Practice in Context 2

Print Making

I always look forward to going to the print room, but when i get in there all ideas drain out of me.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-larry-gagosian-s-lawsuit-over-a-100-million-picasso-explained

I found this article on artsy that really helped me with what prints I could do in my classes with Darren.

Screen Printing

Screen printing is arguably the most versatile of all printing processes. It can be used to print on a wide variety of substrates, including paper, paperboard, plastics, glass, metals, fabrics, and many other materials. including paper, plastics, glass, metals, nylon and cotton. Some common products from the screen printing industry include posters, labels, decals, signage, and all types of textiles and electronic circuit boards. The advantage of screen printing over other print processes is that the press can print on substrates of any shape, thickness and size.

A significant characteristic of screen printing is that a greater thickness of the ink can be applied to the substrate than is possible with other printing techniques. This allows for some very interesting effects that are not possible using other printing methods. Because of the simplicity of the application process, a wider range of inks and dyes are available for use in screen printing than for use in any other printing process.

 

 

 

This time round I learnt how I could build my own plates. I enjoyed doing this because it gave me the freedom to play with my ideas. The process is really easy and simple, but i did forget that if I wanted to put lettering into my work that I needed to do it backwards so when I printed it it would be the right way on the paper.

Dog Boy

 

 

Philip Huntington, also known as Dogboy, is a graduate from Camberwell College of Arts who often incorporates screen print and digital methods together. A series of his detailed and fantastical illustrations is a result of his close observation and experiments in anthropomorphic worlds. Currently, he is part of Dark Matter Collective where he produces limited edition screen prints, drawings self-published zines and numbers of ephemera.

 

 

Jim O’Raw

 

A print maker, contributor and in-house artist of People of Print, Jim O’Raw has worked alongside our director, Marcroy Smith, for over half decade. With his distinct style of using fluro colours in a CMYK process, Jim’s artwork promises to be original and provides the feel of looking at faded film-developed photos.

Printing 1: screen printing, block printing and photocopying

Screen printing

The screen is made from a fine mesh material fixed to a wooden frame. A stencil is placed under the screen and ink forced through the stencil onto the material below. Screen printing with stencils is best for blocks of colour.

1. Mesh is stapled to a wooden or metal frame
2. Masking tape stuck around underside of the screen
3. Stencil design cut
4. Stencil placed under frame but above paper
5. Line of ink placed at one end of screen
6. Use squeegee to draw ink across screen, pressing firmly
7. Carefully lift screen
8. Evaluate and repeat

Screen printing is used to print small runs of posters, display boards, fabrics, wallpaper and control panels of electronic products.

Block printing

Shapes are cut into blocks made of wood, metal or linoleum. Ink is applied to the block, and the block is pressed onto paper.

Block prints can be quite detailed if the block is well made, but normally only one colour is used. The process is good for making positive and negative images and repeating patterns.

Block printing is used to print small and medium sized runs of greetings cards, wallpaper, paper tablecloths and similar products.

Photocopying

Photocopiers can enlarge and reduce images, and process paper, card and clearacetate. Different paper sizes can be used. They can also be used for back-to-back copying and to collate multiple copies.

Colour photocopiers give good results but the copies are more expensive.

Lithography

A printing plate with a relief image is dampened with water and then coated with ink. The ink only sticks to the parts of the plate that are not wet with water. The printing plate is fixed to a roller and the image is transferred onto paper fed under the roller.

In offset-lithography, the paper does not come into direct contact with the printing plate. Instead, the image is transferred to a rubber roller.

Lithography is used for medium and long print runs of products such as magazines, posters, packaging and books.

