Finished my helmets!!

I'm so pleased with how these turned out! They took a lot longer than I originally thought they would and I think my sketchbook may have been left a little because of that but I still really happy with the result.

Making, making, making!

I've decided to go with the making the war helmets idea! However this proved trickier than I thought first I thought about filled the plastic helmet that I had with plaster but then they wouldn't be hollow and I'd have to hollow them out and that same think a lot of work for not very much reward. So I went with paper mâché.

What I did was use the plastic helmet as a mould and create 3 helmets. 

However I then discovered that they were pretty flimsy so I wanted to make the sturdier. I decided to cover them in mod roc to help them have a bit more shape and stop them for collapsing in on themselves. 

I'm going to leave them overnight and hopefully I'll be able to paint them soon!

Drawing sketchbook

Been quite enjoying sketching in my drawing sketchbook. Think I've came up with some good ideas and what I'm going to do for my final.

Having an influence

Think my adopting a fruit have had an influence on my little sister, as she has decided she now has a pet orange. She dresses him up, his name changes quite often which is quite confusing and she like to draw expressions on his little face. I suppose artist want to have an influence and at sorta achieving that! Start small as they say, soon I will have half my family with baby fruits! Mwahahahahaha! All a part of my master plan. 

BAD1 BLOGGER!!

My class name (BAD1) might have been a sign of my blogging abilities! I know I should've been blogging a lot especially since I've started new briefs but I have been crazy busy (as have everyone) and what with hand in dates, new briefs, Christmas coming up I haven't found the time to blog as much as I would've liked. However one of my New Years resolution is to blog more! This should mostly be achieved through better time management which is a personal goal of mine, as I think it not a matter of doing too much it's just fitting it all in.

A trip down memory lane!

I went back to my old school today to collect my advanced higher work and it was really nice to see all my old teachers and friends. Something that really struck me was when I was gathering up all my work and I realised how different it is from the work that I'm doing now! I feel like I've changed my style quite a bit I still really love the work that I created but it's interesting to try out new things and I'm curious as where my work will end up as it is already so different from what I thought it would turn out like.

Because who doesn't love a casual selfie with your work? 

Week beginning the 28th (Scary Week)

This week was not only scary because it was Halloween but because this was our assessment week. I was really nervous about it and spent most of the week stressing out. On Monday we had a mid module assessment type thing with Paul, I quite liked they way this ran because we were in some groups rather than on our own which I think would have been more intimidating. It also meant we could bounce ideas of each other and see where everyone else was struggling, it seemed most of us were having problems with our time management so we were able to talk about that and how to resolve it which I think helped me a lot. It also gave us a chance to talk about what we think of the course and our coursework I'm enjoying this course and I think all the different classes are helping me to explore more options that I hadn't previously thought about. For drawing we were continuing with life drawing which good, we were looking at movement which was really interesting and I liked the way that my drawings turned out. We also got our stuff back from the assessment and were told that our drawings were good but we needed to work on our sketchbooks so that's what we will be doing next week instead of life drawing. I'm glad my drawings are good and I knew myself that my sketchbook would need work, haven't not worked in sketchbooks before it was kinda difficulty for me at the start of the year because I have a sketchbook for almost every class but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it and hopefully I'll keep on improving.

Tuesday was the mega scary day because we had our hand in for the fruit project. However first we had 3D which I think helped to calm my nerves and stopped us all from stressing out too much. We were making more plaster sculptures. My classmate Amy and I made clay wall moulds and then mixed up the plaster together, we ended up making too much so helped other people with their mould but I think that was just down to lack of experience I think the more we work on it the better we will become at being able to know how much plaster is enough. Thankfully Dot (our lecturer) gave us her lesson to work on our fruit stuff. This have us a chance to stick in a few final things, add more annotations and just make sure we were happy with what we had done. However ad lunch drew in and the deadline got closer people started to stress a little bit again (myself included I've never really dealt with stress well). When lunch was over we actually didn't hand out stuff in right way, instead we all sat together with the lecturer, Catherine, and talk about our fruits. Mew talked about the concept of our fruit: what it did, where it grew, who ate it and so on. It was really interesting to hear what everyone else had came up with and what they had created in the end. I'm too sure what kind of grade I'll get but I tried my best and I was quite happy with what I handed in.

Thursday, we aren't usually in on a Thursday but Amy, Scott, Jack and I all came in to do some extra work for our 2D and 3D sketchbooks. We actually got quite a bit done, I worked on my contextual stuff (artist research) and also started curving some of my plaster creations. It was a good day and it was nice that we worked together and helped each other. Also it was Halloween so it was quite cool to see people dressed up. I then spent the rest of the night taking my sisters out trick or treating and then answering the door to different children. We had over 50 children at our door!

Friday this week we continued with looking in

MURDER!!!

I'm a terrible person. I've killed him. I killed Jason. My own adopted Fruit and I killed him. I have my reasons! He was getting too much to bear! Actually that's a lie, I wanted to draw him and he looks more interesting on the inside. It was part of my research! You know what they say anything for art and all that.

Painting my fruit!

Scott, Amy and I all came in early to paint the clay models that we had made the week before. I decided to go with cold blue colours as it reflected the environment my fruit would be growing in and it also made it stand out as there isn't very many blue fruits that we know of.

Clay :)

Today I made my fruit! I went with clay because I felt that it would be easy to create the shape that I wanted.

Holiday!

We had this week off and so I just continued with my sketchbooks and made sure that I had all my PDP stuff up to date.

A New Addition

Our little family is growing! Today my Mum brought home another little baby! She is called Chantelle and she is a coconut. Her and Jason seem to be getting on really well and I hope that everything continues that way.

