Developing Skills - Throwing Clay

I have really wanted to integrate ceramics into my practice for a long time but i feel like i need to get better at it before trying to integrate it into my practice. I decided to start where i struggle the most; throwing.





















Throwing clay is really difficult as its a way of using my hands that im completely not used to. Not only that, clay has a lot of variables to begin with, when you slop it onto a moving surface it just makes it ten times harder to deal with.

I have been watching throwing videos online for a long time now, specifically the videos from Ingleton pottery as he throws a lot of simple pots to sell and therefore will demonstrate how to throw an object up to three times within a video which is incredibly beneficial for learning.

However this did not really prepare me. after a bit of time on the wheel, im still finding it difficult to create something that is actually usable, it is either too small or to sloppy. However each time i throw i am learning something new about the position of my hands and the speed and thickness of the clay etc so all of these failed attempts are at least not in vain.

Madrid - Reina Sofía

Because of the exhibition in Barcelona, I made sure to visit an art gallery when I went to Madrid. The Gallery I visited was the Reina Sofía.

This was a really lovely and huge gallery that offered a bit of everything. I was actually quite surprised at the amount of graphic design pieces i found as it is quite common to find a lot of fine art pieces in art museums and so that was a pleasant surprise.

They had a really good exhibition on punk zines from the 70's, It was so cool to see the methods they used to produce zines and see what really was the origin of the zine. This is something i definitely want to try and do more of during second year because i feel like the offer a great sense of freedom.

 Along side the zines there was a lot of really nice graphic design prints

Barcelona - Local Exhibition Opening

There was a gallery space opposite my hostel and one night we noticed there was some sort of exhibition opening going on (because of the free beer and sangria) The name of the space was called La Capella, however i'm not 100% sure what the exhibition was called. Despite this it was really fun to experience an exhibition opening in a different place and a different country. A lot of the people there were travellers like me and it made for a different atmosphere, it felt like people were more curious about what was going on because it was in a different language perhaps. For the most part, people didn't know what was going on because it was in a different language, this made me at least. think more about what the work could be about and really pay more attention to the work because of the language barrier. This has made me want to try and make it to more exhibitions and opening nights when back in Leeds.

Barcelona - Local Culture

Whilst in Barcelona I did a lot of walking which gave me the chance to get a taste of the local culture. As I was doing the summer project whilst I was here I was paying a lot more attention to the artwork throughout the city which just made for an inspiring trip. More than anything it made me realise that you shouldn't limit visual research to the specific works of an artist or to books, you can simply use what is around you.

 I especially loved coming across a little market in the Gothic quarter and seeing old and and antique objects that have come from Barcelona, my favourite being the extensive collection of letter press letters I found.

This just reinforces my love of travelling because of how much it benefits me as a person and as an artist to see and experience different places and cultures,

Barcelona - Antoni Gaudí

During the Summer I visited Barcelona which is home to lots of works by Antoni Gaudi, the most notable being The Sagrada Família. Once I was familiar with Gaudi's modernist style, his influence became recognisable all through Barcelona.

Whilst in Barcelona I went to visit what I think is called La Pedrera and the Sagrada Família,which is still awaiting completion. The Sagrada Família was such an astonishing building to see in person because of how unique it is and completely unlike any other architecture i have ever seen before,

Being from Liverpool and living in Leeds, i'm used to a very different style of building and generally modern urban architecture. The attention to detail throughout the entire building is unparalleled and is probably due to Gaudi's method of building. He would sculpt the entire thing in miniature beforehand rather than sketching, You could see this in the exhibition which in inside/underneath the Sagrada Família.

This way of working encourages me to try and plan physically rather than just planning on paper because it gives a better sense of what the end product will be like. I think this method of planning is applicable in all disciplines when you intend to create a physical product.

PPP Self-Branding

The brief

The brief was a self branding task however we were encouraged to think past just making a design to go on a business card and to make something that represented us as an artist. This required looking back on ppp and reflecting on our practice. My aims for this brief is to not only create a brand that can potentially be spread across different mediums and works but to create something that represents me as an artist.

Research

The first thing I did was to search self branding on behance to get an idea of professionally finished products, this along with penny’s presentation about her own branding helped spark ideas in my head. A common theme amongst the branding task was a separation between the person and the brand so to speak. This is something I wanted to do myself, not using my name and instead using a made up name that I can develop in to a brand.

My name is Sophie Wendy Oldham, Wendy means Wander. I simply put wander into Google translate and switched through until I found something I liked. I settled on vaeltaa which is wander in Finnish. 