Sculpture

 

 

“Installation art” is a term applied to room-sized works of art that are large enough for the viewer to enter. While the term has been in use since the end of the 1980s, large-scale spatial works appeared sporadically in Europe beginning decades earlier and have been retroactively seen as precursors of this contemporary practice. In the 1960s and 1970s, a few scholars began to identify an increasing tendency for artists to create room-sized works of art. They variously called these works environments, art spaces, or situations and proposed art historical lineages for them, particularly the work of the Italian Futurists, El Lissitzky, and Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau. Initially the utopian ideals that led De Stijl and Russian Constructivist artists to create three-dimensional environments were cited alongside the gestures of Dada artists and Marcel Duchamp. A distinction between the latter and Modernist sources is more evident in recent scholarship. By the end of the 1990s, there were a considerable number of artists producing installation art in Europe and the United States, and the literature soon caught up, growing rapidly in the first decade of the 21st century. Initially, emphasis in the literature was on installation art’s formal qualities. Encyclopedias and glossaries of art identified ephemerality and response to the characteristics of a physical site as its key characteristics. However, this focus shifted as installation artists increasingly began engaging with cultural and social contexts, expanding the discussion of space to include these concerns. In recent years viewer participation has emerged as a central critical issue for installation art. While an emphasis on the viewer’s experience was discussed in response to some 1960s and 1970s installations, by the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, viewer participation was foregrounded as a major entry point for analyses, and recent scholarship has continued this trend. Installation art defies traditional divisions between specific mediums, which continues to earn it both support and criticism. As a medium it challenges not only critics but historians as well. Ephemeral in nature, installation art initially posed similar difficulties to the historian as performance and body art, leaving few material remains. This has changed to a degree, as installation art is no longer assumed to be uncollectible. Conservation and preservation issues have also captured significant attention in recent years. Projects involving the sharing of information by international teams of curators, conservators, and artists not only have addressed practical concerns but also have raised questions about the essence of an installation that was conceived for a given space at a particular moment in time. The debate on reinstallation is a testament to installation art’s challenging nature and is an important consideration for the art historian.

 

 

I decided to go into the workshop to make 10 maquette, I decided to work in the workshop because it is a quick and easy way to make maquette’s.

Here are the photos of my maquette’s my next step is to draw them.

 

 

Artists Known For Sculpture

One of the most famous sculptures of the High Renaissance is Michelangelo’s marble statue of “David” (1501-04), showing the muscular hero standing in repose after having slain Goliath. Other famous Michelangelo sculptures include “Pietà” (1498-99) and Moses (1513-15). King David was a favorite subject of other Italian masters, as the religious figure was also famously represented by Donatello and Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. The latter’s “David” (1623-24) is an energetic work, capturing the hero mid-action and encapsulating the dynamic spirit of the Baroque Era. Antonio Canova emerged as a major figure of neo-classicism for his works “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss” (1787-93) and “Perseus with the Head of Medusa” (1804-06). Auguste Rodin is credited with ushering in modern movements in sculpture with his highly emotive and naturalistic works “The Thinker” (1879-88), “The Kiss” (1889), and his controversial “Monument to Balzac” (1891-1898). The 20th century became a wellspring of experimentation. Picasso created cubist sculpture as well as “constructions” involving the assemblage of different materials and objects. Constantin Brancusi’s works like “Bird in Space” (1928) and Henry Moore sculptures such as “Reclining Figure” (1951) and “Stringed Figure” (1937) were forerunners of abstract, minimalist, surreal, and geometric sculpture, while Dada works such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) and Andy Warhol’s pop-art piece “Brillo Boxes”(1970) challenged notions of what objects were acceptable as art. Some renowned contemporary sculptors include Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley, and Takashi Murakami. 

WALTER DE MARIA

 

KOO JEONG A

Since the early 1990s, Koo Jeong A has made works that are seemingly casual and commonplace, yet at the same time remarkably precise, deliberate, and considered. Her reflections on the senses incorporate objects, still and moving images, audio elements, and aromas within site-specific environments that question the limits of fact and fiction, the imaginary and actuality of our world.

