On Location: Drawing Brixton Market

Friday 27th September
What a good day to have a birthday! We met our new location lecturer at Brixton tube station where we were guided through a maze of shopping centres and rich visual culture. Here are some of my pictures from the day:

 

 + here are some of my drawings! the crit went really well and everyone was really nice about my work saying it was like a 'journey' by using concertina books.

Drawing Day 3: Undercover

Thursday 26th September 
Our third brief of the week was to dress up as a character and act as they would for  the entire day. We had to get into pairs or threes and draw once another before getting into groups of 8 and finally groups of 25 and draw one lengthy hour drawing whilst half the group posed + vice versa.

I was up all night long making this watermelon cape, so worth it!

Drawing Day two: Secret Cinema

Wednesday 25th September

Apologies for being brief, I have a large back log of posts to make following the last couple of weeks. I can't believe the second week of uni is almost over and it's only going quicker.

On the second day of uni we took part in the 'Secret Cinema' project. Being someone that doesn't necessarily watch many films I was excited to see what kinda thing the tutors had in store for us. I had heard previous year rumours of Hitchcock or Kubrick so I was expecting something that would be both challenging and captivating.

The first extract we watched was Zero For Conduct by Jean Virgo (clip can be viewed here)
I was excited to illustrate movements and time progression, although we had the clip shown numerous times and slowed down it was still hard to grasp/ concentrate and compose moving image. It was especially difficult because I am so used to pausing a piece of film drawing happily and restarting it when I feel comfortable with the outcome i've produced, thinking fast and drawing quickly is not my strong point. I really enjoyed the video clip though, the action- pause and focus of the man in the hat - the pillow fight and how it can be illustrated and also the ritual/procession at the end- very beautiful in black n white!

The second clip we watched was Le Testament le' orpheu/ Le testament d'Orphée - (clip can be viewed here 19:40). This film was visually very appealing also, the sense of perspective/ variations of light to dark within the lighthouse clip as well as the obvious fascination of editing and being able to make the David Bowie-esque character reappear from the ocean backwards intact. The visual symbol of the flower that the curious man holds out + the lighting given off by the light house, all very interesting!

The 8 1/2 -Fellini
I have heard a small amount about Fellini - mostly from the bit in ghost world when a man is asking for it in the dvd shop and all the counter assistant can find is crude xxx alternatives. We only got to see the ending which was a little unfortunate as my tutor explained the story and the ending was somewhat spoiler-y but the clip itself was so brilliant and exciting that it didn't matter.(clip can be viewed here)

I really liked using concertina books, they were really effective for progression and moving image, if the image is moving it is interesting in using the book as a progression of this. Also, although my tutors slowed down the films, they never paused them (something i always do) so it was difficult thinking of composition as well as making sure you've got everything on the paper. It is also very hard to fill the entire book!
I'm looking forward to inspiring myself in future with these movies!!

Drawing day one: Gemini

Tuesday 24th September

Today's session was entitled "gemini" which sparked up multiple questions for me- especially with the presence of bringing 64 pieces of A5 paper, masking tape, mug and pack of our favourite biscuits. We're we drawing our biscuits? Each other? Taping each other in pairs? We rearranged the tables in long lines and sat opposite other members of the class. Afterwards the tutors admitted that it was more of an "Ice breaker" task, we drew our neighbours in sets of 5mins, 1 min and 30 seconds. Here are some of the outcomes:

Summer Project: The Pickwick Blogs

Our summer project brief was to design a character, within the brief we were told to use the contextual evidence of 'The Pickwick Papers' by Charles Dickens but it was merely a starting point. The brief was incredibly open- "can be real or imaginary, human or non human" basically It could be ANYTHING and that was slightly oVERWHELMING for a first project.
Staying true to Norwich, I decided to focus the character on a homeless woman who inhabits certain areas of the city centre, pottering about- her key role, reading magazines for hours on end in whsmiths.
My initial research:

From these initial sketches I formed some varying experiments through photography which lead me to my final set of images which I took to my second day of university and first ever (non formal) crit!

observation of different ground patterns:

final images:

Eleanor Clarke, the story of a woman who spent all of her money trying to become published so in turn pushes herself into poverty to fulfil her dream. She carries her personal belongings around in carrier bags, appreciating the small things in life whilst also collecting spare change which will allow her to post her letters that week. Her eyesight is poor but with her thick rimmed, well magnified glasses she can see things infront of her very closely. She watches Jeremy Kyle through shop windows and is disgusted by the kind of people who can capture an audience with a story as she believes her stories are much better. She looks at 'real life' and daily stories magazines about celebrity gossip and made up ""real life"" stories but she doesn't care about those things- she is looking for her name to come up in submitted stories column but it never does. She never makes eye contact with anyone, more like she slumps and scrapes her feet on the floor heavy with her own disappointment. The last two images are of her posting her letter for a possible competition and the other is her route map around Norwich. When I was constructing this investigation I found out that different WHSmiths has different stock so there was a possibility that she got moved or that a magazine she posted her work to was no longer stocked at the first whsmiths.

During the crit day we had to get into groups of 8 and show our work and each member of the group got to choose their favourite to present to the class and mine got chosen!!! My tutors were very nice and complimentary about it saying that they liked the character + the perspective.