Systems: abstraction and figuration help build new worlds."  Now to say i was "shtumped" was pretty accurate.  After a long summer break of having my brain in relaxed mode, trying to get my head around this one was pretty hard.

A lot of brainstorming had to be done before I eventually got a moment of inspiration whilst day dreaming.  I decided to look at the structure of today's society.  With Ireland in the midst of one of the worst recessions in history, its fair to say that most people are being affected.  So from there, i looked at the political side of society what with the Government being one of the main causes for the mess we're in.

There is an inequality in today's society that led me to explore further.  Hard working men and women are being taxed up to their eyeballs with vital resources and services such as medical cards being taken from then whilst another part of society is living it up without a care in the world, little or no tax to pay and crazy one off payments that could feed and clothe the standard family for a substantial amount of time.

As a result of this unfairness and hardship, people who were once high flying successful workers are forced to sleep rough on the streets; others reduced to a life dependant on alcohol, drugs, stealing etc just to survive.

But you dont even have to go that extreme for an example.  Look closer to home.  Students everyday are being threatened with ever increasing College Fees as well as the Grant being cut or even completely taken away.  Without this vital funding, young people arent going to be able to educate themselves therefore there wont be anyone to help get this country out of the hole that its in.

So, for these reasons, i've been playing around with images of homelessness, alcoholism, prostitution etc before i will decide on my final image and composition for my Lithograph.  To say that Lithography is a long and confusing process is not an understatement.  So much has to be done to prepare the stones before you can even begin putting your image together.  We have started filing down the limestone blocks to make them smooth and cleaning them with materials like Carborundum and the likes.

It will be a long process but with the project itself only lasting for a short time I really need to get cracking!  Have no idea where this will end up but hopefully preparing the stones will be done by next week so the printing can start :)