Paints

This is a contact sheet consisting of photographs of all the paintings I have made over the course of this project. The majority of them are A1, and then A2, with a few A3 and A4 sheets scattered amongst them. Whoah!

-HJ x

Oops...

Let's look at the state of my room for a moment.


Uh oh.

-HJ x

Armed with a straw...

I really really really wish I'd thought about doing this technique earlier in this project, rather than a week before because damn, I really love the results of these images. Essentially, it's just food dye on paper with me chasing it around with a straw. I got so light headed but it was completely worth it. I actually love these pictures a lot.




I was feeling a little creative here, clearly and decided to MIX COLOURS. This one with the red and blue is definately my favourite, because there are some gorgeous transitions of the colour in there. I know that's not what I'm supposed to be focusing one but still, I love it.

I love the mash up in this, and the green that's appearing when the two colours meet.





-HJ x

Bubbles

This was an interesting idea, and one that I wasn't entirely sure would work, but there you go. Also, I had to hunt down some bubbles in Leeds, which is a lot harder than I imagined and I ended up having to pay a pound per pot. That's wild! I was not impressed. Either way, I mixed quite a lot of food dye in with the bubbles and hoped for the bed, and this is what happened. I only had three pots of bubbles too so I had to select what colours I would use, and I chose red blue and green. I would have chosen red blue and yellow, all primaries, but I wasn't sure how well the yellow would show up. So instead, we have RBG.




It was a pretty messy process, but it's something that I've wanted to try out for a while, and that was my chance. Some pretty interesting results, and it didn't ruin my carpet at all, which was most excellent!

-HJ x

Glitter.

Never. Again.

I've never has such a disaster as working with glitter in all my life. We had a crit for what is line last week, and someone suggested glitter, and I was like, great! because I had some and that could look really cool. So I went about it, and it was going well and I had a few things done.

Anyway, I couldn't get the lid off this one pot, and I was like, wrestling with it, and then it popped off and flew everywhere and I think I inhaled half of it. I'm going to be sneezing rainbows for a while, no joke.

Everywhere. I had to fetch the hoover out. I stopped working with it after that.

This is one of the pieces that I managed to successfully do before the Great Glitter Disaster of 2009.

Glue on brown paper becomes...
GLITTER FEST. Now, it looks really pretty but it was completely messy and so not worth me glittering up the insides of my lungs and stuff. But aw. Sparkley.


-HJ x

Damien Hirst

Personally, I'm not a Damien Hirst fan, but I do like the 'In a spin' series that he's done. It's currently on exhibition in the uni, on the floor below where I'm sitting right now actually, and I like it. Even if the writing on them does look like it's been done by a five year old.

It's a very simple technique of just dropping ink and paint onto a piece of paper that's sitting on a turning table, or something. Like one of those pottery wheels.

Anyway, it fits in with my project because of the fact that the images were created by not touching the paper.

And they're aesthetically pleasing.

-HJ x

MOAR PAINT.

That's right! More paint. Though this time I thought, I know, I'll try a bit of Jackson Pollock and get some emulsion. It did not work. It wasn't half as runny as it seems when you're trying to paint a wall, and took quite a bit of force to shake it free of the brush. It took a while to dry too, but interesting results. Though my arm was tired after.

I wonder what kind of paint Jackson Pollock actually used.

[EDIT] Apparently he used gloss paint! Which is equally as useless when I tried to do it.


And more goes at poster paint onto coloured paper. I didn't so much let it drip this time and drop it onto flat paper from a height. I like it, it's pretty.



-HJ x

Fail.

One thing that I have discovered does not work, during my experimentation with paper types, is using greaseproof paper. Now I know, the clue essentially should be in the name of the paper itself, but I thought I'd try it, because you know, it's an experiment.

Anyhow, I taked some up, set the paint going and thought, that looks cool, because it wasn't so much drying on the paper as just sliding down it. But eventually it dried, and I took it down, laid it on the floor and stuff.

When I went to pick it up to put it in my bag for the crit, all the paint just like...popped free of the paper. It was dried to itself in long strips, which are fragile, but stay together if you're careful. And I was just like, oh. Maybe not then.

-HJ x

How To

The latest brief is certainly an interesting one to say the least. We were all gathered in a room and asked to pick a number between 1 and 1000. And when we all had, Fred pulled out this Collin's 'Book of How To Do Just About Anything' and pulled out the sections our numbers were.

I got 'How to peel and mince garlic'.

I started by taking photos of the part of the garlic.



And then drawing them to the best of my ability.


The drawing below is off a 'lady garlic'. A joke as to what would 'lure' a piece of wild garlic in during my concept of 'hunting wild garlic' which I'll touch on later.


And at first, I was just like, ...aw man. Really, not the most interesting of things, but I seem to have picked up some decent ideas since, and am now working like a fiend on it.

An idea that I had was to literally show the steps of how to peel and mince garlic via illustration, and then put the images in the form of a chopping board or kitchen tiles. I want to put it in the context of the kitchen somehow.

