Rotations: Fine Art

My forth week of rotations was fine art and the week I was most looking forward to experiencing.
On the first day We started off with a really interesting game of pictionary which involved drawing the word using a variety of marks instead of drawing symbols. I found this exercise incredibly helpful in loosening up my drawing style although it was quite difficult as my team were hopeless although it was probably more to do with my drawings. In the Afternoon we had a go at blind drawing a model with a number of different objects being moved around by her. This again was really helpful in loosening up my drawing technique and added a lot of movement into my drawings. Although some of my drawings ended up looking like nothing although I think that's just because I'm used to judging my work so critically when an activity like this is used I find it difficult to tell what looks good and what doesn't also it made me realise that just completing the activity isn't always enough to create a piece of work that does look good. After the blind drawings we had a go at using our hands and feet to draw with. After the initial surprise of finding out what the activity was the pieces of work we created were really interesting and well worth the jaw cramp.
On the second day we looked at the work of Gabriel Orozco and how he takes the idea of movement and makes an incredible visual impact using his 3 dimensional designs. I started by just using old video tape and sticky tape and kept my design very angular and geometric and then collaborated with Jack Gray's design which was almost the complete opposite, this created an image that held some symmetry along with an explosion of movement and it did look as though the two opposites had collided. After this day in rotations I also looked into the work of Roman Singer, Damien Ortega and Tony Cregg. I really liked the way each artist all had such different ways of working although they all convey the same principal of movent. Probably my favorite artist that I looked at was Damien Ortega who's work mesmorised me. I just found the way his 3 dimensional pieces of art looked as though a silent explosion had happened and he'd taken a freeze frame clip of these fragmented objects suspended in mid air. It really was fascinating.
At the end of the fine art rotation I found that it wasn't exactly what I expected and the work that we did was completely the opposite to my usual work although I feel that along with this whole course I know it will give a completely new dimension to my work and increase the inspiration and desire to come up with new and innovative ways to work and process my ideas.

On the Friday we had a go at experimenting with colour by creating a piece of work from taking samples from everyone else 3 dimensional designs. At the end of the activity I had a piece of work that I really liked, I felt the contrast in colours worked really well along with the different shapes and textures. Although at the end when looking at a finished piece of work it was difficult to determine between the good and bad points of my own work.

Rotations: Photography

Final Image: Branding litter.

Final Image: Where a £10 note can get you...

Final Image: Looting tea cakes and a cup of coffee.

In the third week of rotations it was photography. I was really looking forward to this workshop as I had really enjoyed the single day we had in the area at the start of the course.
On the first day it was explained to us we had to have a go at a project out of college as well as several workshops during my days at college. The out of school project was to argue for or against the idea that modern life was rubbish and the first workshop within college was to create some photo grams. To make my photo grams. I used a variety of objects such as half a bottle, a transparent perfume bottle, thread and some materials that I had in my bag left over from the 3D rotations. These created some really interesting and striking images that were surprisingly easy to make.
I found that all of my images work and were successful although getting the exposure time to provide the strongest image was really just down to trial and error. After creating our photo grams we had a look at photographers who cropped images to either get multiple meanings or change the meaning of the original image. One photographer who I researched was John Baldessari. Who cropped certain parts of a photography and replaces it with a block colour such as a persons face. I thought all of his images were incredibly interesting because he gave every photo a sense of humor especially in some where the original mood of the photo was quite the opposite. I found a Martin Parr image that he took in Brighton to crop. I split the image into four sections and gave each one a different caption, (from top to bottom) Mothering, kidnapped, bathing and next generation. This worked really well as it gave an already powerful and hard hitting image a completely different meaning.
On the second day I was off ill, although I found out through one of the tutors that the class were looking at how to present and organise your work so it has the most effect on your audience so I spent the majority of the day putting final editing touch ups on my pictures and thinking of the best way to present them on the final day of the rotation.
On the final day of the rotation I brought in three very strong images that all had very literal meaning but also a few underlying and more subtle meanings that the viewer could interpret in their own way. I found that this was similar to some of Richard Billingham's work in such as in his collection named 'Ray's a laugh' because his work also contained pictures that at first were very obvious and showed literal meaning but when you spent longer analysing and looking at the photographs they really made you think about the ideas of what he was trying to put forward.
My first photograph was based around littering in the modern life and has a Coca cola can in the foreground in front of a variety of other rubbish such as an old newspaper and other big branded litter. My initial idea was to put emphasis on the Coca Cola can as it is one of the biggest and most well know brand logos in the world and is not only a huge source of litter but also the epitome of globalisation, standardisation and an example of other overpowering brands that have shaped the world we live in today. Also the newspaper in the background is meant to represent how the media are a massive contribute to increasing the amount of control and money these brands have.

