Still Life Evaluation.

My first project at Blackburn college was still life, it was….boring looking at just like bowls of fruit and stuff BUT (stay with me here..) the stuff I learnt during like this….moth and a half? has been so beneficial and I’m so grateful. Ive took part in textiles, photography, graphics, art history, 3D,print making and fine art, its been amazing to learn how to weve, how to actually look at an object and draw it, make a plaster cast or learn how to use a proper camera and not some petty Nikon. I love this course and what its taught me. Im going to run through some of the stuff ive experienced and what mediums I’ve used in this course and just talk you to death!

Art History.

Not to my taste, don’t get me wrong.. I love learning about other people but sticking to the curriculum and doing it old school can be quite tedious, luckily our we have this sweet teacher who makes it interesting and drags me of my daydream unicorn and back into her classes. We’ve been discussing the works of Picasso one of the world’s greatest and though provoking artists. I love it. Hes one to step outside the syllabus at school and treat the world as a rubix cube, changing it, angle by angle. When you look at some of his work, it kind of looks like he’s scrunched up a piece of paper and pulled it apart slightly but haven’t flattened it out so it all disfigured but you can see where they should join up. We have also been looking at how we analyse a piece of artwork by the basic colour, tone, texture, line, structure and composition. It’s a good skill to learn because when I used to look at artists I used to just look at colour and line but there is so much more to a piece of work and seeing all this can help you understand the artist and work in the style of that artist.

Photography.

Oh my lord…. The guy who teaches this (Carlton). He’s hilarious, but he’s a good teacher in that he doesn’t take any shit and when it comes to your work, you do it, and then the banter comes. He showed us how to focus and see what different lenses and focusing it right. I loved learning this as photography has always been in the back of my mind but haven’t wanted to pay the price for a good camera..so I did an experiment with the camera on a IPhone 3g to see if the picture quality was just as good, see for yourself as they are all displayed in my book, I was impressed though, the fine quality from the spikes on a brush to drop of corrosion on a wheel barrow all basic subject matter, just things I found in my back garden but quite interesting what pictures and angles I got.

Print Making.

KIM. I love Kim. So funny but again doesn’t take no shit at all. She taught us about lino printing…. Now ive done this before and I didn’t like it that time aswel...(messy) But I love the end result, we have such a good printing press tthat you can get such good detail from barely any ink. I printed on loads of different textures, from foil to netted material, I loved the experimenting and the worker, jumpsuits we had to wear.

Fine Art.

See… its difficult to judge because it’s so wide what you can do in fine art, but it’s the top one for learning vauble, key skills in art, teaches you how to look at things and not just to take one look then make the rest up, you have to look at things properly and never take your eyes off it, your eyes shouldn’t look at your page for more than two seconds really, and im the worst at this because im constantly comparing, judging and criticizing my work, my confidence hit rock bottom in my a levels because I had a PE teacher teacheing me…because he broke his leg. So coming to Blackburn was a shock to see how wrong I was doing it and how right others had learned already, but with the amzing teaching that mark does where you do it or you don’t, has made me step up and focus, I have my occasional strops but then when he doesn’t care I get back on with it. Ive been recently struggling with proportions, im quite black and white and just draw what I see and not the actual size of it, so we had to measure up with our eyes and thumb you go to a full arms legth out, squint at your ruler, move your tumb along until you’ve got themeasurement and draw a line on the page, you slant your ruler at the same slant move it across to the page (making sure your don’t move the angle) and dra the lines, its planning with out detail. I just couldn’t seem to do it, but practise makes perfect and its definitely a working progress with me. We used so many different mediums in fine art, ink with sticks, conticrane, oil pastel,acrylic paints,handwriting pens with water, and pencil, I hate sing oil pastel as its just hard work, it doesn’t smudge to well, you cant blend without it being thick, and I hate the texture of it. But mark showed me to just use it lightly, that controls it more. I liked using the hadwirtting pens a lot, I love the look it gives, like a water pool mirror on the base of your drawing when you add water. Contricrane it weird… I don’t understand really, looks great on black paper but it between a pencil and charcoal and I can’t find it a good tool to use as of yet really, love sing ink, its delicate and light but you have to weary of how you applying it, using the sharpish sticks was a good idea as sometimes you got a grainy effect of the wood and looked lovely.

3D.

