Evaluation

This evaluation is about observational drawings and development. This unit was really strange and alien to me at first, but later in the assignment I learned to enjoy it. Firstly it was quite strange since we had a live nude model coming in whom we had to draw from over and over again. The life sessions were fun, I think it was a new and really good experience that I do think doesn't happen too often. It seemed quite an easy project to start from.

I used different tools to draw with such chalk coal or just chalk which weren't new to me, but it was the first time I used it on a big scale which was numerous of A1 sheets. I have also used pencils and soft pastels at times. It was hard since when we started we didn't get much time for example a minute for a pose and there were quite few poses like that which came out really rough in my opinion still it was the poses I used in my developments and final piece. I also had to research the artists and some pictures of art works that I wanted to work from in the style of. I chose Samuel Durkin who is an amazing artists that produces beautiful pieces of art. I mainly focused on that artists because it was tricky enough so I wanted to focus on one technique to work from.

My final painting consists of a base which was done to an almost black, very thick colour using primary colours blue, yellow and red. After that has dried a little I painted only the lighter areas that I wanted. So whatever I wanted darker I didnt paint over with lighter and brighter colours. My focus when it comes to colours were warm colours. The reason for that is because from the start of my development I found the red/yellow warm background goes the best. So I started building colours on top of eachother starting from light yellow and white to orange, magenta and red. After I have done that and painted all the light areas i wanted to be light I used a wash and painted a thin water based colour on top which really blurred it which I really liked. After that I added the finishing touches which were more tones of different colours on the figure and i also blurred the arms a little so they blend well with the background. The pose was one of the most common poses that I mainly used through out the development so I decided to stick with it.

This final piece was one of the hardest to come up with, I have done 3 other art pieces that I thought are going to be my final but weren't. I am happy I went through all the frustration of finding a painting technique that will work well because I am happy with the end result. I am happy about the fact that I experienced new things such as working on easel as well as drawing a life model. If I had more time I would have definitely researched more artists so that I can experiment more, but over all I'm happy with the work I produced and with the different stages I went through my developments.

My inspiration for the final piece: Samuel Durkin reasearch and opinion

My inspiration for my art work was by an artist called Samuel Durkin. He is a British artist born in Portsmouth,England. He grew up in a small town of  Oxford shire called Wallingfor. He was surrounded by art works since his mother who has done many art movements such pointillism  realism as well as expressionism. He went to Bournemouth and Poole art college to study art. He had some health problems but even then art seemed to be the one thing he concentrated on. He learned about a lot of painting techniques looking for his own style, and I think he got it. He had some heart problems but he still found himself painting whenever he possibly can.

His movements are a mixture of impressionism as well as abstract. But no matter how abstract he went he always wanted the paintings to be not so abstract that you couldn't see what he wanted to achieve. Many times he kept painting over and over again on one canvas to create a very thick colour for his base which he mainly used three primary colours: cyan, magenta and yellow. He thought that with the base of these colours its easy to show the vibrancy of his final work. He mainly used bigger flat brushes doing his work to achieve more rough, not so precise brushmarks which I also tried using in my final piece to achieve a very nice, unique style.

He was inspired by many famous artists such as Piet Mondrian and the famous piece of his called Vond (Evening); Red Tree as well as the later cubist art works such as Composition with Red Blue Yellow which is also very famous. He was also inspired by Claude Monet but that was earlier in his work. He is known by his nude painting as well as cityscapes but he has also painted animals. He believes that his art work is still to be developed and the way he paints now has been developed from many experimentations and art works as well as influences from other artists.

 In my opinion he is an amazing artist that should get some more credit for his work since he isn't so known. He has this unique style of painting that I really liked. I think it was very hard for me to understand the technique he has painted his art works in but that's why I developed through quite a few stages finding out my style that would be inspired by Samuel Durkin. So now I understand why its so good and useful to experiment with your art work because you never know when you going to like what you produced.