In realising her spaces and images, she draws from a wide spectrum of concerns which she developed over the years, ranging from human cognition to the philosophy of Taoism, and from the science of Qi to the interaction of natural elements such as earth, fire, metal, water, and wood. In her environments, nothing is merely ordinary; on the contrary, any material or phenomena—be it a mound of charcoal, a shaft of iron, or a glare of sunlight—is endowed with dignity and reverence and incites the surprise of a discovery. To venture near Koo Jeong A’s work is to travel unreservedly through a cosmos of unassuming large and small forms, mysterious dwarfed spaces, and perilous landscapes of memories.

 

The human experience has always included the creation and appreciation of art. But different types of art are often used in different ways because of the varying feelings they evoke. Sculpture is bold and noticeable. And in that sense, it’s often used as an announcement or declaration of honor. Think about the Lincoln Memorial, which depicts Abraham Lincoln sitting grandly atop a throne. He’s meant to be remembered as a figure that held this nation together in times of distress.

On the same token, the Washington Monument is more of an abstract honor. It’s magnificent, but in more of a subtle way that allows you to interpret your own meaning.Abstract sculptures often allow for a variety of thoughts and emotions, which is why some prefer them to realistic sculptures.

Throughout history, sculptures have been used for ritual purposes. This is a significant way that sculptures differentiate themselves from other art types—they are more interactive on the human level since they are three dimensional works. There is evidence that the famous Venus statues were used in rituals that were meant to ensure good health and abundance for ancient people. The Mayans also left behind many intriguing statues of unknown ritualistic purposes.

On a more modern level, sculpture is used for learning. Art mannequins often provide basic reference for artists trying to learn the human figure. Seeing the figure in sculpture form helps the viewer get a better sense of all the shapes and how they look from different angles, as opposed to the one perspective that a static picture can provide. Mannequins are used in shop windows to model clothing and jewelry, which is another use of sculpture in the contemporary world.

All art forms provide us an escape from what we know as reality. Sculpture tends to do this on a more personal level because it’s closer to something we know. It’s a similar representation of the way we live and how our senses interpret the world around us. The beautiful thing is how each one of us sees art and sculpture in different ways.

 

 

A sculptor can achieve his desired results by either subtractive techniques (i.e. chipping or carving material away, as with stone or wood) or additive techniques (i.e. adding material, as with clay or wax). Once the desired form is achieved, depending on the medium, the sculpture is either complete or extra processes are required. If the sculptor is creating a cast metal work (such as a bronze), a cast must be made of the sculpted model (usually made of wax) and molten metal poured inside the mold. Such methods include lost-wax casting, investment casting, and sand casting. Artists may create free-standing sculptures “in-the-round,” or reliefs—a sculpture that projects (in varying degrees) from a two-dimensional surface. Some works, such as assemblages, are created from found objects which are fused together by the artist to create the desired composition. Other works known as kinetic sculptures involve an element of physical motion, either naturally or artificially generated.

Video

Tuesday 24. November.2015

After seeing Mark the first time a couple of weeks ago, we were told to gather footage and bring it in with us for today. Here are some screen-grabs of some of the things I’ve been doing with my footage today.

 

In Adobe® Premiere® Pro, you can use an adjustment layer to apply the same effect to multiple clips on the Timeline. Effects applied to an adjustment layer affect all layers below it in the layer stacking order.

You can use combinations of effects on a single adjustment layer. You can also use multiple adjustment layers to control more effects.

Adjustment layers in Premiere Pro behave similarly to the adjustments layers in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects.

 

 

You can add an effect to an adjustment layer, like a tint or color correction effect, and then re-size it. The technique allows you to highlight an area of the screen.

• Double-click the adjustment layer in the Timeline display area.

• Drag the anchor point in the center of the screen to re position the adjustment layer, and then drag the edge of the clip to scale it down.

   

 

Using an adjustment layer, you can apply the same blend mode and opacity adjustment to a range of clips. Do this in Premiere Pro by changing the blend mode under Opacity in the Effect Controls tab of the adjustment layer.

This technique is equivalent to duplicating a clip in a video track over an existing clip, and then changing its blend mode.

 

 

Whilst playing around with things today on premiere pro, I feel a lot more confident today about making a video than I did last year and I think that’s because i have a better grasp on things this year and i am not scared to play.

