Friday 8.10.10

Lecture - Andrew Currie, ‘Kinetic Scultor’

Separate things coming together through movement, not necessarily controlling it, he used found objects.

Simplistic, used dust sheets to give an illusion of space. Interactive work.

Residencies are when you live in a gallery, exciting!

I really liked Andrew’s work, the way it was made from found objects and could be funny and thoughtful at the same time, the way he almost created a world using ‘rubbish’. I found him really inspiring and easy-going, he didn’t take his work too seriously.

Lecture - Universal Jewellery

Binding human culture together, it was the ‘first artform’ apparently. Used for identification (signet rings), protection (crucifix, amulets, grizzly bear claw), Status, reverence, rememberance.

I really didn’t find this lecture helpful at all. I thought her work was nice, but not really relevant to me.

Thursday 7.10.10

Colour Induction

In preparation for today we drew 4 simple line drawings of a still life, with around 25 block areas, and made a colour wheel, mixing the primary colours into the secondary ones, and also mixing a black.

We were made to paint new colour wheels using the 4 printing colours, CYMK, instead or more primary colours. We found them to be brighter and the secondary colours less muddy.

We then painted each of our drawings in the following ways, attempting to create space and depth:

1.     Grey scale - different shades of grey to give depth

2.     Colour - warm and cold colours to give depth. Also play with light and dark. I found that warm comes forward and cold moves backwards, and that light comes forward and dark recedes

3.     Complimentary colours - we used different shades complimentary colours to create depth

4.     Texture - we used a mix of different methods to create the illusion of depth

To be honest, I felt like I wasn’t being challenged at all today, I feel like I haven’t learned anything at all, that I didn’t already know innately. These are things that people with artistic and creative talent know already, without even having to say it, and everyone I talked to was bored and confused as to why we were making colour wheels.

Wednesday 6.10.10

Lecture – Pictorial space, perspective & the illusion of depth

When we scan across the surface of an image, we are ‘reading’. Ways to create depth:

Colour

Warm colours project, cool colours recede. Purity and shade are also factors.

Light

In real life, we rely heavily on the effects of light to recognize objects, understand form and physically navigate our living environment.

Focus

The clarity and sharpness of an image make a difference. Sharp points come forward, blurred areas go back.

Figuration

Recognisable objects have their own spatial cues, so an artist can create a sense of depth by strategically placing an object on a surface. Photography is especially good to play with size and placement.

Scale

If objects vary in size, or change from real-life comparative sizes, we read the space differently. We see things as ‘closer’. If the artist plays with space, reading depth becomes complex. Ancient Egyptian art used hieratic scale, which is scale in terms of importance, eg. servants appearing smaller than masters

Overlap

When parts of an image overlap the covered part looks further away. When overlapped objects are out of proportion, the artist breaks the rules and makes us question the world.

Egyptian paintings rely on overlap to depict space, with image and script describing narrative effects. They also selectively mix front and side views, which may seem strange in western art, but they are just using this to give information, as well as their use of hieratic scale. The gradual dominance of classical Greece narrative meant that flattened Egyptian art was replaced with naturalistic, realistic, observational art as society became more secular.

Hellenistic art used overlap, and a mix of hieratic and rudimentary perspective. There was a sense of freedom and exploration that was not exclusive to the rich.

Western perspective was unified in C₁₄ or C₁₅ in Italy, during the Renaissance but was also evident in Hellenistic art.

I found this lecture informative and interesting, and it gave me a lot if information to use and research, one of the best lectures yet!

Tuesday 5.10.10

Today we had inductions to ready us for the induction days ahead.

Monday 4.10.10

Colour Objects. We had to bring in 12 objects that were flat colour, 1 black, 1 white, 7 natural and 3 manmade. We spent the first half of the day arranging them first in order of colour (in a rainbow) and then in various other ways including size, complimentary colours and alphabetically.

Sometimes we found it difficult to distinguish the boundaries between different colours, and found some people see colours in different ways. Shiny and matt objects were hard to place too.

When it came to sorting alphabetically, we found it hard to name some objects and fought over the classification.

In the afternoon, we did square format drawings of 10 objects we had picked, a plan view, a side view, an oblique view and one drawing of the objects set up proportionally so they all look the same size.

I enjoyed this day to a certain extent, the classification allowed me to take some nice photos, especially when we put complimentary objects together, their colours really ‘popped’. The afternoon was a bit boring for me, I really wanted to photograph the objects rather than draw them. I do feel I have a better understanding of colour after today.

