I hear Rag Week calling....

And so sculpture has come to an end.  During those 2 weeks i've learned that I am not 3D orientated at all and that food poisoning has to be the worst sickness ever.  I had it at the start of this week and it meant i missed a day plus chances to do work....so not a great week to say the least!

I focused a lot on the melting of different materials this week.  Actually really enjoyed this side of things....the child in me came out when I got my hands on the hot gun! Loved melting crap!  I felt like Phoebe's brother Frank in Friends who tried to melt her phone....i was looking everywhere to see what i could melt next!

Melted sculpture made from UNREAL bubble wrap with hot wax thrown over it

Melted forks and knives

Melted spoons

More melted spoons!

Melted bottles

I didnt want to completely forget about the twisting side of things so to introduce some colour, i rolled paint on to numerous brown sheets, twisted them and left them for a few hours.  When i came back i unravelled them all and saw the different effects that this had had on the paint.

But as much fun as melting was, i did eventually run out of things to melt.  So like i did with my paint throwing video (which was sooo fun to do!) i thought about how things were after they had melted.  So using paper, i showed a solid block of colour that slowly melts away on to the floor.

Assessments are on in the morning.  I'm happy to be moving on now at this stage, i didnt do great but at least i can say i tried it.  Now home for the weekend to catch up on some badly needed sleep and then RAG WEEK BABY!! 

So Far, So Not Good...

So one week down and one to go.  Sculpture, i have decided, is so not for me.  I dont think in 3D, I think purely in flat 2D work so i'm finding this 2 week elective pretty challenging.

I've changed direction yet again and gone with the words "to twist" and "to melt".  These seemed more interesting as i got a creative blockage pretty early on with my original words.  So seeing as I had no clue what I was doing and apparently Sculpture is all about experimenting, I started to twist random materials.  I began by twisting the rubber tubing from bicycle wheels along with paper to make an installation of sorts on my studio wall.

From there I started messing with wire and twisted them into different shapes and then hung them under the installation piece.  no idea what i was doing, i was just trying things out.

I was starting to get stuck and lose interest at this point....which is why i spent many a day in the library.  But i was being productive!  Well kind of.....I did start daydreaming at one stage only to be greeted with a lovely sign which almost worked to get me back concentrating on the job of reading magazines!

And of course when i had loads of work to do, I found other things to do.  Which is when i decided that my plain pink folder looked boring.  So I made it pretty!!!!!!!  Amazing the things you can do when you're bored and start playing with a Sharpie marker!

Then on going home at the weekend, I started to think about the melting side of things.  But instead of just melting stuff straight away, I started to think about how things looked once they were melted.  In other words i skipped a step in the actual melting process and decided to show the end product first.

I thought the best way to show this was by using paints.

So on a freezing cold Saturday morning, I headed out...climbed on to the roof of a shed...taped massive rolls of paper on to the side...and proceeded to randomly drop paint down over the edge.  And what i got on finishing was actually pretty cool.

Sincere thanks to my brother Gary who braved the cold and did the photography for me....as well as making sure that i didnt break my neck climbing on and off the roof!!


So for the final week of this elective, I'm going to incorporate the two words and try and make more experiments before the final assessment on Friday.  To be honest I cant wait for it to be over.  And then Rag Week, yayyy!!

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!