Sunday 5 February 2012


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 1st 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 17th 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 30th of March 1853, in Netherlands (Zundert). He died however only aged 37 on July 29th 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.