Aw, mamma Joe. The mother of the class, not saying she’s easy, she makes you work but keeps you in line and makes sure work gets done. In 3D we have been exploring DEAD BIRD SKULLS. Enough to make me up chuck when I first saw them… they don’t smell or anything…but they’re dead... We studied and sketched them and then decided to make a 3D model of one from just rolled up newspaper and gum strip. The biggest test on patience for the whole of the class and Joe.  The rolling one the newspaper was quite testy just because it had to be really tight. Then you just moulded them like wire, but it’s a little hard because rolled newspaper is not as flexible and wire and when bent can create a kink and not a nice, soft curve. We secured the model with gum strip and then painted it white with emulsion paint for a finishing touch, mine was…okay but wasn’t like; knock you off your feet good. But I loved learning how to make stuff out of a common household newspaper…the gum strip? Not so common or household. We also made a plaster cast on all objects that were symbolising us and some still life objects; this was interesting to learn as it makes a great effect once painted. The plaster can be quite temperamental when mixing it together, it sets really it’s and quickly so you need to get a move on with it, we mixed it with our fingers to get a feel for it. It sets by heating up and then cooling down and if you hover you hand above it while it’s setting you can feel the heat radiating off it. I loved learning about it and love the pop out and detail affects you get with it. A really quick and easy way to make an impact.

Textiles.

I LOVE TEXTILES. I do. Love it! I just love the fashion and home-made and lovely little knick knacks you can make in it. We learnt how to weave in textile with traditional weaving machines which looked like they were from a thousand years ago. We weaved cotton, plastic, rips, anything we could find. Textiles aren’t really linked to our projects, its kind of a side-line project on its own of just exploring new skills. I made a cotton weave that took AGES but look so cute and kind of looks like a little dolls house rug… I also made a circle weave out of plastic bags and zips which a later melted down with this mega hot hair dryer which made all the plastic shrink, I love the look of this. We also had a go at using sewing machines…so I’ve never used one of these and it was all going wrong! My cotton kept getting tangled I kept sewing the matial together and couldn’t do a straight line at all! So I went with what I could do and made shells….. I sewed different colours into each other and I’m quite impressed with my wrong but wright shells, if you have a look under, you will see where the excess material got accidentally stitched together. But I love it, I’m not a confident sketcher but I when I do textiles, it can be wonky and quirky because you’re not next an absolutely fabulous sketcher who can make a sketch look like a photo, you doing your own thing, in your own style and because there’s so many materials and styles, it can be your own.

Graphics.

Nope. I don’t like it. I don’t like macs. I don’t like the fact you can’t do it at home because you have to fork out a tonne for Photoshop, where’s the student discount? But yeah…I’m not a technology tool… I can’t work macs but luckily, the light of my life Mandy shows me. So in graphics we have been looking through Photoshop and what tools they’re are and just generally getting used to macs, we’ve also set up a blog http://bethanycobbart.blogspot.co.uk/ feel free to have a look. I didn’t get started on this until late because I couldn’t log in for a while…blonde moment but hey all set and with a cheesy playlist to sing to your heart’s content. So, the photoshop thing…we had to use the pictures that we took with Carlton in photography and add textures, effects and colour to them just faffing around with what we knew how to use or what Mandy had shown us. I can’t really rave about it as it’s just not for me but I’m very grateful for being taught it as I may need it in the future. I love the blog idea, as I’m always typing away I can just transferred whatever I’m thinking on my blog, it’s a little harder uploading work as my phone sometimes doesn’t always want to put my pictures on. 

This is a post on photoshop related things i've been doing.
Not a big fan with photoshop, its amazing but, its too complex. So i've had help on earning my way around it and how to use basic tools. We had done scanning, cropping, working with layers and adding color, filters, effects and how to take screen shots.

First we scanned a picture, sketch, painting in to the mac, something low color to mess around with. We scanned it using image capture.The image size was 150 dpi.

Then we cropped the photos and re-sized our scans. To crop, we used the cropping tool of photoshop, and to re-size a file, you go onto photoshop, image size, then the lock sign at the side of the width and hight will change all the sizes automatically to keep it all the same resolution and clarity. We changed our resolution to 150pixels/inch, then the width and hight move to fit the image size.

This is your layer box, it guides you through using different layers and if your are on the right layer, the eye is to hide certain layers.

To create a new layer go to layer at the top of photoshop, a drop down bar will appear with the option 'new; click on that and to change the name double click the name and type in the desired name.

To get cool effects on your file, you click filter and you get a drop down bar of names of different files of effects just click on them, e.g artistic, then it will take you to a second bar for a wider choice.

Taking screen shots on an apple mac, you use command,shift and 3 to take a shot of the whole screen then to shoot a selected area, press command, shift and 4 and drag to where you need. Then it will appear on the desk top.