Drawing week 2..

This week I have been developing more on my drawing work, moving onto a bigger scale has been a big step, but I felt the right step forward with progressing more into my Urban inluences project.

I moved away from trying to draw absract buildings as that just wasnt my style of drawing, and found myself only getting frustrated with the work that I was producing, I decided to focus much more on my mark making skills to produce bigger pieces of work that showed a clear understanding of what the idea of 'Urban Inlfuences' meant to me.

To create these pieces of work, I really focused on the idea of a sky scraper, sunset siluete theme at night, amoungst the city life, obviously baring Manchester in mind, the photos that I took of the city really helped with influencing my type of practice to create the drawing and mark making work that I did.

These three images below were three peices of work that I felt worked out the best this week, with the ideas that I was trying to create with 'Urban Influences close to mind' when I had my tutoriol with Lesley, she also agreed that the new style of work that I was producing was much better than the abstract work I was trying to do in the first week.

Artist Research..

Norma Starszakowna

Developing on from my drawing work, and attending my tutoriol with Lesley she gave me a number of Artsists that she suggested that I look up. One that really stood out for me was Norma Starszakowna, the reason that I found her work the most eye catching and insperational to me was because the mark making techniques that she focused her practice on was very similar to how Lesley and I saw my work going. To research up on an Artsist and to see that they have the same kind of outcomes as your own practice is very encouraging and motivating to carry on in that particular direction.

The two images below are the two pieces of work that caught my eye the most by Norma Starszakowna, I really like her use of media and eye for making marks, I think she has really good compesition skills and an insperational eye for proportion. This is the perfect way of what comes to mind when I think of "Urban Influences".

The images below are two of my own mark making images from my sketch book, in my opinion they arent two of my best drawings, but I feel are slowly starting to link in well with Norma's kind of work, I thought with the same colour pallet and similar markings they have the potential to go in the same kind of direction.

 

Barabara Rae 

Another artsist that I gained a lot of insperation from was a practisioner that goes by the name of Barabara Rae. The two particular pieces of art work below, are two pieces of her work that stood out the most for me. Even though they are very bright, have lots of colours splashed across the page with a mix of big bold shapes and scrawny squiggly lines, and my own practice of work for this project is much more darker shades and tones, with more rubbings and mark making than solid shapes, like Barbara Rae's work, the reason I found a great similarity to her work is because of the use of media and landscape imagination and shapes, this links in very well with how I would like to see my new kind of work going for this project and how im going to continue on.

These two images below were just two of my selected favourite pieces of work by Barbara Rae, because I felt it really gave off that bright light, busyness of an Urban Influence landscape city, in this case Manchester. I also really felt that his style of work really linked in well with my photoshop workshops too (that I can relate back to with my photoshop blog posts.)

 The image below is a piece of work that was actualy a 'happy' mistake, something I didnt mean to do, but by continuing to layer up the drawing, it actually ended up being one of my favourite pieces of work, very similar to Barabara Rae's work, I found myself being extremly influenced to carry on this drawing as I was really exited to see the final outcome.

 

 

Drawing week 1..

Moving on from going off into Manchester City, taking photos off buildings and Urban landscapes of day to day life that interested me, I then decided what would be the best way to continue this project would be to draw exactly what I saw, to draw exactly what I see, 

I decided to go on a veriety of buses, the manchester tram, the car and last but not least the transportation I found the most interesting was to walk the city, not only to draw from my images but to draw free hand from exactly what was right in front of me.

From this I then started to create some really interesting marks across my pages that where then the start of development pieces for my project. 

My starting point would be sketches in my sketch book, that led onto more mixed media pieces in my sketch book that would build up to both smaller and larger scale pieces of work.

The images below are my starting point images from the first time I went off into the city.

(From sketching what I saw in and around the City of Manchester, I also started to build up some kind of colour theme.)

Photoshop Workshops..

Week One.

Today was my first workshop lesson about how to use Photoshop, today we learnt the basics on how to get from A to B with Photoshop and how to use an Apple Mac laptop. 

