The Wheel

We got the opportunity to use the wheel the other day which was well... an experience! I enjoyed it and would love to get the chance to practice some more using it and getting the technique right but I guess the first time is always tricky. Thankfully, Elaine gave us a step by step run through on it (and then when we still seemed unsure she gave another) so just when we felt a little more sure it was our turn. One of the hardest parts may have been mounting the wheel, along with centring the piece and keeping it steady, its takes a lot more muscle than you'd think!

Developing Ideas

From the first series of pieces we made in the beginning we had to select 1 piece to continue working with and so I chose this piece:

 

We then had to explore the potential of the form and develop it further. I decided to explore what the shape would look like upside down, with textures and various sizes;

 

Here is an image of those pieces I made by developing on my initial idea;

Ceramics!!

Last monday I began my two week journey of ceramics! First off we were given a brief some clay and an intriguing quote to work from. The aim was to make a few 3D pieces within half an hour, as good a way to kick off as any! So here are snaps of my first few:

 

These were one or two of my favourites;

 

 

And here is the one piece i decided to keep and work from;

Crumpeling Clay

 I wanted to use a different medium to portray my crumpled leaf veins pieces through. I wanted to experiment a bit with trying to get the right textures and effects so I started with the bag of clay that had been resting itself on my desk for the past few weeks. I put the techniques that I had learned from Elaine's 3D workshop to use and got started!

In the 3D workshop that I took with Elaine a few weeks ago we used a heavy duty grease proof paper to get a certain texture in the clay like this:

This was the kind of texture I was looking to achieve again, so starting off I rolled out my slabs of clay and began to texture but I noticed after using the one piece of grease proof paper the texture would not repeat again the paper became useless. To overcome this I did my crumpeling technique with some sheets of paper as I do to create my pieces like this:

And I discovered this was very effective in creating my desired pattern, and this is how it turned out:

Being happy with this I kept texturing slabs, being more and more daring making the slabs bigger each time! By the end I had about 5 slabs, so I picked up my courage and started doing the tricky bit... which was to make the slabs resemble crumpled up paper. After awhile (and a few ripped and pieced back together) slabs later this is what I had:

 

I'm quite happy with how the pieces turned out and hope I have time to get them fired before the Xmas Holliers!

 

Leaf Piece (Cabbagey)

 

I made this wall piece using the space behind my desk, I hope to turn it into a mini instillation experiment before going home for Christmas! I had been trying out different methods and colours and stuff with my crumpled paper for awhile and I wanted to turn it into something... bigger! (Macro even). I had all these loo roll holders hanging around (I sort of collect them, it drives everyone crazy 'coz I tend to give out if I find them in the bin :P hehe), lets face it when you're an art student you absolutely never know when things like this could come in handy! I used these loo roll holders as my main veins in my piece (if you look closely at the back of a leaf you'll notice how the bigger veins stick out but the littler ones you can only see) and I used my crumpled paper for the inbetween veins and made it BIG, its the size of the wall: (which ok, isn't so big but it's big enough)

I began by painting like 6 or 8 A1 sheets different greens and different speckles and stuff.. (really trying to get in touch with my inner 'nature').
















Then I used my hot glue gun to merge all the loo roll holders together and stuck them to the wall and all the paper pieces were brought into the equation.

It was difficult trying to get the paper to stay on the wall so unfortunately there was some hot glue involved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm happy with how my little piece turned out... However.. It does rather resemble a leaf of cabbage for some reason :/ but I still like it :)

Photograms

I went to a photograms seminar the other day, really interesting stuff! Given that I am hoping to perhaps study Photography I decided it was probably best I learned what a photogram was let alone how to do one.Of course we had to bring along something we could experiment with and so I brought along possibly the most difficult to work with this I could have.. Acetate.. acetate with a glue gun drawing on it.

Needless to say this was my first attempt at photogramming..

And this was my second..

And so accepting defeat I chose a different item to work with, a crumpled loo roll holder and a leafy piece of plastic I'd made! So here was the first result of that:

damh straight!

 

So once again picking up my courage I decieded to cut some photo paper into 4 mini sheets and have a final stab at the acetate that I refuse to let get the better of me!

So here were my results the first I did is the first to the left and the last one to the bottom right:

Inverse Images

I had a tutorial with Elaine the other day and she took me and my work down to the photocopier, now let me tell you I cant work technology for my life it honestly scares me because I know if anyones gonna break it its gonna be me. :/ But anyway she was doing some pretty cool enlarging and inverting of my images and I just really like how they turned out, They gave me new ideas of things to go check out and take some pictures of. Heres one images that was preodced by just scanning my paper in:

I like how some parts baecame out of focus and others appeared so sharp.

 

Here is the same image again but inverted this time! I have done these pieces on black sugarpaper using white pastel but I'm intrigued by how different it looks just by scanning it in and inverting the white image!

This little bit of experimenting has given me new ideas to go take some photographs of sheets of crumpled metal, rocks that are charred and jagged etc. The inverted image kind of reminds me of marble stone.