The Trip to Edinburgh

Monday's trip to Edinburgh was a great opportunity for me to test out the Ilford XP Super 400 Black and White Film that I had bought just before Christmas. I hadn't used this film before so I didn't really know how it would turn out. 

I'm pretty happy with the results. The prints are sharp and have a lot of contrast. The only major let down is my scanner, which has added additional grain. I think if I was to use this film again, I would also consider using a higher shutter speed, as quite a few good potential shots were ruined by minor hand shake.

These are the ones I liked best:

Louise Bore-geois

On Monday, the three classes took a trip to Edinburgh to visit the Louise Bourgeois Exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. I didn't really know what to expect as I'd only seen one picture of her previously through Robert Mapplethorpe's work. I did a quick look on Google Images the morning before the trip and thought it could be interesting. I really like the idea of us going out as a class to places, it's something that should happen more often.

Upon entering the building I could not help but roll my eyes. The initial works that lined the walls were exactly the type that I personally, would not deem fit for an exhibition. To me, art is a skill and through that, skill should be shown. The red scribbles that depicted the female body felt very lazy and reminded me of Tracey Emin's work; who was clearly inspired by Bourgeois. My tutor made a good point later in the day about people getting where they are, ultimately by who they know. Looking back through the days viewings, I think this was somewhat the case.

One of the rooms contained a series that was done on musical paper. Lucinda's first words were: "these are a bit shite John" and I tried for a moment to disagree. I took a closer look and could not find anything even remotely appealing. I did wonder if blood had been used as a medium, as some of the red was browning and quite thick. That was a point of interest, but the pieces on a whole? No. The same was to be said for another room, with pieces that were created near the end of her life. They were just awful.

Some of the later rooms contained sculpture and these I had a little more time for. There was one that almost reminded me of Cerberus, a three headed sculpture that was locked away in a cage. Three sides of the structure contained hazy glass and I figured that was to enforce the direction of viewing. Closer inspection of this red faced form, revealed it was made from material and quite tightly compact too. Red was definitely the reoccurring theme throughout the exhibition. 

A brighter room further along housed a sculpture that was held down by a set of phallic shaped weights. Maybe that was the point, she wanted to represent being held down by men. Rising from the weights was a large arch, which at the end contained a bristly object that had various droplet shaped glass hanging from it. I pretty much turned my nose up and moved on.

I hate spiders, they are in my top three of most feared things. I didn't however, mind the large Spider sculpture that filled one of the end rooms. It had a robotic feel to it and in a certain sense, came across as quite punishing. One thing that immediately stood out to me was the size and for a little old lady, I did wonder if she herself had put this together. The obvious answer being no, which brings up another annoyance of mine with so called "art". The "Artist" may have the idea but really, who should get the credit? The person that thought it up, or the person that did all the hard work? This is why I cannot stand the differential work ethic of people like Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst. I might be wrong and it'd certainly be an opinion changer to see Louise at work.

The wall inside the Spider room had a large framed embroidered canvas and while I don't care for textiles or the proposed message, the time and energy gone into perfecting the typography was certainly noted. I don't think it could have been done any more perfect than the end result and for me, that was believable.

I know this may have sounded quite negative, but at the end of the day it's just my opinion. I went into this exhibition with an open mind and still I could not connect with any of the work, thus why I haven't narrowed down to a specific piece. I did enjoy the day out, but I wouldn't attend another Bourgeois exhibition.

Narrative Image Making: The Mermaid

For this project, we were asked to create a book cover and inside spread for the short story of The Mermaid. I initially had wanted to try and do something dark, combining Film Noir and Manga but in the end it didn't really work out like I had planned. I then decided to jump from Manga and make something a little bit more comic book based.

This is the result of my center page. I know ideally, a center page would already be well into a story, but as this is so short, it didn't make any sense. I wanted to keep the colour scheme very simple and similar to that of a mass-printed publication.

My process wasn't too long. I started out by drawing the characters in my sketchbook and made a mock-up story board including them. When that was finished, I re-did it on the computer using my Wacom Tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS6. To clean the image up further, I then took my rough draft into Adobe Illustrator CS6 and traced my image, switching between mouse and pen. Doing this in Illustrator was the most beneficial, as it is mostly all vector based, which never loses quality no matter how big you resize your image. Perfect for print.

Adventure Time Publishing!

A while ago I got approached by a Publisher in America that's working on the Official Art of Adventure Time book. They want to have a section that includes art done by other people based on existing characters from the show. The following renders are what they selected to include. I had to re-render them out over the Christmas Holidays and due to them being done in 4K resolution (for printing), it took 3 days to render out each. This meant I had very little computer time during the 9 days because every resource was being used. The first attempt had already crashed once during the first day, so after I had restarted the render, I just left it to run it's course.

These are based on the characters Beemo and Peppermint Butler:

Programs used were 3ds Max 2011 (for compatibility with an older version of Vray Render) and Photoshop CS6 for post-processing.