Tuesday 28 February 2012

Safe journey home to Pauline. 
You have been greatly loved,
And will be greatly missed.
You will both continue to inspire me in everything I do.
All my love 
x

Monday 27 February 2012

Always carry a notebook!

I tend to take a little notebook or diary with me everywhere I go. I have a collection of them, filled up with writing/drawing that I keep and get out to look back on...it reminds me how much I've grown and changed, and of thoughts and feelings that might otherwise be lost. As well as being helpful on a personal level, they can be very useful for jogging ideas for projects- playful little drawings can easily inspire something that may not come about when approached in a less relaxed way. It's always interesting when other people contribute too. To me, they're pretty essential, and I would recommend it to everyone. That is, if you can get past the potential discomfort in being viewed as massively pretentious sitting with your head buried in a notebook out in public. But most people aren't so judgemental these days!

Thursday 23 February 2012

Cancelled photo session.

Last night I stayed up late trying desperately to pull my work together in time for it to be photographed in the studio today, but unfortunately I had to accept defeat, so today I will be going in to college to cancel my session. My work motivation has been stunted by an upsetting weekend...it's a shame I seem to have gained my focus back that little bit too late. However, the deadline is still a little while away, so I will continue my sculpture and the drawings to go on it over the weekend, then do my best to photograph it nicely myself. The college deadline and competition deadline is different (the competition doesn't close until 9th March, so hopefully I might even have time to work with the photography department before then, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high.
Here is how the wire sculpture was looking yesterday:
After posting the above photo on my Tumblr blog, I was flattered to get it reblogged and compared to Alexander Calder!

Saturday 18 February 2012

Pulled apart By Horses!!

Last night was amazing! The show opened with The Computerswho I think I enjoyed just as much if not even more than P.A.B.H! Managed to get a few pictures of them, then once P.A.B.H started playing, my bag broke. The strap got ripped off so I had to go and leave all my things in the cloakroom, then back to the giant mosh-pit that filled the main area of the room. The last time I went to a gig this rowdy I had a handy perch on some stairs just at the edge, but this time I got hauled around, kicked in the head, hair pulled….etc. Safe to say I’ve never been that exhausted by a gig before, or looked as horrendous afterwards. So much fun though!
A little snippet of The Computers.
Pulled Apart By Horses performing 'Wolf Hand'.

Wednesday 15 February 2012

You'd think I'd be getting sick of her face by now...

another peek into my sketchbook...
The first page of my sketchbook....just doodling really, usually the best way to notice a few interesting ideas for me.

A crude plan of the idea I'm going ahead with.

A time-consuming struggle to get her face perfectly right. I was so happy with the bottom half of this sketch!

My most successful drawing so far plus colour and transfer experiments.

Absorbed by Shrigley...

It's been a disgraceful amount of time since I last posted anything, in my opinion.
Today is an essay day- I've had a tutorial and am currently working on an essay with the title:

What have been the connections between fine art and design? Choose one specific decade and the design / designers must relate to your own pathway area and link their work/s to relevant post-modern ideas and theories.

I've chosen to look at Shrigley because he fits perfectly in to the brief, and I'm a bit of a fan already!
When my essay is done I will post it, but for now, here is a wonderfully articulated bit of writing from the introduction of WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? The essential David Shrigley:
Shrigley's maps and plans reveal an endemic predisposition on our own part to mislabelling: we do not know the names of our own parts, let alone the parts of anything else...
To quibble over whether Shrigley is a 'fine artist' or a cartoonist is just that: quibbling. He is, perhaps, neither-rather he is the maker of meta-textual chapbooks that simultaneously drag us back to a pre-literate past and flog us forward towards an unutterable future. 

Sunday 5 February 2012

Little White Lies brief progression

I now have an idea that I am happy with, and is in the early stages of development.
Initially I was reluctant to go ahead with it as it will be a 3d structure again, similar to what I made for my Totem. I was worried that this might be inappropriate for the brief, as it strays quite far away from how a typical portrait would look, and is definitely very different from the examples of covers on previous issues of the magazine. However, after I little encouragement from my tutor, I've decided to go ahead with this plan, in the hope that they might take a shine to something a little bit different!

So, like my Totem, I will be creating a structure; this time in the shape of a swan, with imagery (of Nina) on paper sewn onto it. Here was how the idea looked roughly in my head when it first came to life:
So far I've been putting off beginning making the swan, partly because it seems like a daunting task at the moment (an essay on postmodernism needs some serious attention), and partly because I'm not sure how big to make it. My tutor also mentioned a simple way of making it easy to fit the right scale when I'm using 3d- make a frame the exact size of the required dimensions (or to the right proportions) to fit things into so that when I photograph the work it should be easy to fit to the Little White Lies cover template.

I've been continuing some studies of Nina, mostly using film stills, which has reminded me of how much I enjoyed doing studies of Amelie screen shots last year, using watercolour and ink.
Amelie screen shot studies.

Black Swan screen shot studies.