Visual Language Evaluation

1. What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

I have definitely gone back to my fine art roots within this module when it comes to my What is Line project. It was the chance to go back and do something that I used to enjoy doing a lot.

As for the session work during visual language, I have gained skilled in perspective. I've touched on the subject before but not in great detail and we looked at it in a lot more depth with Lorenzo this time around. I have learnt about icons and schematics and how the simplest way is often the best way. It has taught me a lot about breaching the language barrier and making things universally understood.

2. What approaches to/methods of research have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

I definitely just started exploring lines as soon as I got the brief and then the research came afterwards when I had more of a definite direction that I was working in. When I had the right direction I researched into artists whose work applied to my own. Experimentation definitely came before in depth research.

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalize on these?

Experimentation is definitely a strength of mine. I had fun with this project and it was the chance to go back to something I used to do a lot of and have no time for anymore.  Experimenting definitely helped me decide the direction in which my work was going.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?

Apparently I'm incapable of being able to lay down enough newspaper to not wreck the carpet in my room.

I spent a lot of time on the experimentation and the fact I did little to no research before I started is a weakness.

5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

1. Research first, it'll probably make life easier.

2. Spend less time mucking around.

3. Lay down more newspaper and not wreck my room.

4. Use all the time that was given to me and start right away.

5. set a specific amount of time aside per week to work on Visual Language.

6. How would you grade yourself on the following areas.

Attendance: 2

Punctuality: 2

Motivation: 3

Commitment: 3

Quantity of work produced: 5

Quality of work produced: 4

What is Line Statement

'A mark indicating position, connection or boundaries.'

What is line resolution

I decided to put my paintings and my what is line exploration into context by creating a HOW TO craft book for parents to do with their kids.

The audience of the book is the parents of the children, and not the children themselves because the majority of crafts within the book should be done under parental supervision.

I looked at lots of different stocks to print the pages out onto like tracing paper, sugar paper, brown paper...

But the book was really the clearest and the cleanest on white paper, so that's what I went with. I wanted the cover to be highly visible, so I used Magenta and Yellow to really make it stand out to attract attention of the people who pass it. 

The book is A5 and consists of eleven double page spreads with one craft idea on each. I am very pleased with the resolution. Wop wop!

 

I mentioned that I looked at the idea of printing this out onto brown paper, and I really liked the test piece that I printed out, so I decided to make a mini version of the book on brown paper, using both the stock and testing out another scale.

The book was very small, and pocket sized, but I think that it is too small and easily losable.

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

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

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

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

What is Line? UV.

More light experiments using UV!


My room all lit up in UV, how pretty.To be honest, being that I messed around with using light in the book project...I'm getting kind of bored with it. Sorry to say.

-HJ x

What is a Line? - Lightmark

The following images were created by Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke, and were found on a website called Lightmark. Their work often takes place in remote, sparse places, in which their beautiful trails of light often look very surreal and sometimes very alien looking.

Using this as inspiration, I plan to move away from creating letterforms and experiment more with shapes and curved lines to see what kind of outcomes I can come up with. I have chosen to look at this technique because it is an interesting way of 'painting' without actually making any marks.

-HJ x

What is a Line? - Kyle Webster

Kyle Webster is an artist I stumbled across whilst hanging out on ffffound.com. He has a blog called 'The Daily Figure' and obviously, he draws a figure a day, well, almost every day. It does almost exactly what it says on the tin. He uses no reference for these drawings, and completes them in a matter of moments. They are very simplistic and beautiful, almost using continuous line but not quite. He uses them as an exercise to perfect his develop his figure drawing skills.

I would love to be able to do an exercise like this to perfect my drawing skills, but at the moment I simply do not have time, and that sucks quite a lot. Another day, though.

-HJ x

Visual Studies

Okay! So in the first week back, during Visual Language we looked at Perstective and Tone with Lorenzo. Pretty cool. The first thing we had to do was try and create the perfect cube, as seen below. Mine is a little too tall, I think, it's very pointed towards the edge too, but still, not bad for a first attempt. Pretty good technique too, I'm gonna practice this one.


And then, from there, we had to do our initials, and using the same technique, make them 3D. Now, I only have two initials, so I added an A on the end for a little more practice. I think it turned out pretty good. I want some of these grey markers, they were pretty nifty.

And the week after we did perspective and tone, we were looking at schematics. I might have spelled that wrong. Anyway, I chose to illustrate the story of posting a letter in ocon form, making them as simple as possible. The journey goes as such. Put letter in envelope, write address, lick envelope, stick on stamp, bike to post box, post letter. Job done!

I think it worked well, because it was really easy to read the my classmates got what it was instantly, which was the goal. I wanna work more with this kind of thing as well as refine this one. Maybe do it in Illustrator or something.

I'll post it on here when I do.

-HJ x