In my second photograph is meant to represent drug abuse in the modern world. The composition of the photo was a young adult snorting a line of cocaine  The idea of this photo was not to fill it with subtle underlying meanings but to make it a hard hitting and effective image. Something else that really adds meaning to this photo is that an old classmate of mine passed away due to an overdose of cocaine in the same week I took this photo. My final photo was based around the London riots which I felt summed up the decline of modern society with children as young as 8 looting just to get a hold of the latest consumer trends. Then when the looting and destruction turned to small businesses it was clear that what started from greed turned into just mindless violence and anti-social behavior. I found it incredibly difficult to get a good quality shot for this picture because to get the feeling of movement out of a stationary pose is a challenge in itself. Overall I felt my pictures came well although it was a challenge to take a powerful image with the both meaning and quality behind it.

Cropped Martin Parr Image.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rotations: Fashion & Textiles

In my second week I had fashion and textiles, this was the workshop that I was least looking forward to, although at the end of the week I found that I managed to take a lot away from it. On the first day we started by doing a sketch of our denim jackets in their original state. After this we had to pick a street style e.g Gothic, hippie, skater etc. After choosing a hippie as a street style, I cut my jacket in half and started attaching it alongside my partners on our manikin. This created a really interesting look although it did look quite strange and was difficult to match the way our jackets looked to our chosen street style. After sketching this weird collision of jackets down we then created several variations using our jackets and then sketched them down. Once we had done this we had to pick 4 different words that described our jacket and if the four word didn't match what our jacket looked like we had to alter it to match. Our four words were Edgy, restrictive, unique and striking. However after picking our four word they didn't really fit into the hippie street style so we moved into more Gothic. This in turn also made us make some drastic changes to our jacket.
In the afternoon I attempted doing fashion illustrations using felt tip and cut out images from magazines. I also tried to incorporate my jacket design into the fashion illustration. This worked really well as trying to fit my jacket into a picture from a magazine made the drawing look incredibly out of proportion, but in a really odd way it made the drawing have a powerful effect.
On the second day of fashion we concentrated on making samples out of any spare denim or other materials we had left. I took this as a prime opportunity to learn how to knit. This did take a while to get the hang of and at the end of it what I had made just looked like a tangled ball of wool although I felt that the idea was still there. After moving on from knitting I started weaving strips of denim which created a really intricate and and impressive effect although the design itself was actually really simple. For my last sample I just randomly splashed red food colouring over a piece of denim which actually made it look like it was blood stained. Once we had completed making our samples we drew quick sketches of each one. Which given the short amount of time we had made our drawings look like they had a lot of movement.
After lunch we spent the afternoon making final adjustments to our jackets taking inspiration from our sample designs. I did this by bleaching a checkered design into the arm and body of one half of my jacket. This worked to a certain point although I found when I removed the masking tape from the denim that I had been a little generous with the bleach as a fair bit had managed to get under the masking tape in turn loosing some of the checkered effect. Once the bleach had dried I reconnected my half of the jacket with my partners and then we made final adjustments to it such as connecting the arm and fashioning a new collar out of spare denim to make it wearable for the pictures we had to take the next day.
On the final day of fashion workshop we started off by concentrating on fashion illustrations. The first one we had to draw was drawn with bleach this was difficult at first although my main concern was trying to keep it off my clothes. But by the second drawing I had gotten over the worry of getting it on my clothes and my drawings became a lot more flowing. Now after creating a basic outline using bleach I started working chalk and charcoal over my drawing to highlight depth and where the light hits the jacket. This really started to make the illustration look three dimensional. After we finished using the bleach we started to use watered down blue paint. And used the back of wallpaper samples to paint on which created an elongated drawing which looked incredibly interesting because of where the paint ran, and the erratic brushstrokes.

In the final part of the day we had to use our jackets in a fashion shoot. We had to take everything into consideration such as make up, hair, location and lighting. I had a lot of strong ideas and a good willing model lined up although my partner was difficult to negotiate with so most ideas I had weren't put into practice and we were left with an out of place model who didn't fit our street style and poses that did not highlight our jacket or the style it was meant to express. So we were left with some very weak shots that didn't sum up the progress throughout the week.