Sensing the Surface Blog 3

In week 4 we started with our portrait paintings. Using oil paint I found it very difficult finding the right skin tone mainly because of how pale my models skin tone is, it was especially hard since there was very little amount of white paint at one time, also painting her lips was a bit of a mission as well since I had trouble making her lips look right, but other than that my painting turned out okay...

This is the photograph of my model.








I also found out using turpentine not only helped clean the oil paint off the brush but it also helps smearing the paint on to the canvas board.

Next time i will start on the models face instead of the hair, as i struggled placing the paint on the face because the hair would smudged into the face once I started painting the face.


We were then shown a power point of self portrait artists and chose 2 artists whose work attracted our attention to their work.

Peter Stitchbury

I was attracted to this painting because of how Stitchbury painted the portrait how there isn't any shadows on the face and how he has also enlarged the eyes of the girl which stands out the most out of the face.

Stephen Allwood

I found this art piece fascinating because of the colours, also because of how it is painted because it looks a bit more like a photograph than a painting. I also found myself attracted to this painting because of the reflection off the glasses where I realised he was quite detailed with reflection.     

Sensing the Surface blog 2

In week 3 we were learning about New Zealand Painting and 'Painting After', which is when an artist paint in a similar style as another artist it's also a response to the artist they are looking at.


After Painting

The artist i decided to do a painting after was Dick Frizzel, because I found this art piece engaging, I then decided to change the colour as well as the message but leaving the word life exactly the same as the original piece.

This is the original art piece.

And here is my Painting after art piece, you can already see the difference between both pieces. You can already see the difference between both works, the original main colours are black and white where my piece is of different tones of purples and blues as well as white.

Manipulating The Image Weeks 5,6 & 7

These past 3 weeks we learnt how to screen print posters based on the theme Grounded which is about nature, to show at the Grounded festival on the 27th to the 29th June.


In week 5 we learnt how to make a image for screen printing on photoshop 6, by using photoshop 4 first because it is the only version with a 'half tone screen'. But I decided to not to use photoshop but instead draw my design on an A4 piece of paper then using the printer I scanned my design enlarging it to A3.


Week 6 we learnt how to make our prints, i realised it is very process driven.

1. Coating- A light sensitive a photographic emulsion is applied
2. Exposing- UV light exposes your image stencil onto your screen
3. Printing- You print your images
4. Cleaning- The photographic stencil is removed to start again.

In week 7 we learnt about different types of paper which is made differently, whether its the weight/thickness or what the paper is made of.

We were then given 4 different types of paper for our prints.

• Thin Cartridge
• Brown Paper
• Wet Strength Paper
• Canvas Embosed Cartridge

While printing I used one of my friends print design as well as using my own. 

This is her design:

After doing so many prints I realised I did a few mess ups, mainly because I was spreading the ink over the screen too hard which is why the print didn't come out clearly. But after my prints I decided to collage my butterfly designs on my posters to create a pop up effect to my art piece. Here are my final pieces.

In this piece I used the sunflower design Emily made and Collaged the butterflies around it, then used baking paper I decided to use it for the words Get Grounded as the paper is see-through so you can still see the print under the print design.

This Design my most favourite because the pink and blue go together perfectly, I was kinda experimenting with the brown paper butterfly print over the blue print and to my surprise it worked really well then using a black vivid i wrote the words Get grounded around the butterflies. 

Manipulating The Image Week 4

On Monday and Tuesday in Week 4 we were making magazine covers, we had to pick out a theme to our magazine... the theme i chose was music.... i think. Doing 2 covers these were both the original and the final piece.

 To make this cover i crop the picture till i got the picture of the girl, the adding a large red writing to the title i then made the letter R a little bit larger the the rest of the font.
Then for all the little blurbs i used either red or white for the writing. I then decided to shape one of the blurbs to curve in with the hair.

With this cover I cropped the image then change the contrast, The doing the same thing with title font as the other cover, but instead of using white for the blurbs i decided to stick with red.










The main thing i would like to do next time with these covers were to add a barcode to the cover.

Manipulating The Image Week 3

On Monday we learnt about Adjectives for our blogs as we seem to lack in describing our art works. We were then told about trendlist.org looking at graphic posters and how they are designed. Then choosing two posters we had to describe the piece.

Artist: Falko Ohlmer
Year: 2008
Composition: The larger writing seem to be mainly on the left side of the cover where the smaller writing is on the left side near the center and the colour is full white for this writing. The larger writing seems to fade more into the cover making it a bit harder to read it.

Artist: Erica Bech
Year: 2012
Composition: The writing is pretty bold and stand out from the background, The background seems to be split in half by two different colours.










On Tuesday we then design our own graphic posters, I first planned on making a poster with lyrics from my favourite artist as the background then have a treble clef over the top of the words. But i then decided against it and painted a treble clef then using baking paper i wrote my message: 'Music Is The Voice Of The Soul'. I mainly did this because I am very passionate about music as well as art.

When I scanned the original the printing seem to change the colour of it making the colours completely opposite then the original poster.

manipulating the Image Week 2

On Monday and Tuesday we all did monoprints for posters, on Monday we did a practise run with printing, because it has been awhile since we last did it.

On Tuesday Emma gave the class a task to make a A3 poster that contained at least 3 of the 5 medias used, whether it was text, image, monoprint, collage, drawing or painting.
The Three medias I used text, monoprint and drawing, the poster also had to have a simple directive to it as well. My directive was Pump It LOUDER!
Using collage for the word pump and felt tips for the word it....
Then for the word Louder i monoprinted the word and used black colouring pencil spikes to make the word stick out.