ITS CHRISTMAS!

My Christmas Card collection for when I'm at a christmasy fare and I have a conversation that goes a little bit like this,...
someome whoes interested; 'Do you have a sample of your work?'
,...and I say: 'Yes!'

And this is the point which I hand over my promotional Christmas card design:

The Nutcracker Sets

I fixed my sets together today and have started painting them,...its always such an exciting time!
I can see sereval health and safety issues here,..but seemed to have corrected them at the end with a ladder,...

Thursdays Print Session,....Lino

Here's some of my prints from Thursdays session with lino, considering that before Thursday I didn't really like lino and remember the painful hours in secondary school of spending forever cutting away and getting a poor result, i really enjoyed the process and loved the image that I had created and once cut out was a very efficient way of creating the same design!

I was inspired by a few pieces of work that I saw at a Christmas exhibition at a local shop called the Art Mill on Mutley Plain. The pieces were by Arthur Homeshaw, I seen to have problems getting on to his site, so i'll try add some of his work later!

Having a mooch and I found myself,..

This year I entered a competition with some of my work for the National Trust and Devon Decorative and Fine Arts Society,.. and I've just found myself on their website! me!

Time

I was sat at my computer desk thinking about our Contextual Studies presentation, my group decided to look at time and how we perceive it, and my clock starts to whizz round,..so i had to take some pictures,..it was so weird!

Producing and Selling my work for Charity

 Just recently my sister organised a coffee morning in Milbrook to raise money for a charity that she is working for when she goes on her gap year to Madagascar in January. I decided that I would have a stall and all the money I would make would go towards her charity, so for part of my stall I decided to make some cards ranging from blank message cards to Christmas and birthday cards. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process and learnt a lot along the way, for example even basic things like pricing my items and these pricing relating the time and effort spent on them. Also having to do research on the average price of cards so that people wouldn't be put off buying them if they were too expensive or a customer buying the lot in one go if they were too cheap. Here are some examples of the cards I produced.

These are the examples of  blank cards

 Examples of Christmas Cards

 

And an example of birthday cards

The Nutcracker Sets

A good friend, Mrs Smith, a while ago commissioned me to paint the set for her local performance 'The Nutcracker'. I decided that it was important if we met face to face so I could see her reactions to my ideas and for her to also get a feel of how I felt towards the project. Meeting with her also meant that we discuss about certain dilemmas which Mrs Smith wouldn't have necessary thought about and quickly try to prevent or over come them. Taking into account the amount of work she wanted, I then returned fire with what was realisitic for me because my deadline is December 10th and obviously I made it clear that my university work came first. I tried to be assertive and instead of me completely changing her vision maybe I couldn't see them being effective I worked with my client to reach a conclusion which considered both opinions. So we constructed a priority list which consisted of':
A main set, which is a huge open mouth
A sign post and,
A flat popcorn box.
These are all simple tasks to complete but because of there size a lot of other factors come into play, for example even moving the sets from place to place was very tricky because I needed a vehicle big enough to carry them and the man power to move them because they are very heavy and awkward to carry.

 

 I have just started the main set which is this huge mouth which you can see in Matthew Bourne's The Nutcracker. I needed to consider how big I wanted the set, big enough to be impacting but not too big that I couldn't realistically work on it. Because of the size of it I needed to think about the supports it needs to withstand the weight because young dancers will be jumping about on stage so it will need to be able to stand strong throughout. To help me organize this i decided to talk to the Lights and Stage Technician to give me advise on possible fixings that the set could have to hold it steady.
I feel that this is a perfect opportunity to get some experience of client work in for my work based learning module in the year to come, I have already learnt about how vital communication is to make something work and also techniques during that communication to make something last.

London!

My visit to London! I'm extremely glad that I went to London and feel I gained an awful lot from the trip, seeing lots of incredible sights as I've only been to London once before.
I'm going to try and debrief the trip but in a condensed fashion, which I feel is going to be very hard as if I could I would probably add all my pictures!

In one of my favourite exhibition, which took us an extremely long time to find, was the Ghosts of Gone Birds, a beautiful illustrative exhibition of all the birds that are extinct. The three pictures above are of a moving bird which was in a set of four, it moves so slowly and elegantly.

This craved wooden tree was in the entrance to Camden Market, and I was completely blow away by the detail and work that had been poured into it and the millions of people the walk by without even a glance!

Some interesting photography of Camden Market and The Underground at night, I love the movement that I captured with my camera, London looked so beautiful at night!

Screen Printing Research

I found this beautiful screen print by an illustrator called Michael Hacker,
It is a gig poster for today's Isis show at Arena, Vienna. Its a five colour screen print
50x70cm, edition of 109.

The colour's used are vibrant and this combined with the pattern creates an extremely eye-catching poster.
Find it at;

http://www.michaelhacker.at/?p=11