Carl-A2 Art and Design

As an A2 art student at Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College I am currently working on a project, ‘Art of the Lost Words’ , a project aimed at reintroducing words that are either no longer used at all in modern language, or are slowly in decline. The overall aim of the project is to prevent these words from being lost altogether and to bring them back into common use through the medium of art. The word I chose was ‘Scathefire’, meaning very destructive fire, part of the project brief involved creating origami models relating to the chosen word. I elected to make paper trees for my origami and made a large number in order to compose a ‘tree forest’. After photographing them together I decided to reintroducing my word back into my work, by setting fire to, and burning my trees, creating an imitation of my version of a ‘forest fire’.

In order to try and bring back my chosen word another element of the project requires a ‘Graphic Product’ to be made using images and photos from earlier in the project in order to carry on the theme and make it flow.  The function of the graphic product is to spread the use of the word by mass distribution. In order to do this I decided upon a CD album cover, bearing the band name ‘The Scathefire’, using an image from my burning trees I ‘photo shopped’ it to make it more exciting and bold.  Incorporating a lighting strike as is the cause of many forest fires.

On completion of my graphic product I then resolved to explore the theme of ‘environment’ and issues that surround this topic; using work that I had previously studied gave me inspiration for this area.  After looking at work by ‘Andrew Tift’ a painting of a car factory onto a body panel, my first step in the direction of environment was to source a car body panel that was to be scrapped. I then proceeded to paint an image that would be the opposite of the damage that cars inflict upon the environment; the object I chose to signify this was a tree.

  I also decided to have an attempt at pencil carving with inspiration from an artist previously looked at with the theme of environmental art.  Dalton Ghetti creates highly intricate sculpture out of nothing more than an old pencil, shaping the lead into amazing shapes and objects.  In my attempts I copied his idea of the alphabet and after many trials with broken lead I finished with the letter ‘L’ and the Letter ‘F’.

After this was done I decided to reverse the roles of my work, instead of painting an image of a tree on a car, I painted a car onto a piece of wood.  I wanted to create a highly realistic and detailed image that could almost be lifelike.  First I had to scout out a vehicle that has a distinguished shape that is common and instantly recognisable as ideally this piece should be viewed from a distance and therefore the shape and lines are important. It would also be imperative to get the shape and shading of the vehicle correct or the whole piece would look wrong.  After looking around a local car park I settled upon a ‘Peugeot 206’ for its significant shape and front grille section.

After doing both of these pieces I realised that I had theme running through my work, painting on things that are not necessarily painted on. I therefore went about looking for things that are not normally considered as canvases, the next item I decided upon was a television which I am currently working on painting a scene that includes a tree.



Howard- A2 Photography Stop Frame

Ryan-A2 Product Design

My name is Ryan, I am currently studying graphic design and product design at Stoke Sixth Form College. This is a small insight into my product design course, which is to design and develop a vehicle that can be used by the emergency services that will be a hybrid as so to speak that will be a link between the first responders and the fire and rescue service. I have focused my concept vehicle towards the road traffic incident area, as this type of emergency requires fire and rescue as well as paramedics and the fire service.

The vehicle is based loosely on Landover’s new city style 4x4. The following are just some ideas I had generated to be accessories, solutions or general design inspiration.

Here I am throwing some ides around about sirens and lighting ideas, loosely rendered in marker.

In this sheet of ideas I am generally just putting ideas together, but on this sheet I talked about the ground clearance angles of hills and where the vehicle would bottom out.



This is hopefully what the vehicle will look like at the end of my project.

Vishal- A2 Art 'Update'

After finally getting my infographics work completed for my graphic product I have started to explore a more diverse side of my creativity. The focus is now on relating my work to Shepherd Fairey as well as translating it through a message which relates to the theme of Snollygoster.

One interesting graphic that I came across during the Election earlier this year has started to shape the recent progress I have made within this project. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results - this is the link that I found which depicts a proportional measure of seats won by each party in the 2010 General Election. I noted that the pattern and style that this graphic has been created through is one that I could utilise for my independent development, therefore I began to produce an array of patterns using stencils to experiment with composition, scale, proportion and style.

The results were terrific and I decided to relay the pattern from the infographic onto these stencils by using Photoshop – further layering it within the vectorised image of Gordon Brown seen within my previous post, as well as “despeckled” images of the Labour rose. All of this led to the below outcome of a party political poster that takes advantage of all of my research upto this point.



