Dave & Joe! Word and Image

This is Dave and his Nan.. it’s a bit rough round the edges

A Seal

I was watching Life, and had an urge to draw a seal. I love ink

DRAWING – Analyse

So, we have been doing two projects at the moment, one is Word & Image and one is the third drawing project of the year which is called analysis. In this drawing brief:

we need to find pictures which relate to five out of seven of these

So for ‘A’ simulating reality picture, I found a great artist called Samantha Wall, who is from South Korea originally and now lives and works in Portland, OR. As you will see below she creates images of grappling women, showing strong harsh light and immense detail in the fighting figures. I chose her work as in each piece she captures movement and strength in great realistic detail and in turn you can feel the struggle between the various women.

[Samanthawall.com]

her pictures aren't supposed to be highly sexualised, they're supposed to be just about these two women and their struggle between love and hate

She focuses detail on particular areas of the body, especially hands and muscles, trying to convey that they’re are in conflict and showing strength and also weakness and it seem who can also see a domination in each of the images, reflecting a relationship between them. Historically, aggression and fighting had mainly been reserved for men and images depicting male violence often reveal subtle sexuality. Women as aggressors are usually seen as somewhat of a spectacle geared towards male viewers and this is highly sexualised. Her drawings are women fighting with each other but not for an audience, they are revealing an emotional bond that blurs the boundary between love and hate. The fighters in her drawings don’t deny the sexuality of their battle; they simpley do not care if anyone is watching it.

here is one of her images which is one of few that actually focus on facial expression

another, I like how the shadow is in blue not black, this is a technic also used by monet in his paintings

last one, for good measure, some really nicely drawn feet, very inspiring if i'm goning to carry on down my anatomy route

It seems she must know a lot about anatomy and how the body works. Especially how to cature it in such a bold way, neat and precise also. I plan to look more into this as I’ve never really explored the anatomy before, and i think it would help my drawing skills and give my work a strong platform, not to mention letting me learn a little along the way about the body, which is always good. Something I enjoy a lot

This next one was an obvious choice. The keyword being ‘manipulate’ lead me to choose straight an MC Escher piece. Yes, I know, but in actual fact his work is amazing and technical, not to mention interesting. It’s jsut you see his work so much that you begin to tire of seeing it, that’s me anyway.

This is called Waterfall by MC Escher, you don't actually see the manipulation it this image until your eyes start to move through it

Even though I said that I tire of seeing his work, I cannot deny it’s brilliance can I. It’d be quite a challenge to create one of my own Escher’s, don’t think I’d have that much patience to be honest, but it’s be a great project for someone a little more persistent.

Okay, keyword for letter ‘C’ is ‘embodies’, which lead to think about art therapy and paint being pushed about on a surface. This took me to a website which displayed images from people who had created these pieces to basically release some steam and be a little creative.

This piece is actually called embodiment

I also came accross this from another site by a young illustrator called Jenny Meehan, who uses quick movements and fast srokes to capture her figures, which I believe shows her working method and drawing process.

you can see artists actions are visible

You can see in these, that they almost look 3D don't they, like a bones

The next one ‘D’ is all about explaining a structure or a concept, so I got onto illustrationmundo.com and found an illustrator called James Provost of Jamesprovost.com who had done this illustration of a cube which could plan a city and make it a better using this magic cube concept.

"Twist, turn (or peel and stick) your way to a better city"

My project to far….. I have just started part 2, by researching a bit about anatomy and having a go at drawing some human figures myself. I reckon i’m going to do some large scale studies of the human figure, probably women.

PRINT MAKING

So I forgot to catch up on the exploring media project over the hols, so am trying miserably to make up for it by actually working quite hard on this. The outcome will be a book of some sort, maybe a lino covered book, hmmm we were talking about this today, whilst lino cutting, probably why I have so many injuries…

fish mono printing

The first workshop was basically just mono printing which I’ve done before and is one of the most simplest ways of print making. If I remember correctly this was subtractive mono printing, where you remove the ink to create the picture, usually with a pencil or blunt object. It’s a nice effect, lots of playing and experimenting, which I enjoy

the inks, laid out ready for application

this press is around a hundred years old, made from cast iron I believe

my first attempt

That was my first attempt… this one went wrong, there was far too much ink on the paper that my little fishy was lost, that said my little fishy looks much more realistic, like the sun light shining through the deep blue water onto it’s reflective scales! This trial and error lark is all luck to me.

This is lino cutting

This is where you cut lino, cover it in ink and print it on some paper… in nut shell.

playing

Some doodling and sketching and ideas generating… still haven’t come to any sort of solid idea. I was thinking maybe a phonetic alphabet or an associative alphabet or just making my own type face or just a series of pretty letters …we’ll see

my first lino print!

