New Blogging System

Well today for PDP we got our marks about our folder and blog and so in the spirit of committing fully to a weekly blog and trying to make up for the many that I missed I am making a few more this week to get up to date on my LAST brief and then letting people know about my new ones for this term.

Since what I am doing right now is re-mediation before I move onto my newer briefs I thought I would discuss my changes to the final piece for resubmission which I kind of did in my last post.

TODAY I was painting over the plaster faces and hands and foot so as to get rid of the tally marks that were over-powering the buboes made of modrock. First, I tried a matt gel which was near enough translucent which I had assumed was paint and now I'm thinking maybe not...Woops. But after that I found a ready-mix white paint and after layer upon layer it eventually started to cover the tally marks by the end only a few could be seen.

SO as you can see there are still some little marks showing through the layers of paint. Turns out you need more than 4/5 layers. Tomorrow I will be adding another one after the pieces are all entirely dry and hopefully that will be the last one. 

I also tested what painting the buboes would be like by sticking them to a page and painting them in different ways to experiment how to emphasise them. Trying full black coverage, red, yellow and black to look pus filled, and finally a black outline. But I didn't particularly like any of them so I have the idea to use a marker instead of paint as the outline but I'm unsure of how well that will look on the actual faces and not just on paper. Doing the outlines red would be a reference to the "Ring-a-round a rosey" rhyme which would be subtle and would really pop against the now brilliantly white faces... 

I am still undecided on how to present them once they are fixed up. I do like the idea of placing them outside in the muck like they are really coming out of the ground but now with all this snow, I'm hoping it melts in time. And also I don't want to get my work mucky because I know I will be the one carrying them places afterwards... The photos, if any, would be taken next week anyway more than likely. However, I will need to buy a frame or something to present the photo in... 

My brain is a big jumble for time keeping so I do hope this is all resolved well by next friday, the 6th. 

Another term another obstacle

After finding out I had marginally failed my Multiples project I then had a slight rant online - which is now forever removed from the public world - but talking things out with lecturers has helped me a lot.

I mean I did really well with my sketchbook so now its only working out how to redo my final piece which even I admit was not how I wanted it to be. It ended up looking like... plaster body parts placed on astro-turf... It had no real thought behind it seemingly when there was some, it just didn't come across.

SO

I have no clue what to change and how to change it. Its between painting over the tally-marks, possibly painting the buboes, and then maybe having an external photo shoot to get it in a real outdoor-sy atmosphere and then have a photograph of the "sculpture" be my final piece. Which is soooooo much better than what I had before. 

Or... Recreate an old idea I had of a drawing of a man's face in pain, with watercolour dripping buboes and all on top of the nursery rhyme "Ring-a-ring a rosey" (which is about the plague if you didn't already know that.) 

The decision is all mine but I cannot make a decision for myself ever so instead of starting it tonight... I'm blogging. 

I will get some perspective tomorrow hopefully and then I can start working on whichever I decide, what path I choose... Pray for me. This is gonna get hard... 

What I Learned Cause of College

What I Learned Cause of College

Because of our Contextual/ Essay/ Presentations class I learned a little bit about Japanese Legends, mostly the ones that follow along with the Studio Ghibli movie, Spirited Away. I learned about some of the spirits they believe in. 

In the Shinto religion they believe in Kami spirits. Kami is a term for supernatural forces that exist in nature. The spirits are generally associated with natural phenomena. They are thought to be associated or housed within nature, like in the rivers, mountains, trees/forests, etc. 

Yokai are a class of supernatural monsters in Japanese folk lore. They range from malevolent to mischievous or occasionally bring good fortune to those who encounter them. Sometimes they possess animal features and other times they appear mostly human. There are also some who look like inanimate objects and others have no discernible shape.

I've learned some legends about the spirit world as well such as the story of Izanagi and Izanami. Izanami, mother of japan died during birth. Izanagi went to the land of the dead (spirits) to get her but found she had eaten some of the food. Unfortunately it is believed that if you ate food from another world it would be difficult to return forcing the eater to stay. Which is entirely what happened in Spirited Away.... Just saying. 

All of the information I found out was mostly notes so sorry for the disjointed wording and sentences. Also everything was made relevant to my essay and presentation because they are about Spirited Away and the folklore that some Ghibli's are based on. None of this has any relevance to anything else in my life but I thought I would share because if you know the movie I thought someone... maybe... might find this information slightly interesting. 

My Multiples

My multiples project is about the Plague in Edinburgh. It mostly focuses on the multiple bodies/deaths caused by the plague.

Now my 3 ideas were all 3D sculptures.

1. Create a memorial involving the mass graves. It was an hour glass shape with the top half being the ground and the bottom being the mass bodies, faceless to emphasise the lack of identities. Originally it was going to be a child playing on top to show how these mass graves are unmarked and can be anywhere, but a lecturer pointed out that it would be difficult to know it was about the plague that way so I should incorporate the iconic plague doctor into it.

2. A 2 faced hanging head that on one side is a plague victim and the other the plague doctor mask. I wanted it to hang down from the ceiling to seem eerie and easy to see all the way round. 

3. Plaster molds of faces, hands and feet, laid on the floor like they are coming out the ground like a poorly covered mass grave. The body parts would have buboes made of modrock and the faces would be left white and have tally marks on them to emphasise the sheer number of victims of the plague. 

I have decided to go with the final idea, no.3. The buboes are to be painted so that they stand out, the tally marks are still to be added and as part of context there will also be a plague doctor mask painted black to contrast the white faces of the victims.

I toyed with the idea of adding a "quarantine" area with cones and tape and a white flag to hang over the piece as they did to show people that that place had someone suffering the plague inside. But all of that would have been too expensive all together and lack of time led to the idea being scrapped.