Joy of Progress Reviews..

So after a tutorial with the lovely Breda, I decided to go away from pen ever so slightly and use graphite instead.  These take a lot longer than pen for me so a lot more work went into them.

I visited the Biennale in Venice earlier in September and came home inspired by some of the art work I saw there.  One such way of displaying the work really caught my eye.  There was a blank piece of paper in one of the exhibitions at the Arsenale, with a mirror behind it so that you could only see what was printed on the paper if you looked in the mirror.  I really wanted to give this a try and felt it would work well in my project.

 

 

 

 

Next time though when I attempt it again, I hope to go bigger and have the drawing more widely spaced out from the mirror.

 

 

I also wanted to base drawings and pieces of work on the 10 commandments as well.

 



 

 

This project has a lot of play on words and contradicting text with images, as seen with my Pope Francis "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil."

 

 



 

 

 

Breda also pointed me in the direction of a documentary called "Silence in the House of God."  On seeing that it was 2 hours long and dealt with the issues of the child sex abuse scandals in the church, I thought not a hope would I watch the whole thing, id just get the gist of it.

 

But alas on sitting down and beginning to watch it I was immediately sucked in.  It was tough in parts to watch as the subject matter was quite sad but it was an amazing documentary that was so well put together.  I wanted to touch on the subject of the scandals but its not an area I would be willing to make a joke about like I do with the other areas of the Catholic Church....I do have some morals after all :P

 

In the documentary, the boys who are now fully grown men, refer to the priest who abused them as a wolf, a wolf who would creep into their rooms at night looking for their prey.  This gave me an idea of using an image of a wolf as a metaphor for the priest.  Personally I think it would make a good etching which is my next port of call.

 

I want to mix etchings with screen prints, etch the pen drawings as I feel they would work well, and then screen the words over them.  Once I can start back into the whole print room madness, I'll be happy!



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

Hello 3rd Year!

So back into the crazy busy world of art college for another year!  Just when I thought Print couldn't get anymore hectic, 3rd year proves me wrong.

For this year, I'm continuing with my religion theme and focusing on the Catholic Church once again.  Last year I felt I didn't get what I wanted out of it, so this year will be different!

To begin with I decided to do a drawing based project.  I came to art college because I love to draw but sadly, I have ended up not drawing the way I like since I started.  So I've been having some fun drawing my holy images in the way I like.

I started with pen drawings as I have an obsession with drawing with biro, always have.  I created my own little happy creepy looking priest who will be the basis for a lot of my drawings.  I decided to incorporate David Godbold's way of doing his art work.  He uses tracing paper to make layers of drawing on text. 

I started an online survey which is where I got a lot of my ideas for my drawings from.  Majority of people had a very negative view and opinion of the church so I decided to show both sides of the argument.  I wanted to show how the church was seen long ago to how its seen now hence the drawing of the nun.  I also was taking bible quotes and quotes from church teachings and contrasting them with images underneath.

A lot of people spoke about how they have their direct line to God and don't feel the need to go through the priest anymore in todays society so as one of the first tracing paper drawings, the line going directly over the priest to the holy heavenly hand above seemed like a good way to show this.

Stop Motion Popes

So I decided to attempt to do a stop motion as well as part of my project.  I did a lot of them in first year using clay figures and cut outs so for this one I decided to attempt a drawing stop motion.

No one told me just how hard these are to make.

Every scene had to be drawn individually, then photographed and put together.

423 photos later, it was FINALLY ready to be put together.

Its rough and not very professional but pretty happy with having actually achieving it :)

Link for it on "The YouTube" :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLrxhopON5A

I can see the finish line..

For the prints of the twitter speech box I decided to do some on Photoshop aswel.  Now I am plain useless when it comes to technology, especially Photoshop so its very basic what I've done.

Aswel as this, I was also working on a reduction woodcut which has 5 colours altogether.

Attempting to make brown!

Managed it :D 

With 3 colours done

All inked up, ready to go

With 4 colours

Next thing to do is black and then I'm pretty much done :)

Etchings, acid, mighty craic...

I worked on a new image to go along with my Pope Benedict theme.  I based my etching on the Ring of The Fisherman.  This is basically the image which appears on every Pope's ring.  Its an image of Saint Peter who was a fisherman by trade.  When a Pope dies or in Benny's case, leaves the church, the ring gets destroyed.  Therefore every new Pope gets a new ring.

So playing on that idea, I took the image of the ring and made it look as though it had been destroyed, broken into 4 pieces.  I hadnt intended on doing an etching but when I came up with this image I felt it would look really well as an etching.

Starting out I did just a typical etching, submersing the plate in the acid, applying bitumen etc.

The image of the ring wasnt standing out as much as I had wanted so I decided to then do a quick aquatint on it to make an effect on the background of the etching plate.

This came out much better.  I decided to incorporate this print into my stain glass window display aswel so I printed on fabric.

As well as prints, I'm working on a drawing stop motion which take AGES to do. Its not very neat or professional looking but I've never attempted this before so hopefully it'll be watchable when its done.  Also working on a documentary for Martin's class on the "unsung heroes" of the art college, the people who work behind the scenes.  So we've basically interviewed Anne the librarian, Sean the receptionist and the lovely Noel, the caretaker and thankfully it's coming out really well :) Just have to put the finishing touches to it and then that's another thing off the to-do list.

#SummerCountdown

Saint Angelus has a certain ring to it...

Since my last blog, college has been fairly hectic! Between long days in the print room, surrounded by acid and inhaling crazy amounts of white spirit, blisters from using the printing press and stab wounds on my hands from my woodcutting tools, its fair to say I am LIVING for summer at this point.  The day I can sit down and do nothing cannot come fast enough!

With my fabric prints of the image of the tweet and also the image of Benny looking all sad and fed up, I finally got around to making the display for them.  These prints weren't exactly met with enthusiasm but I really like them so didnt want to not use them.  I got a frame built that resembled a stain glass window which I put to great use before making my prints ;)

I'd make a great saint :P

I then painted the frame black before going about sewing together all the fabric pieces.  For someone who really cant sew I think I did a fair good job...well, it's staying together anyways :P

I'm really happy with how it came out, making myself go to college on a Saturday was worth it after all! ;)

Final Countdown...Religion in Twitter..

So we're into the last few weeks of college so its all busy busy! For this part of the semester, we're focusing on etchings and woodcuts.  I've decided to do purely woodcuts for my project as this is an area which I absolutely love, it's definitely my favourite process of printing.

I decided to stick with the whole idea of Pope Benedict leaving the church, or as I should refer to him now "His Holiness Benedict"...think I'll stick with Benny though, that's too long :P

I wanted to take a somewhat light-hearted approach to his resignation, the same approach I have when it comes to all aspects of my blasphemy fuelled work.  So, I decided to bring into the project the fact that both him and the current Pope Francis are on Twitter, which I think is just gas altogether.

So I made a woodcut of a Twitter bird with a speech box with the intention of filling things with hand-written tweets "from" Benny.

I then printed this on both Fabriano paper and fabric.  With the Fabriano, using a blue ink, I left some white whilst others I did a tea-stain on them to give them an old look.

Fabriano

Fabric (as below)

After this, I filled in some tweets from Benny.

I also did a wood carving of Benny himself to incorporate into the tweets.

Again I also printed this on to fabric.

My aim for printing on fabric is to eventually sew all these together to form a stain glass window type display.  With the frame currently being built I'm working on 2 more images that I hope to incorporate into it.

Crit tomorrow so fun times ahead! :D 

......sarcasm doesn't come across well in the written form -.-