Rock, Gem'n'Bead Show

Laura took me to this, which is on today & tomorrow at Kempton Park. 

As well as the usual Aladdin's cave of semi-precious beads there's a museum of fossils & crystals. Their weird shapes and colours, are fascinating, especially the extraordinarily mathematical looking bismuth crystals.

There was a spiky variety of trilobite which was tempting. I bought a few (more) crystals to take photos of, & see what I can do with the way they handle light, as part of a photographic project. I'll post the results presently.

Assessment week next week, so much still to do. The official blog came as a bit of a surprise as  none of us had read  through all the course notes in advance, so when the last day came we found we should have done it from the start, and had to do it all over the weekend as by pot-luck the IT workshop was the very last thing our group did!
L&A both here tonight for early girly Halloween of film, nibblies & last bottle of bubbles left from my birthday.

29:1st triumph over Mac! New blog, Haiku 33-36

 I think I'm beginning to beat the Macs into submission! We have to set up a WordPress blog so our tutors & classmates can follow our progress. It means recording everything here, there, in our studio sketchbooks and reflective journals as well as any finished masterpieces needing to be handed in. I can now make them write what I ask and record and save pictures & film from the internet.

The address is:

http://60pix.wordpress.com/

I've also written a few more haiku, I've been so busy I'd nearly forgotten everything else.

33

leaves rip’ning from green

gold danish apricot jam

edible autumn

34

trees rip’ning gold red

feastybright autumn spectrum

wind eats them naked

35

mellow fruitfulness

rainbow berried bird harvest

bone aching dampcold

36

oldcoldgold sunrays

brown red green tiffany leaves

hibernating trees

life drawing, more artists!

Moderately successful life drawing, Steve, the very helpful & positive tutor said nice things about my efforts, then sent us off to "just research three of these artists & write about their techniques with illustrations, and how it is relevant to your work..." ready to be handed in on Monday with the rest of our work! In fact, several really inspiring ones,Alberto Giacometti, Gary Hume & Dryden Goodwin. I need to go back to the last one for his film work, but the pencil portraits is what we need to study at the moment.

animation, drawings

Our animation is now on youtube, thanks Bess!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsMWySa5qMc 

 Eat your heart out Aardman!

I also feel brave enough to show some of my drawings, these are my takes on other people we've been studying.
Milton Glaser is familiar to lots of people for his image of Dylan. Some of you might recognise the profiles.

The others are from finalists in the Jerwood prize, we have to study 5 of them, Iain Andrews did a series of purple ink&wash drawings from Tolkien, they're full of wonderful detail, quirky buildings and people, with a range of fantastical beasts. I'd love him to publish a book of the full stories. Mine is ink on birch bark, the natural material seemed to fit the strange world

These are in the style of Lottie Jackson-Eales, a recent graduate of my own Art school, sadly she's a bit better than me, but the perfect style for me to try.

28, spot welding! book report.

At last, another real new thing! We had our workshop induction today, ie Health&Safety talk, then demonstration of all the "toys" in the workshop, saws for cutting twiddly bits, giant drills, vacuum-machines for shaping plastic, a 3-rollered mangle for bending steel and of course the spot-welder. We then had just 2 hours to play, designing & making a clock-face. The good thing is that we can now use the workshop to make anything we like related to our studies.
It's not perfect, but here's my clock, remember 2hours only from design to finish, so ignore the rough edges.

I've also had another report on one of my books (5th July) it's been doing the coast-to-coast with anon! Good Luck

"We Have Normality" Decision

After fretting over what to do for the rest of the year, I've finally decided on "Moving Image & Photography" which was my original plan until I was enthralled by visual communication. I think photography will give me more to do in the next few years, & I was fascinated by the brief adventure in animation.
We went to the Lake District at the weekend, the "normality" of trudging up mountains in zero visibility cloud & 50mph gales was a bit of a novelty after all the new stuff I've done. It was, in fact a very good couple of days.

Disappearing days. Animation.

This refers to the darkening evenings as well as the terrifying speed with which our first assessment deadlines are looming, less than 2 weeks for essay plan, & having read more carefully the brief for next week I find we have to do a "proper" blog, with a specific format, including all the work we've done and some artists in each field. This is our last rotation so it needs to be done in one hit before the dreaded assessment, rather than as we go on through the others. This week's been moving image & photography, have to animate a small film in groups, less then 2 mins but takes all week to do. I'll report back on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsMWySa5qMc