Week 3 Review

Friday 1.10.10

Lecture - Careers & UCAS
After foundation, what next? My plan at the moment is to study some more. I really want to do a degree in Sustainable Product Design at Brighton, or maybe Design & Innovation at Ravensbourne, that's been my plan for a while now. I'm actually beginning to think about staying in Falmouth. I thought it might be too small for me, but I find I can work hard here, and I feel settled and rested, and at home. I'm also beginning to be swayed by photography, although I know I can always keep it as something I do in my spare time.
60% of graduate job vacancies do not specify the degree discipline. Phew. I have to think about the course specifically, as well as the place I want to study. Some courses are very theory-based, some very practical. What is right for me? There's a lot of variation between design courses.
UCAS - I should really start as soon as possible. The deadline is January 15th. Also be honest about deferring, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I am certainly thinking about another gap year.

Buzzword: foundationfalmouth

Personal statement writing scares me a bit. University of Kent careers page has a good section on writing it.

We also had a lecture on Animation from the Digital Animation tutor. He filled us in on the people involved in the production of a digital animation

Pre-production

Character Design

Background Artist

Storyboard Artist

Production Design

Production

Animation

Photography

Post-production

Editing

Sound Design

Good skills for animation:

Creative Ideas

Passion

Drawing/design skills

Organisational skills

Good teamwork

Thursday 30.9.10

Catch up: History drawing – reflective, natural & manmade object – just many different drawings

(I've been ill this week!)

Wednesday 29.9.10

Lecture – What is a Line?

With observational drawings, lines can represent many things, edges, patterns, outlines, texture, contours etc.

Why do we see the world in line?

Whilst there aren’t outlines in the real world, we interpret the point where two lines meet as a line.

Practical considerations:

Pencils & brushes move in any direction

Nib pens are better in one direction

Pencils, pens and brushes can vary in thickness, but fineliners can’t.

Take all these into consideration when drawing, depending on how you want to portray the subject.

Graphite pencils have only been around for about 500 years, before that metalpoint drawings were made using various metal wires as drawing implements. The most versatile was silver wire and the drawings are referred to as silverpoint. With these, small deposits of silver are left on a prepared sheet. Charcoal and chalk were used before graphite to make fine, detailed line drawing.

Line quality refers to the visual variations and graphic idiosyncrasies a line possesses.

‘Taking a line for a walk’ – Paul Klee. Very unhurried… Lines are traces of an activity.

‘Locking my hand to my eye’ – Turner describing the act of drawing.

Some lines need to be accurate, for plans and designs, architecture and product/industrial design plans need to be read accurately.

Speculative lines are done without rubbing out and form part of the drawing.

Dark or heavy lines look nearer, whereas light or thin lines look further away. Lines can be used to create tone as cross-hatching.

Research: Steven Braund, John Raynes, Lewis Campbell, George Stubbs, Raymond Sheppard, John Farleigh, Lucy Kemp-Welch, Honore Daumier, Ronald Searle, Dave McKean, Jacob Kenier, Henry Moore, John Sloane, Shelby Shackleford, Peggy Bacon, Martin Ramirez, Mauria Lendak, James E Allen, Angela Barrett, Hugh Cowling, Tim Ingold, Richard Long, Yuko Nishimuro, Raymond Briggs, Andy Goldsworthy, Sophia Vlazaki.

Tuesday 28.9.10

Catch up: Paper sculptures from previous drawing

Monday 27.9.10

I found this morning’s lecture on Animation really interesting. Andy Wyatt is the programme leader of the Digital Animation course at Falmouth, and has been working in the industry for 20 years, doing stuff for the BBC and as a writer.

Animation is basically an optical illusion, the illusion of movement created by the frame by frame movement of an image, caused by a phenomenon called persistence of vision.

2D drawn animation – Frames drawn by hand and photographed, this is liberating as it is pure movement, and doesn’t have to have characters or tell a story

2D cel animation – The background stays the same and things in the foreground move around

Cut-out animation – Paper is cut out and moved for each frame

Stop-motion animation – uses 3D objects and photographs them for each frame

Pixilation – real-life situations photographed frame-by-frame, it’s named after a Victorian photographer who pretended he could film pixies

3D CGI – Computer-generated frames

Other – Sand on a glass plate, paint on glass, scratching onto film negatives, time lapse, mixed mediums.

We then started our own animation, with a self portrait morphing in any way we wanted to an object of our choice, into the next person’s self portrait, drawing around 40 frames to make a 5-second animation, so that the all link in together.