We learnt how to make new layers of a particular image, in this case we had four, two layers were two different block colours of our choice, and the other two layers were two different images of my own drawing for the Urban Influences project.

Working with all four images we learnt a number of different skills in this session including how to cut certain parts of the image out, how to crop parts of the image, how to feather lines and corners of an image, how to blur sections of the image, how to create layers on top of layers, how to high light certain areas of the picture and fill in with just a block colour, we learnt how to play around with colour, how to blend the colours, we also learnt how to have solid colour just by playing around with the settings on keys of the mac, we learnt lots of different short cuts on how to do things on the mac including how to copy, to paste, to delete and to zoom in and out.

By making notes as we were going along really helped me how to go away from the lesson and carry on my progress and practice work with how to use Photoshop and begin to create some really interesting different kind of work for my project. 

The picture below is the first piece of work that I created in the first photoshop lesson.

(Again I think the colours that I chose to use for this task, are the colours that I would like to use my for Urban Influences project.) 

Week two.

Today was my second Photoshop lesson, the lesson objectives for today were transparency and blending modes, layer masks, digital photos, colour, tone and sharpness. In todays lesson we also learnt some key words, Multiply means when the white becomes transparent and the black becomes more black. Overlay means when you can merge two or more things together, this could be colours, images or anything that has the potential to be over lapped ontop of each other. The lassoo tool acts like a layering mask, and becomes what looks like a magnifying glass tool, this was my favourite thing that I learnt in this lesson because I found that zooming in on parts of an image really helped me with my other work for my project, espessially to broaden my knitting skills. Overall this lesson was mainly about interpriting images and playing around with colour, and the basic but necessity tools such as contrast, tone, sharpness, brightness, layering/imerging and transparency, my favourite lesson out of the two, I walked away very suprised with the amount that I had gained from this lesson.

 

Week three.

Today was my final Phototshop lesson, the lesson objectives for today were Image size, Canvas size, to use a different range of marque tools and to learn and create photoshop work using the wide veriety of 'paint' brushes.

Learning both the Image and Canvas size technique, I found very simple to use, by changing basic settings, this button allowed us to change and play around with both the image and the background of the image to create lots of different looks for the size of a final outcome of our own choices.

The marque tools allowed us to do a different range of skills to be able to change the look of the whole image size, an example of this is to be able to edit the size of the image from an A4 to an A3 piece of work.  

Finally in today's workshop we were playing around with the paint brush tool, this allowed us to draw ontop of our own photographs and drawings to create things that might not be there, we could also take things away or double things up to create a much more interesting piece of work to look at than just a simple photograph or drawing. Here below are just two of my images that I was playing around with in the workshop, two of my favourite ones, the top one, I was playing around with the thin paint brush tool to create circles and lines ontop of the original image, I then played around with the colour, brightness and contrast, the bottom image again I started of by playing around with the paint brush tool, but also combined together with some of the skills we learnt in last weeks session, an example being, the sharpness, the contrast, the tone and the colour.

Going out into the City..

To kick of my first level 5 project of the year, I chose to under go the theme of 'Urban Influences' this a very broad title and I really felt that I could gain the most from it, as I am already bursting with ideas.The first thing that I decided to do was to go off into the city of Manchester, now my second home and take as many photographs of different buildings that I possibly could find, buildings of all different shapes and sizes, that I felt even influenced me in the very slightest, all located in different parts of the city, sometimes for a particular reason. Some buildings with a lot of history behind them where as others compltley brand new, that have just been built on historic grounds.

Each building leaking with beauty, I really enjoyed photographing these images to under go my first task of drawing exactly what I could see.

To complete this task I didnt only walk into the city, I took the bus, the tram, the train and the car so that I could photograph and draw the buildings in lots of different aspects, this was probably the most exiting part for me as I spent the whole week travelling Manchester, I got to see parts of the city that I had never seen before. 

These buildings were some of the favourite ones that I found around the city, all located in different areas, they have different meanings to what they are and why they are there and all look so very different. These three images are the key images that I will use to start of my drawing and mark making process for this unit.