Day Thirtythree

This morning was filled with me desperately trying to get my car taxed...

Eventually I made it into college where I had a great time trying to get the college computers to save my animation as a playable file... A few hours later... It's now on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/user/ClaireMCarter?feature=mhee It's called Destruct and Back Again. We had to start with a white sheet, eventually turn it black, then make it white again. Now for the final piece of this project, I have to make a start on the design I'm going to use and then add the colours. Could be a lot of fun.

Day Thirtytwo

Today we sat around and chatted about what we had done over the last week for our 3D project, some advice was given by our peers and our tutor and now we have to advance on those. My idea has now changed from a murdered teddybear, to a serial teddy killer, to a Cludeo vs CSI style murder and is now heading towards famous suicides.
I have no idea what I'm doing anymore and am sticking by my decision to go down to part time. I now have one week to re-create a number of famous and iconic suicides, I'm not convinced it can be done. We shall see.

The afternoon was life drawing, and I am finally showing some improvement. I've been doing life drawing for over 10 years, but my original tutor was a fool and wanted nothing to do with me because I wouldn't let him teach me by drawing all over my work. Maybe that was wrong of me, but he took instant offence rather than trying to explain it to me. Anyway, Rachael is different and her look of disappointment when we don't get better is too much to bear, so I have improved. Unfortunately I have left them at college without taking photos... Sorry.

Day Thirtyone

Today consisted of going to the hospital for my 13 week baby scan and then getting my car MOTd. So no college for me.
Here's a baby picture to cheer you up.

Day Thirty

I spent the morning in the main workshop, painting and working on my 3D project. It was mundane stuff, just painting boxes and working out where things will go, etc, but necessary for the finished piece.

For the afternoon I was back in the computer room and we were doing more animation. I had originally had a flamboyant idea of filming burlesque/belly dancers and then rotoscoping them (which is the method used in A Scanner Darkly, another bloody film I now have to watch all the way through.) but I came to my senses and realised just how much work that would entail and have decided to go for something a little simpler. I'm going to fill an A4 page with random design and then colour it so the colours move and blend. This idea was better received than I thought it would be considering there is no narrative, unlike the others in the class. So, I have to make it bright and colourful and entertaining to compensate for the lack of narrative.

We were given a homework project called Destruction and Back Again, where we take a piece of paper and do random designs in it till it's black, then do random designs in it till it's white again taking photos, or scanning it in at every stage of the composition. This is when I discover that my copy of Photoshop CS2 will allow me to make an animation, but not save it as an animation. Annoyed? A little, yes. I'm going to have to bugger about trying to fix that problem.

Day Twentynine

More 3D. We sat around, like last week, and talked about our progress, or lack there of. Most of the class were apparently sick so it went a lot quicker and only took about an hour and a half. We then spent the rest of the morning working on some ides. Part of my homework was to watch at least one episode of Robot Chicken, which I did and will never do again, totally not my sort of thing, but I understand why I was to watch it. I got the point. I also have to watch The Imaginarium of Dr Parnasus, which I will do as soon as I can get hold of a copy.

For the afternoon there was life drawing which I ducked out of this week. I needed to get home and think about my installation and maybe even get some of it done! And as I'm writing this a few days late, I did get some of it done, there are a few things that will have to wait till Wednesday, which is when I get paid, but the rest is coming along... Pictures will follow at a later date.

Day Twentyeight

Today we talked about our Historical Movements in the Arts essay and that what we really needed to do, rather than talk about the whole bloody movement, was pick an artist from one movement along with one of their paintings, and then pick another artist from a different movement and one of their pieces, and review, evaluate, compare, etc. Simples!
Now to figure out which artists and which paintings...

I'm currently think about Michelangelo Buonarroti's Damned Soul Descending into Hell

Correggio's Leda and the Swan

Or Domenico Fetti's Melancholy

So many wonderful paintings to choose from and so many very talented artists!

Day Twentyseven

Today we were in the computer suite doing tessellations and I came up with some stunning designs! Very happy.

Then we began our animation class, which consisted of a lot of research on youtube watching really cool videos. Animations with post-it notes and rubix cubes and graffiti. Stunning stuff!

Day Twentysix

So tired... So very tired...
This morning we went round the group explaining our ideas for the 3D project and getting feedback from our peers. It was a long and arduous morning that seemed to go on forever. Rachael was trying to stay out of it but if she hadn't leapt in with ideas and thoughts I think we may have sat in silence and shrugged a lot. As it is my idea has had a slight change to it as I had focused so much on the scrapbook and hadn't realised I wasn't fulfilling the actual '3D Mixed Media' part of the project. So now I have a slightly different kind of whodunit, based loosely on Cludeo meets CSI.
At 12 o'clock a few of us departed the seminar and went to a quick lunch hour class about writing an essay where we were surrounded by idiot teenagers who didn't want to come to the next class as it was on a day they weren't in (Lisa was visibly fuming so I decided to comment on the fact that we weren't in on that day but were coming in nevertheless, which went down really well) and one of the tutors came up to us and said 'Ooh, I've never seen an Access student before.' Yeah, cos were freakshows that need to be pointed at, maybe you'd like to poke me to make sure I'm real.
Then back to class for life drawing. It was my belief that I was reasonably good at life drawing, and maybe once upon a time I was, but this is no longer that time and the crap I'm coming out with is making me wish I could end it all. However, I managed to produce some okish work today, if not as much as I would like.