Research: the Phenakistoscope (1872), the Zoetrope (1867), Erica Russell (Feet of Song), Jan Svankmajer, Blu (graffiti artist, Muto), Smith & Faulkes

Week 2 Review

Friday 24.9.10

Lecture notes:
The first guest lecturer was Alex Schady, a ‘fine artist’ who works in various media, including film. His work really didn’t inspire me at all, it seemed a little gimmicky and clichéd, however his advice was useful. He said it’s good to mess around with different techniques, things that aren’t necessarily perceived as art but become interesting to him and then progress; that showing your work in a gallery or elsewhere is also part of the creative process, so should be done in exactly the way you want, depending on how you want your piece shown; That most artists have to have a series of crappy jobs that supply the money needed to create their art. He had set up a studio space called Five Years (he said it was useful to know how to build walls, to set up the studio!) and does collaborative work by sending instructions to create a piece to a person in another country, and receive instructions from them, and that way they can interpret it in their own way, and brings chance into your work, things that you might not have thought of.

Oliver West gave me a new way of thinking and working, by telling us to fold an A4 sheet into credit card sized boxes, and then use each one for a small drawing, to record ideas. This breaks down a big, scary sheet of paper into little, easy-to-manage pieces, which is really working for me as I find it difficult to sketch my ideas. He also used this technique to help young offenders and children with severe learning difficulties, which I thought was lovely and very worthwhile.

Thursday 23.9.10

We went to Gwithian beach for the day to make sand sculptures, which was pretty fun to be honest…  The brief was to take a famous piece of art and transfer it onto the beach so it could be seen in proportion from the cliffs… Not an easy task as we discovered.

My group chose the intimidating print of the wrestler Andre the Giant with the word OBEY below, by street-artist Shepard Fairey.

The weather was pretty bad at the start of the day, and it was my job (since I had my camera) to stand on top of the cliff and relay instructions to my group below (lucky my phone is on contract) which was surprisingly difficult. Not only did it take a long time to get the proportions right, taking into account foreshortening, but it was pretty wet and miserable with the wind! I found I had to describe the picture in how many steps they needed to take, and once again the measured drawing of this week helped me to work out dimensions and proportions and transfer them onto the sandy canvas.

Well as soon as we’d spent too long drawing out the outlines, we had to rake all the sand inside them, which took quite a long time, with people taking breaks to go for a swim occasionally, as the weather got better and better into the afternoon.

I found this project really enjoyable, and it reinforced in me a desire to explore collaborative work, as everyone in my group seemed to slot into their natural roles, as leaders or otherwise. I’d love to work large-scale with a group again, as everyone brings something of themselves to the piece. I also found I really enjoyed working in and with the natural environment, and it was a bittersweet moment when we watched the tide come in and wash away our day’s work.

Some more of the day:

Wednesday 22.9.10

This morning's lecture was about drawing.

‘To draw’ can mean many, many things, including ‘to pull or cause to move towards’ and ‘to attract something’.

The word ‘drawing’ as a noun means ‘Making marks on a surface that express or represent an idea’. This could also mean writing I guess, but drawing is the only universal language. Even very young children can pick it up.

The lecture made me see how and why many adults draw hesitantly and without confidence, and why few of us draw outside of education or a specific profession, because when we grow up, drawing becomes less about expressing an inner world, and more about recording the outside world accurately, which then becomes competitive, so many people stop drawing rather than ‘fail’ at it.

I also thought more about photography, how it developed from drawing as we wanted faster and easier ways to record the world around us, and that in a pre-photographic world, drawing was much more important.

‘I spent my entire life trying to draw like a child’ - Picasso

Artists to research: Paul Noble, Julie Merehtu, Sara Simlett, Paul Nash, Christopher Nerinson, Giorgio Morandi, Richard Rogers, Frank Gehry, Muirhead Bone, Nicola Hicks

In the afternoon I had my first life drawing session, which actually went really well. I’ve done a little life drawing before in a drawing course I took, and really enjoyed it. It’s the only drawing I’ve ever really enjoyed and been able to get into. We had a female model that I found really interesting to draw, and the measured drawing of the past few days really helped me to get the proportions of her body correct. I’m looking forward to the next session.

Tuesday 21.9.10

More measured drawing, this time a 5-hour wide-angle drawing of everything from eye-level down to our feet.

Distortion creeps into the drawing naturally as you look at things from a different angle. The eye-level line went at the top of the page, and we established a pre-existing vertical line in the room to extend all the way down to our feet. Obviously, as the thing you are drawing gets closer to you, it gets measured and therefore drawn bigger.

I had some trouble with the concept; it was hard for a lot of us to get our heads around, but eventually I understood enough to get measurements right and get something down on the paper. I think I’ll finish this drawing at some point, because it’s a new technique I would never have thought of trying, and even if it doesn’t go well, It’s still a different way of looking at the world, and could be refreshing.

