ANIMATION!!!!!

I started my animation elective. We started off by watching lots of animations and anime's... brilliant! What a great way to start off class! I guess finding and watching these animations counts as contextual work, looking at how they are made and the styles they were drawn/made in.

This is one of the anime's I found particularly funny: 'A Gathering of Cats' ( Neko no Shuukai ) ...enjoy! A cat planning world domination because humans keep standing on his tail. It's the bitter sweet life of a cat....

 

 

This is another animation that stood out for me, 'Ohayo' (オハヨウ) Satoshi Kon. I found the style of anime was beautifully drawn and the story was simple and effective. Enjoy!...

 



 

 

This is a really cute animation with a lovely love story, based on soulmates:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aTLySbGoMX0

 

 

 

I found this animation pretty adorable!!!!!! and a really nice story! Enjoy!...

 



 

 

A typical Pixar looking bird. Funny story based on the difficult life of birds on a telephone wire. Enjoy!...



 

 

This is really funny!...Enjoy!...

 

 

'Big Buck Bunny'... poor guy gets bullied and gets his own back, a cute and funny animation, enjoy!...



 

I thought this was a really well made animation, it has the typical stop motion appearance and flows really well. |'Ten Thousand Pictures of You', enjoy!....

 



 

'Darkness Light Darkness' (1990) by Jan Svankmajer. A extremely well made claymation. I find myself conficted watching this. I like it yet dislike it. It's well made yet creepy! (mainly the creepy face...no offence!)It's an animation about becoming aware of your own body as you grow.

 

 

A short film from 'Wall-E' that I recently discovered. Love that film and the short films related to it.

 

Print! First elective!

We had to choose three electives to try out for the second semester, at the end of the semester we then have to choose one of them to study for the next 3/4 years. It's a big decision!!! My first elective was Print Making.

I found it a little difficult to grasp at first. Which is probably happens when trying new things. It was fun though and I enjoyed it. I discovered my physical strength was terrible though because I needed help with the printing press, kind of embarrassing! I made 19 prints in total. Many of them are replicas of other prints because the printing process is very repetitive. The brief was 'Urban', and my approach to the brief was nature vs U rban. How nature still manages to grow even in our harsh urban environment.

Here are some of my prints:










 All the above were a way of mono printing. Rubbing away the ink to give painterly textures. This was my favourite way of printing.


Dry Point Printing. Scratching the image into acitate and inkink over it and then rubbing away the ink to get clean precise lines.




 Above. Wood Block Prints




 Mono Print. (Above)

Oh yeah! I passed my assessment in the first semester. Delighted!!!!

Next elective is animation, can't wait!!!!
i'll keep  you posted!! :)

Christmas gifts, Paintings!

I was busy this Christmas. This year I decided to do paintings as gifts for my relatives. I'm the only artist in my family... ever! So receiving a painting went down well. It's also a lot more personal I think. Landscapes seemed to be a popular choice for a gift so that's what I did. I never painted landscapes before so it was fun giving it a try. I painted three canvases in total.
Here they are:

Sunrise

Snow scene

Autumn scene

 

 

 

So I was pretty productive over Christmas this year for a change with painting gifts, working on my 8th hallway mural, and photography and drawing animations for my college project

An Artist's Hallway

At home, we have a long narrow hallway, to break it up a little my Dad glued on almost like frames onto the wall. Frames that cry out to have images painted inside on them. So that's exactly what I did! I started painting a series of murals in the frames as material to show in sketchbooks for my portfolio to get into art college.

My theme for the portfolio were flowers, so there are quite a few flowers. Once the portfolio was finished I moved onto differnt images of my Dad' choice... because I paint the for him. There are 9 large frames altogrther, and I'm in thhe middle of paintng the eighth one. These have nothing to do with my current college work. These were done in my spare time and something I enjoy doing.

Here are the paintings in order of the earliest to the most recent, you can see I got better at painting over time I think:

Lilies

Humming bird

Canterberry Bells

Top and bottom halves. Ivy

Top and bottom halves. Roses.

 Parats

Elephants

 

I'll put the photo's of the last two frames when I have time to finish them. Now here are the views of the paintings from either end of the hallway to give you a peek at what it's like now:

One end.




And the other.


Obviously the paintings are very decorative because it's apart of the house.
Thats it for now.

...... Stay chuned!! :)



Some photography, "Journey"

 

I have taken a few photos using my little dough man in college and at home, "my little journey" if you like!  To be honest photography doesn't seem to be an area I'm very skilled at, many turn out blurred or else I simply just don't like them, but practise makes perfect, right? These are a seleted few that I like:







 




This is my favourite photo. He looks particularly sad by the rainy window.








My attempt at casting. Not a bad first result



Christmas at home.


He's pretty small!


Lounging around at home.


Close up!!!!!

Let's get Animated! Part 2

Was working on some more animations. For an animation as simple as my little dough men I think expressions are very important. So as a result I went about exploring different expressions and adapting them to my little characters.

Images confined to a space

Remember these?...

these images are my inspiration for my other pieces, each piece has it's own sense of confinement.

 

These gave me the idea to do a series of hidden images. Images confined to a space. A large enough gap for the viewer to move around and peer inside. These are related to the figure in a box idea except instead of just drawing or painting the image, I'm adding a 3D factor. Giving a larger sense of confinement. Here are a few pieces I came up with:

 

 

 

Before

 

 

 After