Nonsense Drawing Project

I've just completed an assignment we were given over the Easter holidays - to do 15 observational drawings then 5 nonsense drawings composed using elements of the initial 15 images.

I chose quite a wide range of source material for my drawings to give me plenty to work with for the second part of the project. I tried to include a few things that I'm less comfortable drawing as well - larger scenes, ellipses, and straight lines.

Once I'd generated plenty of observational drawings I worked on combining them into nonsense drawings which I'd been apprehensive about but it was so so fun! I don't think there's any point in explaining or analysing a nonsense drawing so here they are for your viewing pleasure:

Artists Book - Springfield 1

Today is a good day! Finished all my work for my hand-ins and I'm really happy with how most of it looks. Now for some overdue blogging...

So I finished my Artists Book project which I'm pretty happy with. I decided that to get my idea across more clearly I should present my wooden triptych and concertina book as a backdrop to a shrine or personal altarpiece. I got this idea across in a pretty obvious but still effective way using candles and little pieces of stone and broken glass and ceramics I'd picked up from outside the house the project centres around.

 As an accompaniment to the shrine I made a little "bible" which incorporates textures from the house in a column structure. It was when I was looking at bibles for reference that I came up with the title for this project, "Springfield 1" which subverts the address of the house as a nod to bible passage titles - "John 3:16", "Genesis 1" etc. I'll do a proper in-depth post about my texture bible soon and the ideas and process behind it.

One of my favourite elements of my triptych is how it folds so neatly making it really portable. I'm really proud of how it looks and even though the construction was pretty simple, it has helped me gain more knowledge confidence in joinery.

Cartocon - Designs

It's been a busy few weeks but we've settled on a date for the window display - next Friday (the 29th). Board the hype train here please.

I thought I should post my designs ahead of that to give an idea of what I've been working on and give a sneak preview of how it will (hopefully) look.

I started by doing some designs based on a tiled wall and the shapes of the art school building around it:

I wasn't too happy with this design so attempted a variation:

I then explored my pyramid drawings further and came up with designs incorporating them into the window:

Finally I made a design based on the abstracted coat hanger shapes, incorporating red wool stretched across the window frame inside:

I sent them over to Cartocon and Nathan decided that he liked the pyramid design best, but wanted it to cover less of the window and incorporate the woolen element.

So here are my final designs:

I brought the window painting up slightly so it blocks less of the window and added in the red "wool" lines behind it which I think makes the design more dynamic. I'm really pleased with how it looks and am getting really excited to see it completed!

Free Software Project

The final project for this year was quite a dense one - it was all about Free Software and how it compares to Open Source and Proprietary software. Firstly we were given a day to do a group project, the aim of which was to produce an illustration/illustrations comparing free/open/proprietary.

As there were three of us in my group we decided to each do one illustration for each type of software and decided to personify each of them them as... wizards... 

My wizard was Open Source - and I portrayed him as a businessman handing over the source code but not being quite sure about the ideology behind it. Also I tried to draw moons and stars on the cape to look like brackets and asterisks but maybe with limited success.

The next part of the project was to sift through some pretty complex essays about free software and focus in an aspect of the writing. I chose an essay by Toni Prug which compared the Free Software movement to Protestantism. As someone who is slightly obsessed by religion, this piqued my interest. A couple of points which particularly inspired me were:
"It [Protestantism] arose against the centralization of the Roman Catholic church, privilege in interpretation of people chosen by the church, and against the Church's extraction of wealth from it's believers. At the time, these were anti-institutional, anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic principles."
"... principle of scripture alone is similar to the hackers' dedication to the code, the text that makes all software what it is."
"Richard Stallman, because of what some considered inflexibility when discussing premises of Free Software, was seen as a fundamentalist."

I was thinking about making an object relating to the principles of Free Software, that would also look like a religious object to highlight the similarities. I first thought about making a scroll, like a Torah, which would have lines of code printed on it, to show how hackers view code with a kind of reverence. I then thought about how Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software movement)'s "four essential freedoms" were kind of reminiscent of the Ten Commandments and thought about making some ceramic tablets which would look like stone tablets. I decided that wouldn't actually look that interesting though so I started drawing Stallman, who looks like quite a biblical character himself:

I composed a scene, with him as a Moses figure, holding his stone tablets with rays of light shining down on him from a computer... Quite obvious imagery maybe but I think it works pretty well. Here it is (hand-drawn then put together on Photoshop):

The final outcome for the project will be a page in a class newspaper. I don't think this image is enough so I'm in the process of making a scroll. I'll post my progress soon!

Pole Tay Pole - Final Outcome

I finally got some photos taken of the box I made for Pole Tay Pole all those many moons ago... Looking at this project project annoys me so much because I think I had a pretty good idea and just executed it quite poorly having rushed it so badly. I've been tempted to revisit this project and remake it before my assessment at the end of April; making my own box, getting a better copy of the photo and using nicer paper. On reflection though sometimes it's best just to leave these things and move on. Definitely a project I learnt a lot from but not my favourite work.