About and how I developed my final piece

My first painting was an experiment in the technique that I wanted to do my final piece in. I used warm colours which were yellow and red which i mixed and got orange from it. For the background and it was done using a palette knife as well as for the outline of the figure that I painted. Using a palette knife was quite tricky since i could pick up a lot of paint unless i used it sideways but for the background it was quite easy to use, but very hard, almost impossible to blend or get a smooth blended surface. I knew palette knife technique was going to be tricky.

Then my other experiments which were developed onward from the first experiment was a little different since I used a mixture of cold as well as warm colours to create a contrasting background. I have not use tonal value in my first experiments since i was using a palette knife. my brush/palette knife marks were a mixture of big and small, bigger for the background, smaller for painting the figure. I only used acrylic paint through out my developments but I also used a little of ready mixed paint.

For 2nd and 3rd of my experiments I have used a squidgy which helped me drag the paint out creating a hoped for abstract look in my painting. i used squidgy on a few of my developments but then i realized it wasn't the tool for me to use.

For the next development pieces I used different tools, firstly i started using a paintbrush. I used bigger and thicker ones and smaller ones. On my other experiment I used acrylic once again and a big flat paintbrush to create a green background. I'm not sure why green but I thought it would be quite nice to use a different - cold colour since i was using warm colours in my previous development pieces. I used black to outline and shade in the figure and then i used white to add the light areas and then I repeated the process with the white and the black to create tonal values.

The other piece which is really light, was done in the technique I wanted to do my final piece in. I basically painted a black background and left some white outlines for the figure, this time I used a different pose. after it completely dried I used a wash which was a really watery 'top coat' to get more natural blurred effect. I used a little white mixed with loads of water for that. after that i started painting everything on top white or really light yellow to get a very light and nice blended background. I added very light shades to the figure I done which I have done using bright colour such as yellow, pink, red, blue and purple mixed with loads of white so that the final developed piece is the closest to what I am going to make as my final piece.

For my first 'final artwork' I have went completely different direction since my paint dried out very fast so I had to do it again. Firstly the blending or wash didn't go well since everything dried very fast and after a was it was exactly the same. Then I wen't even further and added some abstract bubbles in the background which was even more weird and completely different to what I was planning to do, so that piece which was suppose to be my final piece turned out to be just another experiment with painting techniques. To me that was too precise, I wanted something more rough and textured.

Oliveira Bridge

This bridge was made in Brazil and was first opened in 2008. It is 5,200ft long and 453ft wide. It is a very unusual shape as it is similar to an 'X'. I think this is what this makes this bridge so awesome and unique. I think the design was very hard to make yet to construct it was even harder as the shape of the bridge is very different. I think there are loads of bridges that are very different and unique and I think this bridge falls into that category. Once again in the pictures the view you get at night with all the colours looks amazing.

Golden Gate Bridge

My opinion of this bridge is that its amazing. Especially through the night I guess as you can see it shining in golden that’s why this name was picked for it. Type of the bridge is the same as the Millennium Bridge its Suspension bridge. It crosses the Golden Gate ocean.

It was opened in May 1937 which was 74 years ago In

San Francisco, California! It carries Cars as well as pedestrians. I Think this bridge is brilliant, I really like the way its been designed and that its over 8000ft tall!

Norman Foster

Norman Foster was born 1^st of June in 1935 in Manchester, England. He is another famous British architect. He went to Manchester university school in 1961, after graduating he went to Yale University where he gained a masters degree in Architecture. Norman foster is a founder in Foster and Partners which was found in 1967. This company is spread through the world and has designed many famous buildings and bridges. Some of his famous bridges: Millennium bridge which is in UK, Arsta bridge which is in Sweden as well as Millau Viaduct which is constructed in France. He had an exhibition in UK called National Police memorial which was in 1996-2005.

My concentration of his work was the bridge that was designed and constructed in UK which is called Millennium Bridge. Official name for this bridge is London Millennium Footbridge. Is is a pedestrian bridge which crosses river Thames. It is very long (1,214ft which is equivalent to 370 metres long). The width of this bridge is 13ft (4metres). It was first opened in the middle of 2000 which was 2 months late then was planned and it is a type of a suspension bridge. The bridge was temporally closed in 2007 because of the Kyrill storm as they were worried that the pedestrians might be blown off.

