Blog I

Today I spent the day trying to start my blog, as it has already been a week, and all I have done so far
is wrote up my Negotiated Study project (for the purposes of continuity this has been published earlier here). I spent a few hours on tumblr trying to make a theme that was more presentable.
 This was more or less a waste of time, as I was not able to edit the HTML effectively and I spent ages trying to select one of the premade themes.

 Screenshot of a preview of my blog

Compared to my earlier version (Day I) it is an improvement, in terms of layout and colour (though not by much). This was not really what I was aiming for in terms of colour, I would have preferred a paler colour palette and adding a background of my own. However editing such things in tumblr seems to require an almost ungodly knowledge of HTML coding and an account on imageshack of more than 64gb. (bit of nerd humor there i suppose). Anyway after fiddling with the codes in Adobe Dreamweaver with no real result, I gave up on it thinking I would get back to it later after consulting one of my more technically minded friends. Instead I felt I would actually write down a post or two.

Guest - John Hegley

Today we had a guest speak come in: John Hegley... and his small guitar "Steve", a very good way to start an introduction I felt.

dialogue.firstdirect.com - John Hegley

Scan of my sketch book, including doodles of Hegley

The talk considered not so much of talking, but more of several humorous songs of John Hegely singing about his childhood and telling us about his poetry. A great entertainer, his songs/poems were great fun, including singalongs and a rousing performance of the guilamot by Salvator, a guest lecturer we had in our second year.

Scan from a handout given to us by John Hegely (it is unclear whether he drew this himself, or it is the product of a previous guest talk)

Left side, copied from John Hegely Handout, Right side notes written by myself

We were asked by John Hegely to draw a quick sketch based on a line from one of his poems (part of which is shown above). I remember drawing a car surfing, unfortunately I did not get this image back. Which is a shame because I enjoyed the idea of drawing a surfing car as part of my university project. Ah the silly things we do in Illustration.

Poster by John Hegely, handed out to us on the day (origin unknown)

The second part of the assignment was to produce some sort of poster for an upcoming book by John. Which I did not do, as another option was to draw a second image to go with his poetry. I remember drawing a flying car with wings... ah I enjoy quirky projects like this.

On the whole the talk was very entertaining and certainly interesting to experience the wonderful eccentric character that is John Hegely, it was honestly the first time I have ever had a guest speaker who spent most of his time singing strange songs. I did pick up on some points from Hegely, one is to try and explore your work from new angles (for example try turning a drawing into a short text... or in the literal sense, though the idea of me looking at a piece of writing upside down strikes me as slightly pointless). Another  point was to always try maintaining an element of humour in your work, something I try to do in most of my work, for example I created a humerous webcomic for the first and second year (see below)

 my webcomic at drunkduck.com/not_faust

The finally point was to always seek as much input from as many different people as possible, though I have learned that showing work to mates is not always good.. especially if they tend to be more on the bastard side. All these points I did not really find relevant for the FMP... more for sort of work in general. Then again I suppose there might be a message there of making sure that the tutors see your work regularly for the FMP.

 

Photographing Old Work

Today I spent the day in the photography studios taking pictures of my old work. It was mainly of my old life drawings done in the 1st and 2nd year. This was done as a means of reducing a lot of built-up paper into a nice little data file, a process I find very annoying, boring and warm. Though I do not like doing it, it is a good way for me to save space for when I eventually move, and a way to preserve my work as it is bound to be destroyed when I move by either rain or German flat mates.

Photographs of some of my old life drawings.

Though not really relevant to my FMP in any real way, it did begin to make me think about having to photograph my project once it is all done. Once my FMP is done it wont do that if I ever want it replicated, say on business cards, that it can not be done with my old Canon IXUS 95015, which is quite old and without well resolution. It did make me wonder how I will end up getting my final work converted into digital format, since photography will probably have closed down for the summer once we are all done... and we do not have any scanners that go up to A1. Well enough about that, as I have not even completed my FMP yet.

Week 1

Schedule Scan for the first week

Following with my original idea of using a blog to create my PD (presentation document). I looked back on the blog I created in my 2nd year. A screenshot of which is below:

 Screenshot of my website from October 2011

 Chris-sketchpad.tumblr.com

Obviously this is a bit simple and needs to be updated to look a bit more sleek. The website has not been developed since the short tutorial with our guest tutor Chris Aran, partly because blogging has never really been my strong point... and because I spent more time focusing on my deviant art account (concordedly at deviantart.com) I feel that if I am successful in creating a blog for my PD, it is something I could continue with after university. Something I would enjoy doing, and I could imagine that it might be a good networking device... or at least something potentially impressive to show a client.

I have been told to come up with a presentation document title/theme for the 6th of February, something I am slightly worried about as I have no real idea of a possible topic. Furthermore it has been confirmed that we are all going to hang some of our work in the Bargate Monument gallery in two weeks time. The main body of which will consist of our work from our Negotiated Study project, though I will have to create a third layer for my posters, otherwise I would be a bit embarrassed to display the. As far as the theme for my FMP goes I only have the notion that I would like to do screenprints for it.

Negotiated Study

As we were told yesterday to create a mock Presentation Document from our old project, titled "Negotiated Study". A project in which we were asked to create a body of work based on our experience in the last 2 years of studying here. I decided to create a series of posters advertising a new Sherlock Holmes museum, celebrating a fictional 150th anniversary of the character. The following images are all taken from my original presentation document in book form (as scans) and both detail and explain the project in brief.

           I quickly picked the topic of Sherlock Holmes because of some audio books by sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was also a topic I felt would have sufficient material to last for many weeks. When I ran the idea by Jonny he suggested that perhaps I could use the idea of a fictional museum  celebration the 150th anniversary of Sherlock Holmes. I knew from the start that I wanted to use screenprints as my main medium. This was because I created a poster for the Christmas shop last year and found that I enjoyed it immensely, that and I figured that I would not be able to practice screen printing once this year ends.

When doing this project I realized that I enjoy screen printing, and that due to the fact I probably wont be able to do that after university, I would like to use that as my medium for my Final Major Project.  I also learned the importance of leaving things to the last minute, which is largely why my final pieces look a bit underdeveloped. The main comment of the tutors was that a third layer would really have made it a lot more powerful. I am a bit apprehensive about doing screenprints, because in order to do so (at least for A1 size) because drawing on drafting film requires me to go over the lines a minimum of twice, three times for the thin lines. Which translates to a lot more work just in order to get the screen to work. Though it was a tiring project I did enjoy the creation of the project and the moment of gratification when the prints were all done and lined up next to each other.