Newspaper Cover Evaluation; Session 2

For this session we now have to use the three colours, from the paintings that we did yesterday, to transfer the digital imagery into tritones. It defiantly needs a lot of work doing to it. I don't think that the background colour works very well, I think that It would look better if the colour wasn't as strong as it detracts from the images in the articles. I think that there need to be more contrast with some of the pictures also as you loose some of the detail in them. I need to make room within each of the article spaces for the headlines as well, which I haven't done at the moment.

I think I am going in the right direction with is all though. I have made the whole thing slightly wider as well so that everything would fit in it better, I think that this is the final template that I will slick with.

Box and Mannequin; Session 2

In this session I finished covering the mannequin and the box ready for my to cover them in scrim and plaster.   I covered the box in black bin liners because it was easier than using cling film. The picture below shows the whole thing before I started putting plaster on it. 

This shows how far I got with the plaster and the scrim in that one session. I got the main shape created on these two side but on the other sides I need to add more  scrim and plaster to make a better shape. I like unfinished effect that using this material has created at the bottom, as I had the character of the harlot in mind so wanted to created something that look worn. I think that when I finish the other side it will look really good.

 

I could also use this technique with different materials such as newspaper with pva and water and fabric with pva and water. Using these would stiffen the material so could help me create more of a structured piece.

Newspaper Cover Evaluation

This is my newspaper front cover after the first week of doing it. Obviously its only the very basic start to this project for me to build on next week.

Overall I think that the layout works well, its just a case of dropping all my pictures and text into the boxes to see where they would work best. I think the background colour needs changing slightly, having a little more of a brown tone to it. I think I should lay the back ground image over the whole of the piece as well so that the whole cover looks a bit more realistic. I also have the life drawing piece that we did today to slot into it somewhere so might have to rejig or take something out of the layout. I will also have to change images to tritones as that is what we have now been told to do to restrict us a bit more.

Life Drawing; Session 5

I am founding it easier to draw the male figure now. I think that my drawings are getting quicker but I need to try and get the whole figure in as I, on most of my drawings, don't seem to get the legs in place so the body looks like its floating. These are my drawings from this weeks session. 

This is a similar pose to the last one last week so it was nice to be able to compare the two and see how I have improved from last week to this. I think that my measuring has got better and the shaping of the body and the legs is better but it is still not 100% right. I am defiantly going in the right direction though. 

'Another Place': Liverpool visit

Another Place: 1997
Crosby beach is home to Antony Gormley's 'Another Place'. Another Place consists of one hundred cast iron life size figures. These figures stretch out along 2.5 kilometers of the foreshore, the area between the high and the low whatever mark, and stretch almost one kilometer out to sea. The is  an average of 500 meters between each of the stood figures. Each of the 650 kilos 'Another Place' figures have been made from one of 17 cast of Gormley's body. All of the figures are facing out to sea, looking towards the horizon. Depending on the state of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of the day the work will be more and less visible, all the figures are on the same level meaning that those closest to the shore can be buried up to as far as their knees.

http://www.visitliverpool.com/things-to-do/attractions/search/another-place-by-antony-gormley-p160981
http://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/item-view/id/230#p0

London Brief- Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

I have chosen this as the other piece of work for me to look at because I loved this character in the film and I love the costume Meryl Streep wears as Aunt  Josephine. I think that it is really interesting how they have managed to create an eccentric costume for the character even though the colours of the fabric are dark.

These show the sketch and the costume featured in the film.

Hollywood Costume, edited by Deborah Nadoolman Landis

Information about the costume 

http://www.costumersguide.com/lemony1.shtml

High neck gown with leg-o'-mutton sleeves, 88 functional button and loop closures. The dress features 2 layers - an underdress made of different colors in alternating princess panels of light blue satin, black satin, and black crackle print taffeta. Each color panel shows through the top layer to create different backgrounds for the sheer top layers created with smocked organza and black bobbinet. There are 14 vertical rows of black punched ribbon hand painted with blue pearlized paint. The stand collar features soutache sewn into horizontal stripes."

London Brief- The Lion King

For the character of Sarabi.

For the character of Scar.

These are the two photos of the Lion King costumes I got in the V&A. I have chosen these as one of my pieces to look at because I have loved this production ever since I went to see it as a child.

