My attempt at a stained glass window

These photos were slightly edited, I was experimenting with photoshop, never used it before... s'cool :3 Anyways, I put my acetate sheets up on a window in the college facing on the gardens, I'm waiting until tomorrow when the weather is better hopefully so that it will create some cool shadows. I played around with different effects to check out the different patterns I created I might paint some of these.

Inspirations

Here's a quick post to keep anyone who follows or has any interest in artists I'm taking inspiration from. Ours tutors call it SEQUENTIAL DEVELOPMENT :3 Find something good, take ideas from it and develop.

 Regarding my abstract work on the brain matter patterns, I thought of Jackson Pollocks paintings. His free wild technique of what seems like aimlessly throwing paint on to a canvas, but actually creating a pattern, by repeating these drops and splashes. With the ink and stick you can be as messy and careless as you want, but when you still create your pattern it makes such an impression.

Doodles

These are some drawings from my sketch book regarding movement and motion in and about the brain. The photos themselves are fairly crap quality.

T

A piece of frank

This is a drawing of my boyfriend I did last week one night when I wanted to do something non-project orientated. Now back to work :)

P.O.A

Sooo, my plan for the end of my project so far, well for the next two weeks of college and the Christmas holidays; while I'm still in college and have the facilities I want to display my what hopefully will be a stained glass window, get stuff done in the print workshop. I'm going to finish my ceramic piece, get it glazed this week and hopefully it didn't blow in the kiln, fingers crossed. Then I have a little tangent off the centre point of my project that I want to do a mini-project on to the side.

 My project is the movement and motion of the brain, which can be interpreted as the thoughts, notions and ideas that are constantly moving in your mind, that make your body function and move. This movement of the brain creates thoughts and these thoughts, feelings, memories and ideas cause emotions and expressions. These are physically apparent through facial expressions and gestures.
 So I'm going back to my book of thoughts, my tutors quite liked this metaphore, the brain being an open book. I have a book that I'm going to record my thoughts, feelings, ideas, lists and notions for the next few weeks and from this book, I'm also going to record these by photographs of my facial expressions that symbolise the movement inside my brain. From these photos I'm going to choose a series of images and paint them.
 I'll end up with a series of self portraits that portray the movement and motion inside my brain. The paintings themselves will represent movement and motion physically by the changing of facial expressions. Maybe with the photos I can create a stop-motion of facial expressions at the end.

Print

Gavin Worth
'And light fell on her face through heavy darkness'.

I finished off my wire drawings of the head and brain. I looked at Alexander Calder and Gavin Worth, both famous for their wire sculptures. Anyway I went ahead with my wire drawings, I got about 6 or 7 layers. I'll upload photos once I'm back in college because they are on my wall. I'm going to ask Kieran for some advice on them next week, about where to go from here. I was thinking of hanging them somewhere because they make really nice shadows.

Alexander Calder

I just played around with
the photo quality here to
 see how it looked.

 I approached Des during the week about starting a print but I wasn't sure how to go about it, so he came up to my studio today and had a look through my work.
 We took all my wire drawings of the head and brain and photocopied them downstairs, layering them up, inverting the colour and moving them around into different positions. They really gave the effect of the X-rays and the MRI's, especially the inverted colour because the wire is white and the background is black. The layering up gave a nice perception of depth in the X-ray. The further away wire drawing blurs quite nicely and the more the wire overlaps and crosses gives deeper and darker lines which gave the drawing great definition.
  I'm going to the print workshop on Monday and I'm going to do a mono print of the photocopies from today.

  When I got home to Galway today, I played around with my photocopier and acetates because I'm not sure we're allowed use acetates on the ones in college. First of all I made multiple copies of my abstract brain matter patterns. It took a whole thingy of ink to paint 6 and it was so tedious sooooo I took a shortcut :) I now have about 20 sheets, so next week I'm going to ask Mike Fox if there is a free window somewhere I can display these sheets to make a stained glass window, like the wire drawings, I think these will create some really sweet shadows.

Ceramics II

I went to another ceramics workshop this week, where I continued on with my mini brain scans. I got a large slab of clay sliced them up into separate forms. Unlike last week when I pushed the pencils and sticks through, I decided to make this a cleaner more polished version of the idea from last week. So I developed from that and just cut out individual shapes in each of the slices. I gave each piece a smooth finish and I fixed them up a bit so they looked more ornamental than last weeks prototypes. At the moment they are in the kiln so on Tuesday I'll head down and glaze them. I glazed the smaller pieces just to see how they turned out as a rough draft and they've been in the kiln since Monday so I can collect them on Tuesday as well.