My first step is crushing the garlic bulb. Now, I wanted to draw them in an older looking style using cross hatching like illustrations in old cook books. Now the image below, I drew it and inked it and though, wow, that looks like garlic, job well done. But I took it into the classroom to keep working on it, and everybody mentioned that it looks like, well, balls. To put it bluntly. And now the more I look at it, the more I see it, which sucks because I liked the image. Guess I'll do it again.The next step is peeling the indivisual cloves, as shown below.
And then mincing said cloves.
And putting it into your meal. Yum yum. Shame I can't cook.
Another idea I had was to illustrate the entertaining ways to crush a bulb of garlic. The image below of the steamroller is the first of such experimentations.
It's amusing, to say the least. I'll see where this goes. I do have until Monday, afterall.

-HJ x

Screen Printing at Blenheim Walk

Finally, we got an induction into the screen printing facilities at Blenheim Walk, which will save us having to walk all the way to Vernon Street whenever we wanna do something. It's much smaller, of course, so we had to do our inductions in small groups of six. It was pretty good though. Plus, there's a lot more variety at Blenheim, we can print onto fabrics and there are three amazing printers there, which can print onto canvas and stuff like that. I'm kind of excited about that. The lady who talked to us, Wendy, she seemed really nice too.

The first thing we did was choose pattern screens, we were printing onto simple cotton. there were some really interesting patterns to choose from. I didn't take my camera, or I would have taken pictures of the stages, but anyway.

We had to lay down the light colour first, because obviously, it's easier to print dark over light than light over dark. I chose yellow and purple, clearly an awesome combination.

Here is a scan of my pattern when it was finished. Lovely, huh? I really like it, even if it is a little crazy to look at. Like, whoah.

We then moved on to screen printing using the screen beds onto paper using a screen of a font that one of the members of staff had design. I'll upload this when I go and fetch it from the drying racks. Just know that it's lovely.

-HJ x

Painting with Glue.

I decided, as a part of my experimentation with seeing what marks I could make without touching the paper, to see what kind of affects I could make whilst painting with glue. It's only simple PVA glue, which I've had for a while, so I just thought, Sod it! Let's see what happens. Essentially, it goes on just like white paint, obviously.


But it's kind of runny, but not as much as paint, so I put the glue on while it was flat on the floor, and then tacked it up on the wall, after putting news paper down of course. It started to run before, which make some really interesting marks on the paper. It looks like of gross, but I really like the effect.
The most interesting thing is how it looks once it's dry.


Another interesting thing about working with glue is that it comes out a lot more...beady than paint? I'm not sure if beady is the word that I'm looking for, but it kind of spreads when it meets other lines and forms junctions of sorts. It looks really nice.


This is what I mean when I say that the glue is most interesting when it's dry. For this image I tacked a sheet of black paper up on the wall and just let the glue drizzle on down it. clearly, as it got thinner at the top it dried quicker and made this wierd, but awesome look. You can see the transition of the glue as it dries and gradually gets tackier as it goes down the paper.

I think that it's definately a worthwhile experiment with some surprising results.

-HJ x

What is Line?

Okay so, the direction for this project has changed after several spectacular failures in the department of working with light. I did a series of paintings using the gooey stuff from inside glowsticks, and I was like, right! And left them up to dry and went off to college. Turns out, as they dry, said gooey, glowing stuff soaks into the paper and disappears entirely, and not even UV light can bring it back again. I was most disappointed. What a wasted night.

So I decided to start working with regular paint, cause I know for a fact that it doesn't disappear overnight. I decided to see what kind of patterns I could make by letting gravity do it's work. I made at least 20 paintings, I'm not sure of the exact number, and they were mostly A1, a couple of A2's thrown in there. So, pretty big, and therefore difficult to photograph in a narrow hallway. Plus, they curled as they dried, but there were the best pictures that I could get of them, so please, don't judge.
The state of my room afterwards though, oh my God. Really should have tried harder with the newspaper behing them. There was paint EVERYWHERE. I washed it off as best I could, cause it was mainly posterpaint and watercolour. Now my walls just look really grubby. Oh well. It's an art student's bedroom, what do you expect?


Oi what a mess.

-HJ x

Lost Souls - Poppy Z Brite

Okay so, Lost Souls is pretty much my favourite book ever in the world. I love it so much. This si the cover on the book that I have, the one that Leigh is borrowing at the moment.
It's pretty bad quality a picture, but it was the best I could find. I would have scanned my own copy, but it's not in my posession at the moment.
During my Foundation course, we had to redesign the cover of a book of our choice, and I obviously chose this one. I had so much fun with it and really liked the outcome. I would show you a picture of the sketchbook that went with it, but it's back home in Grimsby, tucked under my desk. The thing was immense though, and weighed a ton.




This is the cover of the book that I designed for that project, and I really liked it. It was the result of lots of layering and blending and that's actually my eye, just tweaked a lot.

And then, on an adventure of surfing deviantART, I come across this. A Russian artist known only as fya-shellk as made her own copy of the book, complete with all her own beautiful illustrations.

I would pay good money to own oe of these, but unfortunately, it's one-of-a-kind, so I can't. Her work is completely beautiful though and it must feel so good to have such a unique copy of a favourite novel. I'm jealous, clearly, but I'm very impressed.

Here are a few examples of the double page spreads inside the book.

:[. Want.

-HJ x