I really enjoy doing hand rendered type and wanted to create something bespoke so I looked at a book called “Handmade type Workshop” which features many artists doing small tutorials on various ways of creating hand rendered type. These are just some of the ones I liked and might try out. I made small notes on the pictures picking out the detail.

Production

After taking a long time to think about what it was I wanted to create for pp the answer I kept coming up with was ‘I don’t know’ so I decided to play on that and use that as my theme. I don’t know what style id like to present myself as yet and all I really know about my practice so far is I really like physical practices so I decided to just recreate my logo in a range of mediums. Being inspired by all the youtubers mentioned in my ppp blog, I decided to film the process rather than just show the end result and create a promotional film of sorts. To do this took planning. I had to plan out the individual process before hand so I could film it and not have to re do it over and over. I settled on a few simple ways of recreating y logo and some more complicated. I also chose photo screen printing and using the vinyl cutter as the end result of these processes would give me something I could give out in order to promote myself. Two birds with one stone. The idea is I can show design studios the video as an introduction to myself.

Conclusion

I really really like the outcome of this brief. I have something I can hand out to potential contacts and have also strayed away from a conventional business card etc. Going down the route of video was quite a challenge as I’m not versed in video editing software or even really well versed in cameras so it was difficult but I'm very pleased with the outcome. To develop this further I would probably spend more time focusing on the video editing to make something really impressive and feature more and varied processes.

Ceramics - Expanding my practice.

I finally went and booked a ceramics induction! this is something ive wanted to do since i first got here and im so pleased that ive now done it and can access the workshop. Sadly i dont have any pictures of the stuff i made yet ads im waiting for it to come out the kiln. however ill just talk a bit about what i made.

having done a lot of ceramics before i wanted to try something that i hadn't done yet and have wanted to try. I love making small abstract pieces and ive really wanted to try slip trailing as i think the process lends itself really well to abstract pieces.

Firstly i rolled out my clay and cut it into uniform tiles and played around with a circular design (one im contemplating using on my bank notes) Then i selected the slip colours, i decided to go for white and black as they will go well with any colour if i choose to glaze the pieces after they've been fired. I decided i wanted a really free looking drip design over the tiles but the slip was a bit too think to acheive this so i thinned it out a little with water before filling up the bulb. I then very freely dripped the slip across the tiles creating  really random design and im pretty excited to see the outcome. Im hoping the slip will have stayed raised above the surface so i can coat them in wax and apply a glaze to the other parts of the tile. im so excited to try and incorporate ceramics into one of my briefs at some point, and if not just dedicate my time to expanding my skills.

Album artwork - Atlantic Shore

I was asked by some friends to create some potential album artwork for their up coming single, they information they gave me wasnt great, the asked me for simple line drawings, nothing really to do with the songs themselves and they asked for maybe a hot air balloon and light bulb design.

They expressed a desire to use the brown background however i really didnt like how it looked so showed them a mock up of something else instead. After none of these took their fancy i drew a few more things up for them.

i got positive feedback from this and they particularly liked the lips, however they wanted to change them but couldnt articulate how they wanted them to be changed and the extent of the art direction was to make the lips "more wavey"

i edited the lips as best i could and sent them three options, as they didnt let me sort out the layout, whoever done it just took the pdf and threw it over that horrible looking brown background without even aligning them or anything and the result is a bit shit. I think this is the reason they didnt go with it in the end but i guess its an experience i can learn from. i need to be dedicated to my work and see it through for start to finish so that whatever i make i can be happy with. i know that if they had used this image, i wouldnt have been proud to put my name to it.

Photography - Expanding my practice.

After my lighting induction, i decided to take advantage of the equipment and hire out a camera for the weekend. I'm not very well versed on camera setting and such so i took the oppertunity to just experiment and take lots of pictures with various settings. An understanding of the settings and how they worked proved useful when  i was tying to take some pictures of light as it was very difficult to get a good picture. Despite this im quite happy with the outcome and ill definitely be booking out a camera soon to continue to practice and develop my skills.

Mr Never Satified - No Entry Design.

Mr Never Satisfied or @Dis_satisfied is someone i have followed on instagram for a while. Only recently did i visit his website (no entry design) and see that he is a designer that tackles all elements of graphic design. After doing my ppp presentation of where i see myself in 10 years, i can say that id be pretty pleased if i was in his position. By looking at his instagram it is evident that he travels alot whilst being based in one area (brooklyn) and he or a collective, focus on all areas of graphic design, yet still have a speciality, which seems to be typography and sign-age. We are being actively encouraged to get in contact with designers we love and i think ive now found someone that id potentially send work to in order to get feedback. Loving this guy as a constant source of inspiration.  

Time lapse - Expanding my practice.

