Captain's Blog

Evolution of a being

2009-04-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

You are emerging from the primordial soup.
You are being driven by primary needs.
Your physical form reflects these basic requirements.
You are at the earliest evolutionary stage.

I began to isolate my primary needs in order to develop a physical form for my being - how it moves, how it eats, how it thinks etc.
My being - keeps a very low profile in order to evade gangs on the streets.
- eats almost any fast food it can get hold of.
- doesn't like being alone - it's a pack being.
- gets about on public transport.
- relies heavily upon its eyesight.

Author_Primer

2009-03-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

Got some new felt tips for cheap, decided to use 'em. Start of a new project called 'Author', which is another kind of autobiographical ting. For this stage we had to fill a sketchbook with made/gathered imagery that describes our personal world, so the environments we inhabit, things we use, relationships we have etc. I looked at it more from the point of a local lad who has lived in Southwark all his life and knows it better than others on the course. My territory, my rules, the places I go and the places I avoid. I took my fresh felt tips, got on my bike and cruised round Herne Hill, Dulwich, Peckham, Camberwell and Brixton drawing whatever had a bit of meaning to me.

Object2_Chair

2009-01-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

Following on from our initial research into the our chair we had to illustrated 20 different and alternative uses for the chair. I made a small cardboard model of a rocking-chair and used that to discover new uses. It helped to have a physical object to move around and look at from different perspectives. I tried to keep the shape and structure of the chair as similar to reality as possible - separating the chair into components or adding to it's structure seemed almost like cheating to me. I bound my images into an A5 book (spent about 20 quid on the photocopier, clown!).

We also had to show 10 different connotations for our chair. At the end of the 'Object1' project I had began messing about making models of rocking chairs and also people to sit in them, and I decided to continue this for the connotation images. The models were quite effective because many of the connotations I came up with were simple stereotypical characters.

Object1_Chair

2008-12-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

Finally a completely new project, no image kit or any of that jazz. This project was a research project in which we had to choose one design/type of chair and research when it was made, who designed it, how it was made, where it is/was used, who it belonged to and what it's made of, but present the information in a visual way and take it where we wanted. I got stuck into the rocking-chair, researching why we like rocking, cradles and rocking-horses, primitive visions of rocking, different types and origins, design history and stereotypes and more.

A1 Poster - Sign 5

2008-11-23T04:04:00.000-08:00

With a view to create an A1 black and white photocopied poster with our visual kit, we had to choose one out of a list of ten bits of text taken from already existing posters. I picked 'Rat in the Skull', and began looking at different ways to portraying the same thing.

I had difficulty deciding between these two final ideas:

I think the first is a better use of my visual kit, but the image is not simple and strong enough and quite an obvious even cliched responce. The second is far more simple but clever, with the rats wearing skulls rather than existing inside them. The concept has possibly been taken too far away from the original text though (especially as there are plural 'rats') so perhaps just the skull masks that they are wearing would be enough...

Paris sketchbook work

2008-11-23T04:01:00.000-08:00

This is some of the observational drawing I did on our Paris trip, on the streets, on the metro and in museums like the Picasso and Quai Branly.

Headline - Sign4

2008-11-20T11:09:00.000-08:00

Had to choose a headline from a newspaper on one specific day and do an A4 landscape double page spread illustration, yet again using our visual kit.
My headline: BANGLADESH SENDS WARSHIPS TO BURMA OVER GAS ROW.
In my sketchbook I looking at the structures of offshore gas stations and warships and combining the two.

This was the final image I came up with, expanding the more structural stitch patterns of my visual kit and using them to create the architecture of the gas stations.

Binnorie - Sign3

2008-11-20T10:48:00.000-08:00

Yet another extension to the sign project; we had to choose a fairytale out of about 5 without looking and then make five images to sum the story up. My story was about two princesses and the older marries with hunk of a prince and then he falls for the younger more beautiful princess with rosy cheeks and gold dress, so the older throws her in the river of Binnorie and she drowns. Then some guys who work at the mill pull her out, she's dead, but a travelling harp player makes a sweet harp out of her breast bone and her hair, plays it to the royals (including the older princess and prince etc) and it starts playing on its own and sings about how did died, grassing the older princess in. Started in the sketchbook...