Again, I also found it hard to concentrate and keep myself motivated on such a long drawing. I had to take frequent breaks and come back to the drawing, trying to look at it differently. The proportional work will be useful for me as I move into technical design drawings.

Monday 20.9.10

Monday was the start of measured drawing, where a unit of measurement is used to find the right proportions for the rest of the drawing, usually using a pencil held at arms length to measure (with one eye shut). We also used frames made from cardboard to help see the area we were drawing.

I found this pretty horrible but persevered with it and definitely saw improvements in my awareness of proportion and space, and the measuring improved my drawing. I talked with one of the tutors about my concerns with my drawing skills, and that put my mind at ease, he didn’t think my drawings were so bad, and added that it didn’t matter anyway, that I would obviously achieve more in my areas of expertise and enjoyment.

The afternoon was a long (2-3 hour) measured drawing of an area of the studio – or outside of it – that I found interesting. I didn’t really get far in it, I tend to lose concentration on drawings after about 10-20 minutes, and I’d also foolishly chosen a pretty difficult outside area to draw.
I found the frame useful as it helped to pick out the exact area of a drawing and therefore visualize a grid inside the frame to work from. I expect I’ll use both techniques again to improve my drawings.

Week 1 Review

This week is a bit of a strange one. On one hand there isn’t a lot to ‘sum up’ since I haven’t produced a lot of work, or done very much studying, but on the other hand I’ve been introduced to some new ways of thinking and been immersed in a new world of art and design, as well as met a whole new group of people and moved away from my home to an entirely different way of life…

One big thing I’ve learned this week is that it actually doesn’t matter at all that I don’t think I can draw. I think it’ll come with time as I discover new techniques and find out what type of drawing interests me, or maybe not. Things like gestalt took the stress out of drawing and made it kind of fun again, which is a good step for me. I also learned that for a drawing to be considered ‘good’ it doesn’t have to be a perfect representation of what is in front of you, like all of art, it’s subjective and personal. Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t had setbacks, I still lack confidence when drawing and often second-guess myself and put my work down.

I find I’ve settled in well in Falmouth itself, I feel happy and prepared to work hard and explore my creativity in such a beautiful and inspirational place. I finally feel motivated and like my life is going in the direction I’ve always wanted it to.

Friday 17.9.10

So I enjoyed the first of the series of Friday lectures today. On Friday mornings the university brings in two artists and designers (usually Falmouth alumni) to give us hour-long lectures on various topics (mostly their work and how they got there, to give us inspiration, I guess)

Alison Sharkey talked about her life as a 'fine artist' and what that entailed. She morphed from a painter to an installation artist to working collaboratively with other artists, and gave advice about sending work into competitions and requesting grants, and about how to make money on the side to support working in a studio (artists rarely make enough money from selling work to support themselves)

The talk was interesting, it helped that she gave advice about finding studio space, but ultimately of little use to me as I don't think I'll ever want to refer to myself as a fine artist in a career sense, but I do enjoy collaborative work and got some good advice on how to go about finding people to collaborate with!

I'll research Artquest competitions and AXIS (THE online resource for contemporary art, apparently!)

Thursday 16.9.10

We had to make small sculptures to prepare for today, made from different textural objects stuck together, and were told not to show them to anyone.

I teamed up with Theo and we had to make a series of drawings of one another's objects, firstly drawing only from his description of the sculpture:

And then from feeling it behind my back, then by looking at only the object and drawing without looking at the paper:

Lastly an observational drawing attempting to get the correct proportions:

In the afternoon we drew our own sculptures in different ways including continuous line drawing, using symbols to replace line quality and tonal surface drawing. I really enjoyed the description drawing and the drawing from feeling, it made me much more aware of how language and senses affect out perception of something. I also liked the blind drawing, I've done a lot of that before and it's definitely a good way to boost my confidence with drawing, which I often lack. I'll use it again and also use variations on the idea, like drawing subjects upside-down etc.

The afternoon didn't go so well for me, I wasn't sure about drawing my own object, which was pretty difficult, and as my confidence dipped again I felt a little disillusioned. I need to practice drawing a lot more to learn all the techniques - it can be learnt after all. I understand that it's a relevant exercise, learning all the different parts of drawing separately so that eventually they can be applied together, but drawing really doesn't interest or excite me so I find it hard to motivate myself. I liked the symbol work, I think it could inform some interesting illustration or graphics work, I'll research Chuck Close, who does massive portraits using symbols. I'm very interested in portraiture.