'Record' Project: Working with Sound.

 In a session with my tutor it was suggested that I start looking at all the differnt ways of recording information and imagery, including video and sound. This is a short post with a few sound clips from my morning. It's really enjoyable, and I think I'll keep taking short sound clips when I'm working on location they could even complement drawn pieces.

'Record' Project: Artist Research: Rob Dunlavey

I found Rob Dunlavey's work reading a book about artists journals. I love how he approaches constructing the drawings, almost like he's working from the inside out, focusing on the shapes within the buildings rather than the outlines. I think I found these inspiring because they were quite free and loose but the colour choices seem quite thought out. A little reminder for me to be less careful and more experimental in my journals.

'Record' Project: Drawing Workshop and Development.

To generate ideas and begin work for out final major project, we had to bring in items to work from that were related to our theme. I chose glasses and toy cars. My project is called 'Record', I thought the glasses represented observation and the toy cars could relate to the everyday things you see around you. We were using them for a drawing workshop. This workshop was really fast paced, and covered a whole range of different experimental drawing techniques. I worked on sizes A4 to A2, and also on grounds we built ourselves.

I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, I think in some areas it really works, like the glasses cut out and where the oil has covered that. It gives it an interesting texture and almost looks like a print. I think I should have placed the large car cut out elsewhere, as the rectangle shape is cutting off the rest of the image. 

This one is tiny, only on A4. It worked initially but I regret cutting out a large section of the image. After that I struggled to find any use for the piece, or make it work with any other images.

This was the largest piece of work I did, A2. You can see that halfway through I managed to spill a whole pot of ink all over the paper. I did my best to half cover the spill with tracing paper and masking tape. It worked and I actually think it creates layers and texture. As a whole though, it definitely doesn't work. There is too much happening.

You can see that this was originally one piece, which I then cut up and developed, adding collage and layering up tissue and tracing paper, also adding a black ink drawing (bottom left). I think these were my favourite outcomes from the day. Cutting the image in half created two separate pieces that were decent. 

At home I wanted to develop another piece of work, using a viewfinder I tried to pick out areas from different pieces of work that I thought could stand on their own. 

The second image is my favourite, really toned down. In the end I actually made a completely different decision, and cut up the A2 piece of work (3rd image on the post). I really wasn't happy with it. I got rid of the car cut out, and places the glasses cut out over the ink spill, and then added some red found materials because it needed some colour. It's still really messy, but I'm glad I took the risk and cut it up because I'm much happier with the outcome now.

Overall, the workshop was perfectly timed for me. I think I was slipping back into being too careful and not taking any risks. Working this way reminded me that I need to start from scratch and really work on generating ideas rather than focusing on outcomes from the beginning. My work was clumsy and messy but it doesn't matter, because developing my work allowed me to really focus on moving forward and improving what I had. I'll definitely keep working this way every now and again, and hopefully come back and work on/from the pieces I produced.

'Record' Project: Monoprinting

I spent the day working on monoprints, after collecting some words from magazines, I settled for the word 'Going'. I thought it was interesting and open to interpret in different ways. I started creating some images in my sketchbook for possible printing.

I really enjoyed these images, I was working with the lines thinking about paths, or direction. I had some going off the page, to make it seem continuous, quite like the word, it's kind of constant.

Using the word itself, I really liked this idea but I thought it would be quite time consuming. The second image of the legs, I was thinking about journeys again. I eventually settled for this one because the image was so simple but really embodied the word. 

My final print, I'm really happy with how this came out. We were sharing ink prints round the room, and someone else's print came off on mine in the orange, but I quite like how it looks, adds something different I guess! I wish I had the chance to do a few more, but it was fun and a good way to get started on ideas with my project.