7th to the 13th of October

In our PDP lesson we discussed CREAM as a way to be a dedicated student, different ways of working and went over what our lecturers would be looking for in our own work and how we can achieve certain grades. After that we filled out a hand out on our long and short term goals. This was something I found quit difficult because I keep chopping and changing what I want to do with my life. The short term goals were simple pass my classes, finish this course, pass my ITC (cadet training) etc. I think I''l need to work on what I want to and work put how I'm going to achieve it. 
Drawing was a good lesson me and my class mate Amy left and worked out in the corridor which I think made a difference because I couldn't get as distracted because there was less people to talk to. I was working on making my work more abstract, I was adding more geometric shapes to the drawing and I really enjoyed the way that it was turning out. 


On Tuesday we got to use the vacuum former in our 3D workshop. I really enjoyed this, I had used this type of machine before but not for a while so it was good to use it again. I decided to go out side with some of my classmates as to get leaves and other natural objects to put in the vacuum former as I thought that would look interesting. Also sort of went along with my theme. I've decided to go with the industrial revolution in Scotland so I looking at contrasting things like built up areas like Glasgow and little country villages. Its a really interesting theme that I hope will allow me to explore a lot of different things. For Creative concepts we didn't have a lecturer for the first 2 hours, however contrary from what I thought we all got on quite well and worked quietly. I even helped Amy come up with a new idea! I was using her water colours and I had used a lot of water so she decided to flick the painty water on to her page as to create an interesting background, which contrasted really well with her sleek and polished drawings. I'm enjoying creating my own fruit have have several little ideas that I'm working on, so that I can whittle it down to the best idea before I make anything 3D. 

I wasn't in on Friday because I had to leave for my Cross Flags (infantry signals course) on Thursday. However I was told that in Contextual Studies they talked about taste and how things are viewed in our society. Also for Fridays 2D lesson they just continued on with research for the transformation.

Paper folding

One of the first 3D workshops that we did was for paper folding. I really enjoyed this, we got to learn some simple techniques that created some really interesting effects especially if you repeated the folds. This is something that I'm pretty sure I will use again in other projects.

30th of September to 6th of October.

This week started of a little bumpy for me. On Monday there was still road works and a lot of traffic this meant that I was late to my first class. However I got there in the end, and that was where I made this blog. The rest of the day went smoothly, in drawing I decided to leave the classroom to complete on of my sketches, this was quite a good decision as it meant I was own my work, so I was able to concentrate fully on what I was doing. I started drawing the corridor that I was sitting in but in order to make it a more interesting piece I started to abstract and simplify the shapes. You can still tell it's a corridor (I think) but it's hard to which one and what is in it. I really enjoy this class gave me sometime to think about what I wanted to achieve through my work.
On Tuesday we were meant to be in the workshop but sadly our lecturer wasn't in so instead a group of us took it upon ourselves to go do some more research in the library. I got a couple of interesting ideas of 3D objects I could try to make. Later, we had the creative concepts (fruit) this class I worked mostly on my own, try to work through the ideas that I had. It was a nice afternoon, a couple of us talked about how we are going to actually make our fruits: what materials, what tech quite, how. Which was fun as we were able to bounce ideas off of each other.
Wednesday and Thursday I was home, working through problems in my sketchbook. I was also research further into 3D sculpture as we had missed a week, I didn't want to have done no work. These two days we pretty chilled.
Friday started well (I got a lift in, so no bus!) we had a lecture from Nicholas Oddy (a guest lecturer from GSA) this was about branding, how it came to be, how it's changed, how it effects us. It was really intriguing, and was an interesting way of looking at something that is never really put much thought into. After words we had a group discussion about it which was fun but also gave me a chance to see how others felt about the subject and how it affected them. Later in the afternoon we were learning how to make felt, which was really enjoyable (but quite tough from all the rolling!) also I later discovered that I was allergic to the shop that we used to bind the fibres together (not too good) but it isn't that bad and it wouldn't stop me from doing it again! Maybe next I'll wear gloves!
Over the weekend I just continued with my sketchbook work, nothing too specific as I had set myself a clear task for the weekend. Although it started out a bit bumpy the week improved and I enjoyed it a lot especially Friday because is never done felt making before and I like to try new things :).

The Blogging Beginnings!

Ok, so I've to keep a blog of everything that I do for this course, simple enough however I will probably for forget :L. Any hoo, so I will quickly sum up my first month or so.
The very first week we mostly sat and listened at things were explained to us, what was expected of us, where things were (discovered that the college has amazing chips!).
Then after all that came the briefs at the minute we have 3 briefs: Transformation which is for 2D and 3D , Fruit for Creative Concepts and Negative Space for Drawing. They are all completely different which is a good thing I think, gives us more room to try new things and explore with I think is kind of the point in 1st year. For fruit we also had to adopt a fruit as our child, which is fairly odd but interesting none the less. We were eventually told that all the research that we were doing was because we would be designing our own fruit!
In 2D and 3D we have been learning a lot of different techniques: like how to make silk paper, paper folding, how to use the band saw (pretty scary), how to make felt. These were all really fun to do and something that I had never done before so it was good to try out new things.
For drawing we have been working with positive and negative space, so we were drawing different parts/areas of the college, which was interesting to do (also gave me a chance to wander and find out where things were!) and now we are taking the shapes and creating our own abstract area. This is really interesting and a new way at looking at things, taking ordinary things and turning them on there heads.
Another class we have is PDP which is good because it gives us a chance to build on ourselves, see where our strengths and weaknesses lay.
Also we have Contextual Studies, in this we get to have a board look at what art is, we are studying the 90s in this class. We have even had guest lectures for Glasgow School of Art which was a great opportunity and we have had some really intriguing discussions in this class.
I'm struggling to remember what I actually did oh well. I know that getting to know the class was better than I thought it would be and we all seem to get on really well.