I haven't seen the bridge live myself but I seen it in the pictures and I do think it was quite hard to design however I don't see it very interesting or unique its simple but I think that's exactly what they wanted for it to be simple but very well done. I do think however they did a very good job as it had many modifications which just shows how well they wanted it to work out at the end and to be as safe as possible.

Architects

Thomas Heatherwick

Thomas Heatherwick is a famous English Designer. He was born on February 17^th In 1970, He is 41 soon to be 42. He was born in London. He works In Heatherwick studio which was found in 1994. That's where he designed 'The Rolling Bridge'. Other key works of this architect are designs such as: The Seed Cathedral, also he designed the new bus for London, as well as the East Beach Café which is the building created in West Sussex, UK. Also he designed the sculpture in Manchester called B of the Bang. He Had an Exhibition in 2004 where he presented 1,000 everyday design objects that he has gathered.

Heatherwick designed a bridge called 'The Rolling Bridge' so I’m going to talk more about that. The bridge was made to carry pedestrians and was finished and constructed in 2005. It was Designed in Thomas Heatherwick studio and is a total of 39ft which is equivalent to 12 metres. It was a movable bridge and consists of 8 triangular sections joined to the walkway. It is made of steel segments, hydraulic actuators and lightweight deck. It allows the boats to pass safely as it curls up to an octagonal shape and once the boats have floated through the bridge extends and lets the passengers walk through. The bridge had some maintenance issues at around 2008, it had to be fixed and was fully operating again in April 2009. This bridge is known to be the only 'curling' bridge that exists.

My opinion on this bridge is just 'Wow'. Firstly because I never would have suspected or even though that this kind of bridge exists and yet it was already designed and constructed by this architect. I would love to see it sometime as it is in the London, UK. I think the idea of the bridge is really unique and one of a kind. I read that in Victoria era there was similar moving bridges, but none of them looked like this one.

CD Cover research

First album I have chosen is Rihanna's album which was released in 2009. It's called Rated R. The album cover was made by Simon Henwood. I think the most important part about this album cover is the fact that there aren’t any colours. This automatically shows that this album cover isnt meant to be about joy, happiness etc. its meant to show something like anger or depression. Well thats why opinion anyway. The R on the side is 3D and I think it gives a lot of definition and meaning to the cover of the album. The other text is the album title 'Rated R' in the bottom right corner. Its written in small and not really clear letters so the person can concentrate on the R and the picture on the cover. I really like this album cover, its different and interesting.

The musician of this album is Beyonce. The title of the album itself is called B'day. This album was meant to be released in 2004 although there was some delays and they first published it in 2006. The cover it self I really like. To me its like Nature like, before the picture and the background blend in well. The picture of Beyonce is really clear although the background is blurred so you get to concentrate on the musician. The writing is quite interesting as its not just simple letters, it elongates on the sides and the font isn’t just a simple one its more like script. The colour of the text is white I think its because they don’t want to distract listeners from the picture of the musician. I really like this one mainly because of the colours, its nature like really neutral and well composed together.

This third album cover is called Doo-Wops & Hooligans. The musician of this album is Bruno Mars and it was released in 2010. The cover designer was Nicki Bilardello although I’m not so sure it was her. This is one album I chose that is cartoon type, it doesn’t not have a real person picture like the 2 other ones that I talked about. The colours are quite funky as yellow really stands out. Its really interesting and unique I think as I haven't seen an album anything similar to this. The writing is in yellow but really faded yellow, its quite clear and bold. The album name however is really small and its quite hard to see it although it is in black and meant to stand out. I like this album because usually I like albums better when they have real photographs unlike this one which is cartoon-like.

Last but not least is another Rihanna's album. The title of this album is called 'Loud' and was released in 2010. The album cover was designed by Alex Haldi. I really like this album mainly because of the colours, the colours are mostly warm like red, pink although the shadows which meant to be black are blue/purple which tells us that there is also cold colours included. The really interesting part about this album cover is the fact that it is close up, so the photograph of Rihanna is really clear. The picture looks really gentle and works really well for an album cover in my opinion. The album name at the bottom is really thinly written although its quite big, I think once again they wanted to concentrate on the picture itself. I think it works really well and I like this album cover a lot. Well done Rihanna.