I was up really early this morning so i decided to make good on my aim of being more deliberate in my photography, capturing nice skyscapes. I only had my phone to hand so i used the time lapse featured and precariously balanced my phone against my window using some books and filmed the sky. For a first attempt im pretty pleased with how it turned out and i'm quite impressed with the quality of my phone camera. Knowing that the feature is there and now i have a better understanding of how to use it, i'm going to continue to look out for opportunities to film or even just photograph really nice looking stuff.

Julien Solomita - Night and Desert.

I am continually finding myself inspired by youtubers and how they go about making their videos. Most recently it is a video from a guy called julien solomita. like most of the youtubers i watch, beautiful time lapses are a huge part of their videos but in this one julien focuses specifically on cinematics rather than the vlogging of his day. I really love this as its the idea that you can take a break from what you usually do and what you're really good at an dabble in something else that is also something you love. For example me a graphic designer, doing a fine art piece. I think what this video has made me realise is the reason i love these time lapses so much is they are usually of nature and our surroundings, Something I continually do is take pictures of sunsets/sunrises or any other moments that the sky looks particularly beautiful. This video has made me think that maybe i should be more deliberate in my photo taking and perhaps rent a camera and plan to go somewhere to take a composed picture rather than just snapping one on my way home etc

Casey Neistat - Filmmaker/Youtuber.

Casey Neistat is a film-maker I discovered on youtube, he has recently started making daily vlogs.

Something that inspires me about Casey is no matter what is going on in his life (work, family, travel) he manages to post a vlog everyday that is visually stunning. He uses a lot of time lapses of new york and various things he does to pad out the vlogs so to speak but they are so beautifully done that they have become an essential and much loved part of the videos he posts. Aside for the asthtetics of the videos he posts, i also love the content. He tries to put across how important it is to just make. dont be a perfectionist, as long as you dont give up and you just create, tell the story you are trying to tell no matter what. This is definitely something im working on embedding into my life in order to add my art practice into my every day life like he does.

Unsplash.

I recently found a couple of websites that have license free images meaning that anyone can use them for whatever they want, personal and commercial. I had no idea that something like this existed and it really opens up the possibilities for work as if i cant find a way of taking my ow picture i can ssearch through the collections to find one that will or or even some that will inspire me. my favorite out of all these sites is Unsplash.com. the website is simple and easy to use and focuses on the image making it easy to navigate, it also features collections so its easy to look through for inspiration too.

Leeds Corn Exchange

I finally visited Leeds Corn Exchange this week to see what the place had to offer as the "home of independents" 

The place itself is really lovely and i guess its useful to know what's in there and what it has to offer in terms of independent art. there are not art shops so to speak, there is mostly just fashion boutiques, however there is one place called The Great Yorkshire shop. I liked this place particularly because it features stuff  made exclusively by independent companies, makers, artists and designers of Yorkshire. This will be a really nice place to visit every so often to get an idea of what the designers and artists of Yorkshire are creating.

Bertil Nillson - Naturally

These are a few images from a series called Naturally by Bertil Nillson. I originally saw one of the images on tumblr and went searching for the artist and come across the series on his website. 

The artists statement: 

"Naturally was born from that inspiration to explore, both the landscape and our role within it. Working with the naked figure in nature is straightforward, there is an obvious connection with our natural history. I’m interested in what happens when I introduce cultural elements – colour, shape and dance gestures – to question that relationship"

I really love these images because it demonstrates a very graphical composition. nature in the background, the figure in the foreground to bring focus and the bold use of colour to draw the eye to the shape of the figure. It is evident that the artist has considered balance in his images as there is definite contrast of colour, like the one where it is black sand, white sea foam and then the stark contrast of the red figure.

I hope to use this series of images to inspire me in the future showing how i can transfer my knowledge of graphical elements to nature and create a lovely balance between the two.

Mark E Miller - GO

Mark E Miller is a YouTuber I have followed for a while, he makes weekly vlogs about his life and incorporates time lapses and really nice visual transitions into his videos. One of his most recent videos is called GO and is a motivational video for the new year. A few weeks before new years Mark requested bike themed images from his viewers and GO is a compilation of those images. I really like this because it is a collaboration on a huge scale, the resulting video is incredibly beautiful and highlights the fact that you can collaborate with people who might not consider themselves artists. The "brief" Mark set out was incredibly simple and vague: A bike themed image and he managed to get hundreds of really lovely images.

This video has inspired me to consider this kind of collaboration in the future or as a possibility for a future brief. I could use tumblr or facebook to request a simple picture or drawing and incorporate it into my work. This is also really exiting as you dont know what you're going to get sent so the possibilities for the resulting piece of work are endless.