Tuesday 18th September - Workshops

Activity 3 - 3D (Morning)

 

First, Kim showed us the different kinds of wires that we could use to 'spot weld'. This is where you join 2 or more pieces of wire together in one place - it melts the wires together. The different kinds of wires were copper, silver and florist's wire (which is mainly used to display artificial flowers) and is really easy to shape. Copper wire is best for straight lines, silver wire is good for bold outlines and is moderately easy to shape.

I kind of lost interest when Kim was talking about the different kinds of wires and what they're most suited for.. I knew this was not a pathway that I would be delving into.

I chose to use the florist's wire at first to use to draw the pattern from the museum, so this way my work and ideas are continuous. It was really tricky and fiddly, and required a lot of patience. Lucky for me, thats one thing I have a lot of!

This is the process of which I made the wire drawing of the paisley flower one from the museum

 

The drawing was really detailed and curvy, as I like things to be small and detailed but this did not help the cause. It was difficult to draw with the florists wire. I only did most of the outlines of the bigger shapes, as to make a shape, I had to cut the wire, bend it/twist it to the shape that I wanted, and then twist it around another piece of wire I had already shaped so it stays in place. So, as I was doing this, the wire was bending out of shape, so I had to keep reshaping my drawing.

After I made the pattern, I thought I had finished but Kim wanted me to stop being a wimp and have a go at using the spot welder and the copper wire so I used the welder to make a frame for the pattern. It was sparky and made me jump, but other than that, I didnt mind it. I then attached the pattern to the frame with some florists wire so the pattern was in the middle of the frame.

 

I enjoyed this workshop, and would like to use florists wire again for other, less detailed drawings. I didnt think I would because i havent really done 3D before, and other than using the florists wire I have no interest in this area.

There were some 3D artists that I found to be interesting, one of those being Jean Tiguely.

 

Tinguely's fantasy machines with pre-programmed elements of chance, the so-called "Métamatics", are quite spectacular. They are machines producing drawings, or self-destructive machines. His welded iron constructions represent ironic attacks on the purpose of the era of technology.

Another of the 3D artists whose work I admired is Antony Gormley.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside." His work attempts to treat the body not as an object but a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical — a trace of a real event of a real body in time.

This is one of those artists whose work is looked at and started at in awe. It is left to the viewer to interpret it's meaning.

 

 

 

 

Activity 4 - Visual Communication - Drawing and Reproduction (Afternoon)

 

Ideally for this workshop, it would have been better if I had taken my own image to use but as I didnt have one, I started off by looking through a Vogue magazine for an image to trace as that is the first thing that we had to do. I found an image of a model from MIU MIU dated 23-26th May 2012 - it was an image of a model who is wearing a suit with a repeated pattern all over it.

This really appealed to me as I like patterns and it kind of follows on from the museum work that I started because that was about pattern.

I traced it onto tracing paper, including lots of detail of the clothes, and all of the small patterns on the clothes that the model was wearing. Then I traced my drawing onto a page in my book using something called CARBON PAPER. This was used for typewriters originally, but these days not many people have them anymore and it is now difficult to get hold of.

 

The tracing I did in my book using carbon paper looked like I had done it with pen - it is really dark and bold. At first, I didn't really like it as I felt it was too dark, but then the more I looked at it, the more I began to see how it stood out againt the white page.

 

 

Then, Jo photocopied my tracing and the original picture onto acetate and paper, changing the scale on some of the photocopies so I could experiment further with the images. I used one of the photocopied images to apply PVA glue to and stuck it onto some thick canvas fabric. This process is called IMAGE MAKER. The glue transfers the image onto the fabric. I didn't think this technique would work because Jo had said that there was something actually called image maker that could be used but was too expensive and PVA did just as good a job. I had to wait until it was fully to see the results, after I peel the paper away.