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1176042/theatre-costume-taymor-julie/
Information about the costume for Sarabi

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1176045/theatre-costume-taymor-julie/
Information about the information for Scar

The War of the Worlds

Yesterday I went to see Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of The Worlds. After listening to the original soundtrack as a child and seeing the 2005 film I didn't know what to expect but it was really good. The way that it was transferred into a production from book was really interesting and well done. I think as well because it was such a large scale performance the big screen at the back work really well to piece the story together.

Two images from the production, the bottom showing the large martian.

These three pictures show the front of the program and two halves of a large image in the in it. They all show things that happen throughout the story.

Fluxus Manifesto

http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/index2.html

Absurdist Manifesto

http://amr.obook.org/manifesto.php]
The New Absurdist Manifesto

New absurdism has come to mean chaos, anti-style, anti-genre. This is quite a difficult foundation to build a movement on and is more in line with the principles of Dada than anything else. While the TNA site will forever remain an open writing experiment, free of editors or any kind of guiding hand as far as content or structure is concerned, the Absurdist Monthly Review's goal is to work to define absurdism both historically and in its growing modern form.

Absurdism lacks the manifestos of Dadaism and Surrealism and has had little popularity outside of the theatre community until recent years. Media now refers to any over-the-top or crude comedy as absurdist, completely diluting the term until it's become descriptively useless. Even those working in absurdism today tend to rely on vague, philosophical definitions or merely use analogies to previous authors. No one has come up with a compact, concrete description similar to surrealism's dream metaphor; so, I will try:

Stuckist Manifesto

http://www.stuckism.com/stuckistmanifesto.html
Link lists the points on the stuckist manifesto.
Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist.


http://www.stuckism.com/info.html
Stuckism is a radical art movement founded in London in 1999 to advance new figurative painting with ideas as the most vital artistic means of addressing contemporary issues.

Stuckism is a rebuttal of the twentieth century development of Modernism, which has resulted in an increasingly fragmented, isolated, material-obsessed and stultifying academia, existing not by virtue of the work but institutional and financial power, flattered by critical acquiescence.

Stuckism regards the foundation of Modernism in art as an opportunity for vision, integrity and communication which has never been fulfilled.

The Stuckists are, therefore, opposed to the current pretensions of so-called Brit Art, Performance Art, Installation Art, Video Art, Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, Body Art, Digital Art and anything claiming to be art which incorporates dead animals or beds - mainly because they are unremarkable and boring.

The name Stuckism was derived, in the best art historical tradition, from an insult, in this case from 1999 Turner Prize Nominee, Tracey Emin, to ex-boyfriend, Billy Childish: "Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!"

Manifesto Definition

Definition
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/manifesto
-A public declaration of principles, policies, or intentions, especially of a political nature.
-To issue such a declaration.
- a public declaration of intent, policy, aims, etc., as issued by a political party, government, or movement
-a public usually written announcement of policies and intentions

Art Manifesto
A public declaration of intentions, motives and views.

Great Expectations (2012 film)

I went to see the new Great Expectations film that came out this week. There were some really good costumes in it that have given me some ides for what to do in my work my work. The costume designer for the film is Beatrix Aruna Pasztor.

These show Estella at the two different ages she is in the film, I think it is interesting to see the different styles of dress from the two different periods in time. 

Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham. 

This shows the obvious difference between the rich and poor, with the costumes they are wearing.

Box and Mannequin

As a final sort of experimentation thing at the end of this term we have to use the techniques that we have learnt and put into practice, from the last few weeks, to create work that is more structured towards our subject area. I had a quick flick through my costume ideas to get an idea of where to go with my work. We had to take a element of a Rake's Progress also, I thought that a good thing to do would be to look at the structure of the women dresses focusing mainly on the skirt of the dress.

I took a few quick photos of where I am up to with it now. I came across a few problems with the length of the mannequin so I had to drop it into the box and support it with a chair and some bricks so that it was the right height for the mannequin to sit on. The bottom photo shows the model ready for casting, I am going to use scrim and plaster to create the casts, I will just have to see how that turns out next week.

Life Drawing, Session 4

This is my first life drawing session drawing the male figure rather than the female. I have defiantly found it difficult to change from drawing a women to a man as the figures are obviously different. I think that its good though because its good  for us to have a challenge. Some of the drawings I did were really bad but some were okay for a first attempt.

