"Watching" photomontage

In response to this brief for Miss Stacey's Summer School.

Panoramic: Panoptic

Click on it for a much bigger and better version!

As promised, this is what we made last Thursday (took a while to get good photos). The idea was to work in groups of 2 or 3 and work on location around Bush House (where the illustration studios are) to record the environment in a 360-degree panorama. Didn't have to be exact, just our version of it. We could include anything we wanted including interiors, snippets of conversation overheard, people, buildings, anything really. ... I teamed up with Luke and Jen and we all went out for about two hours drawing quick sketches (we had to make about 32 each of about A6 size). We three have very different styles and it was nice to see how it would all come together. I also took some photos and did some rubbings (which the other groups hadn't thought to do!). Here's some of the stuff I managed to do in the freezing cold (some were done out of the studio windows when we couldn't take the cold and wet anymore - hence the one through the dome shaped window!)







We then congregated back in the studio and started photocopying the drawings; changing their scale, making some of them negative; and in our case, as I managed to get hold of some acetate, making some see through images too. We cut these out and stuck them down on two large A1 sheets stuck end-to-end. It was HUGE and actually quite difficult to do any decent composition-ing on as we couldn't quite see what it would look like. The process was obviously quite organic with us cutting things, moving things round, and running back and forth to the copier making more stuff. And in 2 hours we made what you see above ... I think actually it came together quite well, and we worked well as a team too. I've actually really enjoyed this fast paced generation of source material, and then manipulation to produce a final image, and am quite tempted to try some more ... Below is a close-up of my favourite bit of the image, the bottom right corner ... I love the series of boats and series of cranes.


I'll be putting up more work from Luke and Jen (and a couple of others) in the next day or two. I've had them all over today and we've had a portrait party! Its past my bedtime now so I'll do the collating and stuff tomorrow ...

Drawing workshop - collage

Text says "A midday donkey spits out a whole cloth full of plague and parlour art"

Text says "Put your head through the curtains What can you s e e The universe bends a n d space curves boundless expanding not expanding galaxies rushing queerer queerer than we"

Text says " 'Well', he says well thats fine" "Island citizens full of plastic memory ... ... ... ... ... ... listen."

Last week, after we all shared our self portraits and talked through them (and discussed what we'd learnt) and our collages of the portraits, we did a day long session on collages, looking at everything from Dadaism to contemporary illustrators who use collage. We watched a documentary about William Burroughs, who wrote Naked Lunch using a cut up technique where he would chop paragraphs up and then re-join them randomly to make up surreal storylines.

So we were given three different pages of text from different sources, asked to make up a text collage (using any method we wanted), and then do a picture collage from magazine cutouts to illustrate our piece of text (and encouraged to be as surreal as possible!). Most people chopped up their texts in to sentences and then re-arranged them to make some fantastical narratives ... I took a bit of a sidewards route in that I tried to keep the text connected (in sequence, and physically by cutting then out all connected), and went for short, and bit poetry-like, sentences, rather than whole paragraphs, as everyone else was doing. I think I'm the only one who has also stuck the words down as part of the collages ... its all due in this morning, so we'll see. What you see above are my three finished pieces. I'm not even going to try and explain them!

As homework we also had to do some drawings based on these collages - but using drawing exercises such as left handed and continuous-line. Below are my strange looking attempts:

Left handed

Blind (ie not looking at the drawing)

Continuous line

Left handed

And my favourite, continuous line.

I really like how the continuous line text has come out ... want to use this effect in the future ... strange things you learn from doing a collage project!

Self portraits 28 - 30

Whoopee!!!! Finished!!!! I must say I've really enjoyed this and may now force myself to do weekly or monthly (more realistic!) self portraits as a way of trying out different techniques and media.

Number 28, very experimental - I saw someone do this somewhere and wanted to have a go. This is a print of a photo that has been then worked over with acrylics and ink (you can still see some of the photo through the paint). I'm not completely sure about it as its not very me, but it was an interesting process anyways to work out how to carve up the face into sections...

Quink ink wash, then bleach to highlight. I'd forgotten how much I love this technique - something I picked up several years ago, and should do more often.

And the piece-de-resistance, number 30, 'Mithi the thinker' complete with cogs and a light bulb! Acrylics on board plus a few other bits and bobs. I wanted to make the cogs out of some more sturdier material - I gave up as cutting the board (which would have been ideal), would have taken too long - I've got to hand all of this in first thing tomorrow morning! - but I might still come back to it and make them more solid in the future.

Part of the project was also to make a collage of parts of the portraits - since I've been scanning them all in, I decided to do it digitally, rather than chop up bits of my hard work. It also means I could resize the parts to my hearts content till everything felt right ...

All I can say is if I didn't already know my own face intimately before, I sure do now!!!

Self portraits 22 - 24

Another three .... yes I've slowed down - but I've just found out I have another week ... and I've also been beavering away on another three little projects ... so for the time being, enjoy!

A collage of patterned papers (I collect nice patterns, even pictures of wallpapers from magazines!). I did this twice as the face was a flat darkish red at first and looked too flat and too dark ... much happier with it now. Took forever ... (notice the birds and flowers on my lips!)

Same image as before - I drew it in pencil first as a template for the collage, but stuck the collage down on a fresh piece of paper. So I drew over the template with Indian ink with swirly lines ... took all of about 10 minutes but I'm so much happier with this than the collage ...

Things I daydream about ... flowers and birds ... ;) Watercolour wash and Indian ink over the top.

Someone asked if they could see all the portraits together ... well you can, they're all in a set in my flickr accont here. I also have another self portrait set which includes all of these and some I did before.

Self portraits 16-18

Only managed 3 today - but at least they all have a theme - about the two sides of me, the logical scientific side; and the creative artistic side.

I've always associated myself with the Queen of Clubs - not sure why, but here you go. My teeth and eyebrows have come out a bit strange (gotta make mistakes to be learning from them) ... but I was quite pleased with the concept. Gouache on paper.

The next two are collages (the faces are ink with brush on paper). They should ideally be in a pair. Firstly, the right side of my brain, the creative, artistic side.Then the left, logical scientific side. But of course both sides influence each other - thats why all my paint brushes are so regimented and in straight lines, and my scientific images all so pretty and colourful.