History of Alphabets

Roman Alphabet took over 4000 years of developing. First type of alphabet that was found was Proto-Sinaitic. There are many different alphabets even “syllabaries” which exist in the same family of scripts, although the Greek alphabet and Roman alphabet are most known. There is alphabets such as Samaritan which has a limited use however there are a lot of popular alphabets which are more common such as Proto-Arabic, Ugaritic, Ethopian, South Arabian etc. Proto-Sinatic (Proto-Canaanite) was formed about 3700 years ago when the workers of Sinai were under the powered by Egyptian rule. The alphabet started slowly develop over time. The Sinaitic script only had single consonants letters however hieroglyphs which had not single like Sinaitic script but multi consonant sings. This unusual method formed Proto-sinatioc which was related to Hebrew and Phoenician alphabet.

Looking at how this made the start of the alphabet not Egyptian hieroglyphs was the letter alpha. This word in Greek did not mean anything however in original West Semitic form 'aleph' had a meaning of “ox” so its not too hard to imagine letter A as the head of an ox. As well as 'aleph' the symbol of water was named mem (which is water in West Semitic) which we can imagine water wave in the letter M.

Nicolas jenson (1420-1480) began printing in Italy (Venice) with the original font from 1470s. Italic type was found and started in 1499. Over the years the fonts developed further.

Important part of the Historical alphabets are the Gutenberg Bible which is also known as 42-line bible. It is important because he invented lower and upper case letters and called them cast letters, so he placed smaller letters on lower case on the other hand upper case letters he placed on upper case. Historic period manuscripts were usually done and produced by a team of scribes and illustrators although the whole 'Lindisfarne Gospels was done by only one man. In this gospel he produced a lot of colourful and unique pages and gave it sense of design. His amazing skills are evident in every page of each gospel.

Evaluation for Image making

Firstly, I really enjoyed graphics project. My favourite part was of course the test pieces, for the final 4 images, looking at different artists, different techniques etc. I wasn't really clear what we had to do at the start because there was 2 projects that somehow were meant to join to one, so that really confused me however once I started doing it, once teacher helped me a little I started to get into it and actually enjoyed it. I do like fashion illustrations that could be another reason I liked doing these units.

I collected the information I needed for this project from internet, drawings, photos. I did research on a few different artists which I think was very interesting just finding out how artists work in different techniques. I was satisfied with my designs as well as my final piece because I thought its something I’m good at. I like working with colour. Some techniques were new to me such as working with ink. I did work with ink before but it was not that much and was never fashion related. I did of course struggle at some points like choosing different techniques for the test pieces, writing in really technical terms, annotating the images and the designs that I did, but I tried my hardest and I think it worked pretty well.

I did have some difficulties organising my book as at first I got a soft back A3 book but I realised working for me in A4 book is a lot better and tidier. But that was a struggle as I had few days to print everything out, catch up with the stuff I didn't do if I didn't have time or I wasn't in, organising the book in order of what we done and actually finishing the final piece. But as I said before I’m satisfied with my final outcome.

My final piece consisted of 4 illustrations which I done in colour pencils only as I thought working with colour pencils would show off my skills the best as I enjoy doing it.

If I had more time I would have done a lot more research on different artists, as well as making some transcripts of the artists that we looked at during this project. The book would be a lot more full if I had some more time to work on it.

Evaluation for Typography

This project of typography was really hard for me. Firstly I think its because I never looked at alphabets, and typography work of any artists before. The tasks were pretty hard especially the ones where you had to talk about the history of letters and how it first started and developed over countries and time.

I did research on few artists and did some work from the websites given to us from study space. Very difficult part for me was actually writing in my words talking about the history and the development of our alphabet. Also a very hard task for me was finding out different typefaces and comparing them as well as knowing the right terms to annotate them.