Day Twentyfive

Today we were given a piece of brown paper, which we taped down. Then we were asked to choose a paint, choose a stamp, and fill the brown paper with rows and rows of prints. Then wash the brush and the stamp and start again with a different colour and a different stamp. It was long winded, and a little boring, like a production line, but in the end it was worth it. I wish we had a radio or stereo to listen to, but with the variety of people on the course we would never be able to choose what to listen to... Although a healthy conversation about Rob Zombie Vs White Zombie was sufficient to have me humming Dragula for the rest of the day.

We also scanned in our now unwrapped and dyed pieces of cloth into the computer as we are going to be making digital patterns from them in our own time, unfortunately they are currently too big and in a format Blogger is unable to support so I will have to upload those later.

Day Twentyfour

Photography and Animation today, excited, I've wanted to do some animation for a while but had no idea where to start, now is my chance.
The first half of today was actually a continuation of Mondays pattern design. I started doing tesselations, lots of them, and a few turned out alright. I'm already beginning to think about what they could be used for, carpets, furniture, wallpaper, material, etc. Unfortunately all my files are WAY too big to upload at the moment and I need to go make them smaller before I can showcase them... Sorry about that!

In the afternoon it was animation and we were asked to pair up and grab a few things from the box and then take lots of photos of them moving around.

We chose a squid and  a lobster and had them moving towards each other from opposite ends of the table until they met in the middle and all hell ensued, it was bloody good fun. The final video will be uploaded to youtube reasonably soon and I will add the link here.
After this we learnt how to make shapes move using photoshop, and I made my triangle have an argument with the circle and muscle in on it's territory... I think I even gave them voices in my head... All in all a good day, and a good week, now I'm shattered.

Day Twentythree

Another 3D project, after the last one I was kinda shitting a brick. What the hell was I going to do with this one? Well it turns out I didn't need to worry too much on this point. We were told the different types of sculpture we could do, from land art where you find some stones and pile them up on top of each other, to deconstruction/reconstruction where you tear something apart and remake it anew. Many, many options. We were told we could go to a charity shop and look around, find a few things we liked and use them, so I thought about what I had at home and what I could do with what I had. I eventually decided on the teddy bears we have sitting on a canvas chest of drawers. The canvas is black and our bedroom is deliberately kept dark, so I thought about emptying the clothes onto the bed and having the teddy's hide and poke their heads out.  Of course my mind did not stop there, the teddy's had an argument and one of them was found on the floor, bleeding, murdered! Who had done such a thing? So I imagined doing the whole project like a crime scene whodunit. My partner, however, refused to let me kill one of our own teddy's and insisted that if we were to kill one we had to go to a charity shop and buy him first. Well, we came across the cutest little murder victims and they were only 45p each, so it kinda turned into a serial killing.

 Then we found the police officer who will be the first responder to the crime scene when their bodies are found. The chap next to him was also very cute and my partner thins he would be a good killer, but I think that's a bit obvious. We shall find out soon enough who the 'real' killer is when the investigation is over.

I was planning on the final piece being their bodies buried in the ground, and the scrapbook could be the crime scene report. I'll let you know how it ends.

Day Twentytwo

New project. 2D Pattern Design.

At first I was thinking how the hell am I supposed to make a repeating pattern? They're all so complicated. Turn's out that's not necessarily true. After spending about an hour trying to come up with a few design ideas I could work on later we were given a fat black pen and told to just do a doodle.

Then we had to cut the page into four even pieces and rearrange them.

Then add another doodle in the middle, I chose to mirror the main image.

Then we had to duplicate the pattern.

And so on...this time adding an extra element, I chose to mirror the image again and make it lighter.

Finally we were to add colour. The first simply has a blue background, but the second I spent more time on and tried to give it the British Flag colours.

I am very proud of myself. We will be doing a number of different types of pattern design during this project. This is the hand drawn one, next week I will have photos of the tie-dye patterns we started making today, and homework tonight is to start on the tessellation pattern design, so best get cracking.

Please ask before using any of the images shown here, thank you.

Day Nineteen, Twenty and Twentyone

Assessment week.

Some were surprised they did better than they had hoped possible, some were happy they didn't fail, some understood and realised why they got the low score they did. It has been an eye-opener, this course is not a walk over, it's bloody hard!!

Well done to all who passed successfully, and good luck to all who are re-submitting.