I spoke to Mark about what sort of audio I would have on the video, we spoke about looping sounds, a little like what I did last year with the poem and my voice going over and over the video.

Looking at my video now, its quite grungy and a poetic piece would not work very well, so I though maybe it would be an idea to make my own music at how out of recordings of banging on things i find in the kitchen etc.

 

Tuesday 1.December.2015

 

After last week being a positive week I went home in a good mood and decided to take more footage that would enable me to carry on with my work this week. I decided to go with  a mouth shot because that was one of my ideas from the start. Looking at these photos here you can see just that. By layering and playing around with the colour, I have managed to create something beautiful, and I have managed to give it texture.

 

 

 

Jennis Cheng

Jennis Cheng is one of the artists that has inspired my video.

What’s that smell of rubbish? It comes from the edges of the streets, from stagnating rivers. But the web also has its own waste and Li Cheng Tien digs it out of the digital crevices, recycling it into art.

“Have a Nice Day” is an online project by Jennis Li Cheng Tien, who becomes the net’s dustman for the occasion and retrieves lost or reconfigured digital identities.

Photos which had got tangled up in the electrical cavities of frenetic servers dotted around the globe, which Jennis reprocesses with various types of digital distortions.

The artist, who is originally from Taiwan, dilutes the features of unrecognizable faces in watercolor brushstrokes or overlapping filters and pieces of pictures of natural landscapes like veils or layers of a new skin.

 

 

Illustrator and after effects

 

Adobe Illustrator and After Effects go hand in hand when creating classic vector motion graphic design. In this tutorial, we will walk through the basic process of how to prepare an Illustrator file, and how to then properly import & animate the file in After Effects. This tutorial also covers basic animation principles to achieve smooth and eased animation for vector objects.

 

 

So after making my shape on Illustrator and After Effects I layered it on top of some clips of my video. Here are some stills of what it did look like.

 

 

Tuesday 8.December.2015

 

 

So today is our last week with Mark, I decided to carry on and try and come to a conclusion with my video, which I am quite happy with. Unfortunately with there being so little time I didn’t manage to get a sound piece to go with my video but I am hoping in my own time to get this done.

 

 

Looking at my video, a poetic sound piece wouldn’t work with the ascetic I am going for. I am going to look at brash sounds, made from simple things such as using my lips to make a popping noise and distorting it using different software.

Brash Sounds

• BRASH (adjective)
The adjective BRASH has 1 sense:
1. offensively bold
Familiarity information: BRASH used as an adjective is very rare.

Background music plays a wicked important role in your video. It’s a powerful way to drive the video forward and create emotion around your message. However, choosing the right track for your video can get tricky.

 

Feelings

How do you want your audience to feel when they watch your video? Should they be excited about your new product launch? Warm and fuzzy from your customer testimonial? On the verge of laughing from your candid in-office culture clip? All of these feelings have styles of music that will help evoke a specific emotion.

Music licensing libraries like Marmoset and Tunefruit have emotional based meta-tags on their tracks like “empowering”, “playful” and “peaceful”. This feature is super helpful for finding a background track that elevates the emotional message of your video.

A great way to shop for songs is to split your screen up and try some out! In one window play your video without music. In another, test out some songs. This will help you find a match made in heaven.

Song form vs. video form

Most pop songs you hear on the radio have a pretty standard structure consisting of 4-5 parts (verse, pre-chorus, chorus, another verse, another chorus, bridge, and a massive double chorus to bring it home!). While you might pick a pop song that is stylistically and emotionally the right fit for your video, the transitions will probably not jive with your video’s narrative structure.

We recommend looping (repeating) sections of the song to better fit the flow of your video. When it comes to background music, you can repeat things more than you think. Don’t be afraid to loop the verse, cut the bridge, cut the last chorus, etc.