There was fun parts too, not only difficulties and struggles. I enjoyed working on Photoshop as I didn't do much work on it before. Also making designs which we soon turned into a Photoshop images showing the meaning of the word. As well as working on Photoshop I enjoyed doing the ransom notes of the word 'Street Style' for the magazine cover. I was fun collecting different sizes and colours of letters and putting them into a word. Talking about ransom notes I enjoyed editing the scanned picture of it in Photoshop creating my final piece.

My final piece consisted of a 'Street Style' writing as a magazine title and one of the pictures we did in graphic image making. I like my final piece I think it is quite good and I like the final outcome of the whole project.

If I had more time I could do a lot more like adding more examples and talking about them, researching more about the history of letters and alphabets as well as making my final piece more interesting and great.

Evaluation for Chair project

This evaluation is about the chair project that I have done. I really did enjoy this project mainly because I did it before when I did BTEC Art back in school. I think constructing a chair of your choice and from your designs is actually really fun.

I did not like making paper models for this project because paper doesn't stay for long and its hard to construct something out of it, as well as make the designs yourself. Haven't said that I did enjoy copying the paper models that I made in my book and annotating them after.

I also enjoyed this project because there was a lot of drawing involved and drawing is something I think I'm good at and I really enjoy doing. We had to come up with some designs on our own which I think was very fun as we could have done anything we wanted for this chair project. Also enjoyed learning about human proportions for the chairs that we looked at and made models of. Ergonomics is another thing we looked at and knowing that most of the chairs made have been actually calculated to be perfect for as many different audiences as possible. Learning about the different shapes and the technical terms for it was also a good experience.

My final outcome was a sofa type of chair. I do quite like my final design however it could have been a lot better than it turned out to be. If I had more time I would have done a lot more designs, I would have annotated the chairs I designed a lot more, but after all I’m quite satisfied with my book and my final design.

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh

'Portrait of a woman in blue'

Subject matter:

I think the mood of this painting is calm but also confused. The way he showed the background in pretty dark and coldcolours shows a little of confusion/sadness. Also the way he painted the face makes the painting look like the lady in it was surprised, as her eyes seem to be looking at something and her mouth is open. I think this painting is a lot about the way its been painted as well as the colours used. The way its painted i think because of oil paint which gives it a rough and a little blurred like effect. Also its about the colour because the painting name is Woman in blue, which does say that blue is meant to be as a main colour, and there are alot of blue/green tones in this portrait.

Technique:

This artwork by Vincent Van Gogh is painted. The brushes used could be different sizes, but the marks however seem to be mostly slapped on, because if you look closely at the picture there are only certain areas such as the eyes, or some of the shadows on the face as well as necklace and earings that were carefully applied because its quite detailed. The consistency of the paint is thick and oily. There is alot of depth in the work as if you look from far away it does look like the woman is in the front of the painting because of the background colours. The tonal range which is used a lot in this painting shows the light and dark areas in the art work as well as also shows the depth of this art piece. The colours do resemble the actual person as it was meant to turn out realistic. Colours used are warm and cold but mostly cold tones of green and blue as well as looks like theres a hint of purple. Only warm colours that are in this Vincent's work are for the skin colour nand the lips, as its shades of yellow and red. The texture is lumpy and rough because of the canvas as well as the oil paint which is quite thick.

Artists career:

Vincent Van gogh was born on 30^th of March 1853, in Netherlands (Zundert). He died however only aged 37 on July 29^th 1890 in france. His death cause started of when he had an illness and he was hospitalised, after being released from hospital there was a lot of the times Vincent couldnt paint because of the ilness that was making it really difficult for him, and from frustration that he couldn't express his talent, he shot himself with a revolver in the chest. Vincent was quite but a very serious child in his early ages, he was taught in village school from 1860s to 1861s. He began to draw as a child and had interest in art from an early age. Van Gogh worked as a supply teacher which he did not get paid for once he came back to England. He was however never married. He was working in fields such as drawing, painting and also printmaking. His movement was Post-Impressionism.

Opinion:

I do like Vincent's work, some paintings i think are a little hard to understand however there are loads of paintings made by him are really great and inspiring, i love the texture and the pattern of the work made by him. I did paint the same painting that i described, my painting colours weren't so rich but it turned out pretty similar.