The catch here was that we had to use our 'visual kit' that we had been compiling right from the beginning with our universe. I saw my kit as being collected tectures and fabrics and materials because I like to use that in my work, but instead of actually making with the real things, I began photocopying all these textures in black and white and collaging with them. As I began this stage of the project I built up a huge collection from fabric and weave and knit and felt books in the library and used them to portray swirls in a river or stone buildings or trees. Keeping the shapes and figures etc simplified I think it worked really well and was a useful experiment.

Alphabet Book - Sign2

2008-11-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

This was an extension to the universe project - a personal A to Z book that was 'peculiar and local to us'. I decided to use the quirky, dark humour I use in a lot of my work, and made an 'Unpleasant Alphabet' in a tiny little book I bound myself from types of found paper. I was much more chuffed with this cos I could do what I wanted more and so I worked faster and so I wasn't so precious with the images and most actually came our better for it. Job's a good'un!

Personal Universe - Sign1

2008-11-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

Create a patchy, idiosyncratic universe, considering everything you know.....you what!? This brief was all a bit confusing, taking an image and dividing it into two sub-categories such as useful-useless and making two more images for them, and then doing the same to those two images and so on, and on, and on, it can never end we were told. I found the constraints of the brief really difficult to work with and didn't know what materials I should use and read into it all too much and got too precious with the images i made instead of just squeezing loads of work out. So, basically I didn't do enough. We were told to look at ways of presenting our 'universe' effectively too, and I had big ideas (too big) for this, constructing a web kinda thing out of lollipop sticks...which failed. This is what it looked like:

Me-Tea Party

2008-11-02T06:34:00.000-08:00

For this project we had to customise or decorate our desk space we'd just been assigned for a tea party with the second years, using aspects of our personal summer work to advertise ourselves. Using some of the references given on the brief such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Josef Frank, and also modern aboriginal artwork I saw last christmas, I painted this image on to the back of thick A1 asitate, building it up in layers. I wanted to be bold and not hold back, but the outcome was a bit confused and garish; less information and a more reserved colour pallet would have been better i think. The process of building up layers on the back of the clear asitate was quite interesting and affective though. The party was a bit of a flop!

John Soane Museum

2008-11-02T06:24:00.000-08:00

Hunterian Museum

2008-11-02T06:23:00.000-08:00

Cut and Paste Exhibition

2008-11-02T05:36:00.000-08:00

Clever collage, great compositions, bold graphics.

The Dwarf

2008-11-02T04:53:00.000-08:00

5 minute animation of a short story.

In brief, 'The Dwarf' is a story about a dwarf who is brought up in a minature world protected by his parents, but when they both die in a fire he is cast into the real world and not accepted. He discovers a circus and every night he goes to the maze of mirrors and admires himself and dances around with joy as the mirrors stretch him into regular size. This is the only time he is happy.

When it came to collecting visuals for the storyboard, we found some amazing books in the library about old victoria dolls and dolls houses and some of them were so interesting and also terrifying that we got very attached to them and collaged our characters and sets using photocopies.

At one point we tried to recreate our own maze of mirrors with drapes and fairy lights and various mirrors, which didn't really work but created an interesting mood.

I randomly found a battered old lamp shade on the side of the road which we built a kind of circus tent with and ended up filming the majority of the animation through the top of moving our photocopied material in stop-frame and using our fairy lights and coloured asitate to represent circus lights and alter mood in places.

Some of Summer Work

2008-11-02T04:03:00.000-08:00

Requirement

Name

Nationality

Education

Place of Birth

Requirement

Age

Hope

Hope

Hope

Expectation

Expectation