In relation to Shepherd Fairey I feel the piece has strong visual links with the way in which Fairey uses “worn” images and stencilling, however to kindly humiliate my own support for left wing politics I have also created the below piece which heavily relates the Fairey-esque style of stand up politics; labelled as “The Social State” it relates to the surveillance and interference of our previous government within society, exposing the disparity between our fair democracy and other more extreme left wing socialist dictatorships. It is this piece that brings me to the end of Task 11 and onto my independent development – therefore I wish for my work to evolve into something much darker, and maybe much more cynical.

The next stage of this project is now to explore the reverse side of left wing politics; Conservatism. More so by exploring the role of religion and society within a conservatively dictated nation, namely the Southern States of the US, as well as our own current “Conservative” arrangement.

Abbey-A2 Art and Design

For my A2 Art this year I have been working on a project called The Art of Lost Words. I chose the word Perantique which means old and ancient. I started by experimenting with typography developing a pattern out of different fonts and sizes. I then folded my typography into an origami owls which I felt represented old and ancient.

I then experimented with collage and image montage (graphic product). I began to focus on jewellery made out of the images and old images I created.

I liked these jewellery pieces I made, however I wanted to create something more substantial and experiment with wood, metals and plastics more.

I started by heat pressing some of my image montages onto ply wood. Then I drew the shape of my owls onto 2D design ready to lazer cut them out of my ply wood. I experimented putting these together in different ways with different findings and small screws.

I am starting to experiment more with jewellery and creating different styles of brooches looking at traditional jewellery for inspiration. These are some of my designs I have come
up with.

I have experimented with different types of acrylic to produce my designs.

What I love about my project so far is my wooden owl necklace. I feel it has worked better than my other necklaces/bracelets as it has the traditional look, which I wanted to achieve with my word meaning old and ancient. I am now developing new angular designs inspired by my origami shape.

Mitchell - AS Product Design

 I am a product design student and recently we have been doing the AS lighting project and I have found it a really interesting course. This is because we have been working on designing lamps and I have done a few designs myself which I will make. I have attended all my lessons and found the theory lessons especially helpful because they help will works and help prepare for my exam.
We also did a lot of initial sketches to help develop our finals ideas here is an example.

Also after this stage of development we have been developing them into 3D models ready for making. This is one of my earlier 3D models which I made form this Sketch.

Tavonne- BTEC Subsidiary Diploma Art and Design

In this project the focus for our work is party. We are going to design party related graphic products.

So far in the project we have created a development cycle which identifies key parts of the brief so that we can understand what we need to do at each stage.

Last Wednesday we threw a party in the Art department and took pictures for visual records. We then had to pick a party item to draw in different media such as paint, ink, wax etc. so we could use them as a motif for a pattern.

Today I have just learnt how to draw object in one/ two point perspective to make our still life drawings look more realistic.

My next task is to draw still life images then using a view finder to find parts of the image that I can draw in more detail using different media.

Vishal-A2 Art and Design

The project brief for art this year was titled as “The Art of Lost Words”; to pick a word that is in danger of becoming unused from Save the Words and to bring it back into the vocabulary through means of products, posters and individual artworks. I chose the word Snollygoster (a shrewd, unprincipled person – especially a politician) from a frantic array of lost phrases that yelp every time you hover over them, who would have thought such an historical expression of significance would be hidden beneath such vulgarism? Anyway, I am glad that I found this word as I am confident that I can reintroduce it back into the vocabulary at least within petty advertisements or slogans for political parties, a technique that I have found interesting undertaking within my sketchbook.

As well as this, I have tried to relate the word to Bush-era politics which define, in my opinion, the true connotation of the word Snollygoster. I have explored this through the use of info-graphics, which presents information that I have collected online regarding the recent political history of Britain, Europe and America through means of Military Expenditure rises, popularity of administrations and the usual jargon that follows political debates. 

My latest endeavour was to create an “individualised” artwork; however I chose to take inspiration from Shepherd Fairey’s truly amazing work on political sentiments – using powerful illustration and subversions to publicise one’s opinions (a characteristic I would like to apply to the word Snollygoster). Throughout this I will be experimenting with different patterns, portraits, quotations and stencils to create work that has relevancy to my project, as well as the personality of Shepherd Fairey. I have alot more to do throughout this project and for the year; in terms of research, development and maturing my own creativity, yet so far I have enjoyed finding myself through this very interesting project brief.