Loved cutting lino, very therapeutic gauging out chunks of plastic with a sharp object. Not so pleased with my poor poor injured fingers!!! seriously, they’re dangerous those little tools… anyway the print above is based on the alphabet and the letter ‘A’.

yay second. a bush baby

This is, what turned out to be, a very cute bush baby. Was based on the letter ‘B’ but as silly as I am I cut out the ‘b’ backwards… clever omi. Anyway that was my day, and that was my print making project, thus far!

Rudolph Laban’s 8 basic efforts

This is Laban's graph

Rudolph Laban is a German kinsiologist and dance educator who analysed the movements of workers and dancers in order to catergorise them in terms of effort-shape, a system still used in choreography today.

Laban is basically saying that all movement requires an effort of some kind, in relationship to weight and time and a shape in space. Anyway so our project 2 part one is to explore these 8 efforts and create an abstract piece using a chosen amount of these efforts combined into one expressionate outcome. But first we have to explore each effort individually…

Effort one: Slash

Effort two: Dab

Effort three: Flick

Effort Four: Thrust

Effort Five: Glide

Effort Six: Press

Effort Seven: Wring

Effort Eight: Float

So these are all the marks I made using these different efforts. This activity is just to apply Laban’s movement theory to drawing and mark making, and to see what we can produce with these restrictions. That’s what I think anyway. This movement stuff is actually quite interesting the more I’ve read into it, and it was especially fun playing with paint, I must say, and getting messy.

Drawing Project

Been in uni today, attempted to finish this project in around the four hours I had in the studio. Aaaaand I think I did rather well, despite the small amount of time.

So I had to create 12 drawings, 4 drawings of a complex object, 4 drawings of a clothed human figure and then combined object and human, all very exciting. Anyway, see what you think…

Larger pencil sketch of fossil

This is just a larger version of the previous ones, as they were purely for practice

A distorted view of the fossil through a cloudy washing up bottle, hence the blurredness

From a strange angle

Thing is, this object doesn’t really have any strange angles, as most of the angles look pretty strange to me anyway, so I just chose the part with the crack in it.

An expression of the rock

Here I just drew what I felt when I touched the fossil, based on a workshop we did before christmas, and I basically explored the kinds of textures it had which I suppose painted my picture for me. I like doing this.

Amber, in the form of an observational drawing

Just a 3/4 view of a clothed human figure. Amber’s skinny frame is funny to draw, as she is rather reminiscent of a skeleton

Amber at an unusual angle

Quick ink sketch of Amber from above, found it hard to get it to look like her, but not to worry ey.

Distorted Amber

As you can see, if you know Amber, it looks nothing like her. That’s because she is distorted somewhat by Photo Booth.

A made up picture of Amber made from imagination showing a mood

So this one wasn’t observational, it was purely from memory, and it shows!

Anyway, this is all I have now, the final four are still in progress, but are at least started. It’s been kind of nice just drawing stuff. It’s good to practice basic drawing skills, to top up your knowledge now and agian. It’s also been nice to have a challenge, like the fossil, I enjoyed drawing it more because it was harder to get down on to paper.

Heima

Finally watched it. Not only does it make me wanna visit iceland, it has fueled my love for film and photography even more, some of the shots were breath taking, so beautiful. The best live DVD i’ve seen in a long while.

Well hello

So i’ve finally started a blog. This is my first blog, so i’m still learning the ropes, I’ll get the hang of this in no time i’m sure. In the mean time…

This is a fossil and is a few million years old

I was lucky enough to obtain this really really interesting object for a small drawing project I’m doing at the moment. The brief is to draw a series of four A1 sheets of partly observational drawing and partly imaginative, and in some cases, combined. We are told to choose a complex object, the brief giving examples of drawing things like washing machines, hoovers etc , which didn’t get me excited, as you can imagine. So a fellow colleague of mine at work, offered to lend me his fossil. I was quite interested, as he is a geologist in the making and gets rather excited about rocks, so I was fueled by his enthusiasm to take up his offer.

Another view of my new shellfish-esque friend

To me and youit appears to be just a rock. But I’m assured by my nearly certified geologist friend that it’s not and it is in fact a fossil, and it was once a living thing a good few million years ago. Which I actually find quite amazing. Which makes drawing this incredibly difficult object significantly more appealing. Much better than a washing machine don’t you think.

A birds-eye snap, I really do like this little piece of history

My first attempt

a comparison between rock and drawing

So I’m not used to this at all, it’s all new territory, drawing such detailed objects such as rocks. I enjoyed doing it nonetheless.

Pencil sketches

after more scribbling and sketching, I think to myself ‘wow, i’m enjoying drawing rocks’, a strange notion I know. But I really have enjoyed it, that’s probably why it’s on my blog. I would go into what this particular fossil is and actually how old it is but I can’t, as of yet, but I will as soon as I get the message I’ve requested from my colleague yet explaining the facts about this wonderful little creature.

another quick drawing

Finding the colours was reeeeally hard! The texture and patterns and colours on the surface were so varied and detailed, it’d probably be best if i did one on a larger scale, I will need to get myself into uni tomorrow for this I think. So until then…