Avoid corny digital instruments

If you’re looking for an organic-sounding song with acoustic instruments like acoustic guitar, piano, or indie rock drums, make sure you find a track that has the real thing. Although some high end samples sound amazing, digital versions of acoustic instruments often make a recording (and ultimately your video) feel corny and dated.

Let’s say you’re looking for a song that kind of sounds like Mumford and Sons… put on your headphones and listen to some Mumford and Sons! Open up “Little Lion Boy” in one window, and your music site in another, then compare and contrast the sonic qualities between the recordings. It won’t take long before you can tell the difference between the good, the bad, and the corny.

Keep background music in the background

In a lot of cases, good background music is the music that you didn’t even notice. So if someone’s talking on screen, don’t let the music get in the way.

Watch out for songs that have sonic elements that compete with the human voice. Obviously vocals and group whoa-ing fall into this category, but poppy piano melodies and even whistling are also elements that will compete with the human voice.

After trying different sounds out, using brash and industrial sounds and looping them over my video, I wasn’t really happy with it. It didn’t seem to come together as one piece and I felt like the sound piece and video piece were too completely different things.

So after coming to this conclusion I decided to go with the more elegant piece of sound try that out and see how that worked. I watched my video over and over layering different pieces of sounds. The more elegant pieces seemed to work better, the sound and video linked.

 

 

Tony Oursler

 

 

 

Always rooted in the medium of film, Tony Oursler conjures sculptural and immersive experiences using technologies that hark back to magic lanterns, Victorian light shows, camera obscura and auratic parlour tricks, but that also look forward to the fully networked, digitally assisted future of image and identity production. As a pioneer of video art in early 1980s New York, Oursler specialised in hallucinogenic dramaturgy and radical formal experimentation, employing animation, montage and live action: “My early idea of what could be art for my generation was an exploded TV.”

 

From performative and low-fi beginnings, Oursler has developed an ever-evolving multimedia and audio-visual practice utilising projections, video screens, sculptures and optical devices, which might take form as figurative puppets, ethereal talking automatons or immersive, cacophonous environments. His enduring fascination for the conjunctions between the diametrically opposed worlds of science and spiritualism have allowed him to explore all kinds of occult and mystical phenomena, employing not just smoke and mirrors, but playing the role of circus showman and extricating the sham from the shaman. Oursler’s aesthetic and interactive technomancy reveals not only the ghosts in the machine, but the psychological impact of humanity’s headlong dive into cyberspace.

 

 

Hanna Greenhalgh

Ba Fine Art

https://hannagreenhalgh.wordpress.com/practice-in-context-2/

An artist’s words are always to be taken cautiously. The finished work is often a stranger to, and sometimes very much at odds with what the artist felt, or wished to express when he began. At best the artist does what he can rather than what he wants to do. After the battle is over and the damage faced up to, the result may be surprisingly dull—but sometimes it is surprisingly interesting.

On a basic level, my work is an attempt to transform ordinary matter in to something extraordinary, to bridge the conceptual realm to the material world.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this module, and I believe it has helped my studio practice, giving me a better look and ideas of what I can use.

By playing around with making maquettes and using different materials in different ways it has opened my eyes to what does work together and what doesn’t work.

Bringing history into my work helped me to create an installation. Very simple but effective way.

I felt like I thrived in my video module and I felt like I could communicate clearly with the software. Once I realized this, that’s when I really express my total creative freedom. Video is a really simple and beautiful way of showing your work to on-lookers. I enjoyed manipulating the footage and sounds. Playing around with different effects.

Screen-printing offers a seamlessness that allows imagery to be peeled away from its original sources and built into something else altogether.

After years of turning up to print classes and getting stressed out because I had no ideas and just feeling empty, I felt this time that I had finally found something that I could use over and over again, and be happy with the results.

I would have never of thought that something so simple could be so beautiful. Layering the colour’s one on top of the other. I finally found a way of using print in my studio work and it wasn’t an awful chore.

All in all as I said at the start I enjoyed all aspects of this module in one way or another and will definitely be using all aspects again in my studio work.

Putting the time and effort into finding what actually works for you is well worth it.