Howard- A2 Photography

During my current studies in Photography A2 I am looking at the combination of two themes inside and outside. I recently responded to a piece of work by Valerie Belin by going up to the Roaches. I decided to bring some objects we associate with the inside and put them in the outside environment. The Roaches was a good place to take pictures because it gave me an interesting outside environment in which to work in. I also got to go climbing which was a fun bonus. I am now looking at how I can follow on from this idea to develop it into a commercial product.

 

Dan N-AS Photography

This year I have taken AS Photography, I wanted to do this because it seemed like an interesting subject, which would provide me we new skills. We started the course by taking pictures from around the college which show the three main elements which are shape, tone and contrast. This is the best photo that I took from all of the pictures from around the college.

We then started to plan our own photo shoots, we started off by taking pictures of; pinecones, bottles of water and chairs. These were difficult because they are un-usual objects to take pictures and to make them good photos. One of our homework tasks were to take pictures of things and compare them to a photographer, the photographer that I used was Dale Unrah he takes pictures of nature and landscapes.

To enhance our learning we went on a trip to Birmingham to visit a number of art galleries modern and old to give us all new and inspired inspiration, this trip also take pictures of the art and sculptures. After we had been on the trip we started to use Photoshop to edit out photos, I learned about joiner photography this is where you take a number of images and join them together to make one complete photo. We also learned about HDR which is High Dynamic Range, this is where you intensify the colours of an image to emphasise different elements.

One of the major tasks that we were given was to recreate a masterpiece of a artist and recreate it with photos, the masterpiece that I picked was painting by Friedensreich Hundertwasser and is called 'Pavilions and Bungalows'. (Below)

I focused on shape and colour in my work to recreate it.  

 

Harriet- A2 Art and Design

This year as part of my A2 Art and Design I have already begun a series of exciting new projects. The whole group are now working as a more experienced and confident art students, everyone is starting to set up a series of new pieces of art.

The project I am working on is called the art of lost words and the word I am work with is ‘Nubivagant’ it means; passing through the clouds. I chose this word from Save the Words to be the basis for this unit of work.

Wanting to commence the year with something that was going to inspire my work, and myself. I decided to create a large model using my preliminary images and origami work. Constructing a piece based on ‘moving among clouds’, with 200 origami peace cranes, I went on to produce a flock of birds. Here you can see I have photographed the model with dramatic lighting. I intended to create something unusual and eye-catching, in which people are attracted to its curious shape and odd presentation.

Using this as a foundation, following the brief I went on to create a graphic product and a mixed media piece. To carry through a geometric theme into my graphic poster I used silhouettes and sections from other images. Including vivid shades of blue to create a modern and eye-catching image.

I created a painting for the mixed media piece, right. Using pixilation I transformed an image of the model, creating a really unusual effect. I then painting this is onto a large board, I believe the clouds worked really well. This is the start of my project, and I am now moving onto creating geometric sculptures.

Rebecca- BTEC Subsidiary Diploma Graphic Design

Creative Boom is a website dedicated to support designers. The site has offered us the opportunity in the form of  a competition to design a banner for them. There are 4 words to choose from inspire, work, social, and fun, I chose the word inspire.

I have come up with a mixture of ideas, mostly done using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, although I have produce some images by hand.

I did I this design using a method called continuous line drawing, I drew this on illustrator, I took the word inspire tried to relate the images to the word, and and to make the image fun I made it look like it was underwater.

I developed the line drawing further and then I edited it using Photoshop, I scanned in some pages with paint on them edited them into the drawing. I experimented with lots of different designs but I think these are the best ones even thou there basic.

In this project I learned how to use Illustrator, I had not used it before I also improved my skills using Photoshop. In addition I learned how to come up with new ideas, some times I came up with these ideas by doing the wrong thing completely.

I have really enjoyed the project especially using Illustrator; I liked it so much that I have developed many of my ideas in my spare time, the most enjoyable of my designs is the one one with the bees and flowers.

Welcome

Welcome to our new blog. The reason we have stared this is so students from all courses can see what is going on in different courses within the department. Also if you are proud of a piece of work it can be shared with other people; maybe your friends or parents.

If you want to contribute or have any suggestions email your post to your teacher.