This shows the final pose that we did today. Again I had to deal with a lot of foreshortening like in the previous two weeks. I did find this pose difficult but stuck with it and I don't think that the final thing I came to was too bad. Its far from perfect as some of my measurement are off so the figure doesn't sit correctly but not bad for my first session drawing a man.

Life Drawing, Session 3

Within this session I asked for short poses so I could note down the basic shaping and the positioning of the figure so I could use them in my costume designing. These are the result of the poses, there isn't much detail in them but they will defiantly help me which what I am wanting to use them for.

I didn't quite get the scale quite right on the page so I have drawn the shaping of the feet and the bottom of the legs to the side of the figure just so that I have recorded the whole of the figure. I did a few more like the drawings above just showing different shaping and placement of the figure.

With the final, longer, pose of  the session I was in a position where I had the foreshortening of the figure. I took what I had learnt the week before and measuring the figure as I went along to help me with this pose. It is defiantly not perfect but it is much better than what I could have done at the beginning of this year. Foreshortening is something I would have tried to avoid tackling but i defiantly think that after these two sessions I will try and improve on it rather than avoiding it.

A Rake's Progress theatre poster

Within our graphics lessons we have now got to create a poster to advertise a performance of A Rake's Progress. I did some initial research into different poster designs, I came across the image below whilst having a general look through them all.  

I like the fact that this is just a really simple poster, it has the relevant information on it and is not to crowded with imagery. For my first attempt at creating a poster I used this simple layout to help me. 

This is where I am up to at the moment with creating a design. The images are not entirely relevant, they are just place holders until I create images that would work better. Overall though I like the layout of this poster I think it just needs slightly more information on it, such as where to buy tickets from or the main actors/ actresses in it. 

Design Improvement

I am working at my designing skill because I think the way I was designing at the end of last year wasn't brilliant. This is where i'm at up to yet with it. They are a definite improvement on what I was doing at the beginning of the year. 

 I just need to look more into a character now to base my designs on. I'm defiantly going in the right direction with it all though.

British Ballgown- V&A

This was one of two exhibitions that we went to see at the V&A in London. The first thing that we got told when arriving was that there were no photos or sketching allowed while in that particular exhibition  Meaning that we couldn't really record what we were seeing, apart from to note down artists and the collection the dress belonged to, and would just have to look at photos after in books or on the internet, which ins't really the same.

I did really like sections of the exhibition  where the dresses where a little bit more eccentric and out there, but others were more like your traditional ball-gown which didn't interest me as much .
The two dresses i thought were the most interesting in the exhibition were these two.

The one on the above is Alexander Mcqueen and the one on the below is Vivienne Westwood. I likes these two out of all the dresses because they are different to the typical silhouette that is used for traditional  ballgowns. 

These few images show the majority of the dresses that were in the upstairs section of the exhibition. 

Image manipulation

I have struggled with these sessions, firstly with which image/ advert to choose and then what to actually change or write on the image to change it. Graphics has never really been my strong point but I have given it a good go.
This is the first image that I have done:

This is what the image originally look like:

The idea was to subtly change the image so I tried something that people may not think was not right when they first looked at it but would realise a bit after. I played about with apple and android as apple were the first to start with the developments in technology but no android have started to catch them up and rival their products.

This is the second image that I have done:

This is how the original one looked:

When looking at these the differences probably aren't even noticeable until you look at the images for a while. The two things that I have changed on the image are the price of the fuel and the number plate of the car. These now show what petrol prices will be in the year of 2042 if prices keep going up as they are. 

These are the best pieces of work that I have done in graphics but I gave what we had to do a good go and don't think that the outcomes were to bad.

Life drawing, Session 2



In this life drawing session we initially focused more on the angels of the figure rather than the muscle structure and the curves of the figure. This was so that we could work on the shaping of the figure, the length and placing of the limbs and the correct proportions.


These were my first attept with using the graph paper. These ones arent brilliant but i started to get the general idea and technique through doing these.

These were my second and third drawings  i think that the one on the left is better than the one on the right. Neither of these drawings are perfect though but I don't think that they are a bad attempt to say its my first try at using this sort of technique to help me with foreshortening.

This was my final piece of the session, done using chalks and charcoal, with this we were still looking at foreshortening. Overall I think that this piece works well and the proportions are pretty accurate.