College Term 4 – Jewellery – Week 6

Posted on 20th October 2012 by Neil

We’ve spent the last five weeks learning about the various ways of soldering (butt and sweat), cold joining with rivets, surface design (heat colouring, mill impressions, hammering) and playing with a laser cutter (I want one!). This week over five hours of lesson time, it was our time to make our own design – this is what I came up with:

Each of the metal discs were cut by hand from aluminium sheet, hammered to give texture, and wire brushed to make matte. I designed the acrylic flowers and circles to scale in Adobe Illustrator and these were cut from 3mm acrylic sheet on the laser cutter. They are attached to the aluminium discs using 2mm chenier tube rivets – several had to be done again as I was a little heavy handed at the beginning and cracked the acrylic. Links are commercial jump rings, as is the chain – time pressures didn’t allow me to make my own. Not that I’d know where to start making chain! I’m really pleased with the result, and aside from the laser cutting, all the techniques are feasible in a home studio.

College Term 4 – Ceramics – Week 4

Posted on 14th October 2012 by Neil

Yes, I know, there’s a week or so missing from the ceramics thread – I’m waiting on some of the things I’ve been making to get fired in the kiln so you can see the before and after. This week, amongst other things, we were invited to play and experiment with extruded clay. Here’s my (unfired) tile with my experimentations:

From top, all extruded shapes:
1) Twisted trefoil
2) Square, alternating full and half-slices
3) Square, pierced and cut
4) Trefoil, pinched and dented
5) Trefoil, sliced and indented
6) Trefoil, pinched and dented
7) Square, irregular slice, end on
8) D-profile, coiled
9) D-profile, plaited
10) D-profile, stamped with biro lid and nib
11) D-profile, pressed with curved edge of serrated kidney tool.

College Term 4 – Painting – Week 4

Posted on 12th October 2012 by Neil

More painting mayhem this week – this time we had to work large… very large! This painting is A1 size, with the viewframe being 4.3x3cm. I completed this in about two and a half hours, in acrylics, mixing colours from primaries and white. The rose bead and the filigree bead need a little more work, but I didn’t think it was too bad overall.

College Term 4 – Painting – Weeks 2 & 3

Posted on 12th October 2012 by Neil

Well, the Mac is currently reinstalling from back up – silly me decided to do that over the network, so there’s another day to go! Meanwhile, back in real time, I took more photos of the oil paintings from week 2 (the first three) and one from week 3. Each painting is 15cm square based on a 3cm square frame of my bead collection. We were working in brown monotone, making our browns using colour theory: blue and yellow to make green, green and red to make brown, add blue to darken, yellow to lighten and be careful with the white! A small amount of the light brown mixed with white made the background cream. I reckon I was getting much better by number 4… Let me know how you think I did!

College Term 4 – Ceramics – Weeks 1 & 2

Posted on 6th October 2012 by Neil

So far this term in ceramics, we’ve been learning techniques – week 1 included shellac and masking tape resist, piercing and carving. The tiles were fired and then I was asked to embellish the pierced tile – I’ve used beads, head pins and a bit of superglue. The result has been variously described as St Basil’s Cathedral, Brighton Pavilion or the Taj Mahal! I’ve already thought of a way of adapting it to make a final major project, so keep watching the blog 😉

Carved pattern – Masking Tape Resist – Pierced – Shellac Resist

College Term 4 – Painting – Week 3

Posted on 6th October 2012 by Neil

It’s monoprint week, using oils. This is a completely new technique for me: paint onto glass with oil paints, and then press a damp sheet of paper down onto it to make the print. Not sure that it will become a favourite technique – I prefer using a gelatin plate and waterbased colour, but I guess I’m still a beginner! As before, I’m working from my collection of beads, and each print is 15x15cm. First image in the pair is the oil painting on glass, second is the print.

I’m quite pleased with the improvement – partly from making sure the paint was a little thinner on the plate, and the paper slightly damper to make the print. I particularly like the iridescence I managed to get on the last purple bead – I included all the colours I’d used on the other beads.

Minor hiccup

Posted on 6th October 2012 by Neil

Sorry about the lack of posts, particularly updates on college progress…. My iMac died in the middle of last week, probably the hard drive failing apparently (it’s five years old), and with it went my current photos of work. All being well, it will be back repaired next week and the back ups will have worked, and all will be restored!

If not – well… I’ll be busy re-photographing the work!

College Term 4 – Painting Week 1

Posted on 23rd September 2012 by Neil

I had to hit the ground running this week, with the first day back at college for Year Two, Term One. We’re starting off with six weeks of Jewellery, several weeks of Drawing, Life Drawing, Painting and lots and lots of Ceramics. Later on we’ll be doing some more Print.

The theme this term is ‘collections’ and we’ve been researching ‘artists who collect’ from those that seem to curate lots of objects (e.g. Portia Munson) to those who do assemblage (e.g. Joseph Cornell). I have to say I fail to appreciate the artistic creativity in curation, but I’m sure someone will put me right! I know these curated collections are art by definition, given it is commissioned and displayed and appreciated, but not what I would see as creative arts by any means.

Painting this week was set to stretch our comfort zone. We were handed bamboo pens, black Quink ink and told to draw our collections and then use clean water to move the ink around the page. We were encouraged to explore the media and work loosely. My collection is of beads and buttons, just in case you can’t tell from these images!

The ink has so many different colour pigments in it, more and more become obvious as it moves with the addition of water. Wet-on-wet creates more feathering, and translucent wash layers can be built up. I left the paper-white areas as highlights. It was difficult to add more ink back into the image as the paper had become more absorbent and spongy. I think I did ok…

Graphics & Illustration – Exhibition Piece

Posted on 14th July 2012 by Neil

This is the last post based on my end-of-first-year exhibition pieces. Today’s is the graphics and illustration project – we had four sessions to create a collage based on the portrait and work of our chosen artist. I developed several collages, based on thumbnail images of the myriad works of Jacek Yerka, courtesy of a Google search. The two I chose to take forward were a simple cut and paste montage of as many thumbnails that would fit on an A4 sheet, and a number of thumbnails mounted on acetate hoops circling an image of the artist photocopied from one of his books (to represent his images being inspired by his dreams). I then researched and mocked up a magazine cover and article (based on Artists and Illustrators March 2012 magazine) and a book cover dust jacket using a photo of the 3D whirling dreams montage and a scan of the A4 montage.

Still Life – Exhibition Piece

Posted on 11th July 2012 by Neil

This is another of my end-of-first-year exhibition pieces, this time for the four week still life module. It is white oil pastel and graphite on black paper, and took around four hours to complete. The items were all drawn separately and then grouped together for the piece with a single light source chosen. It was an exercise in creating ellipses which I now know are circles drawn in perspective!