a glimpse of my final product

It's already week 4 of term 3, I have about 6 weeks more to complete my coursework!

I just finished editing one of the few photos that I'm using in my poster series. After having the ideas all in my head for such a long while, I feel really happy to see that my final product is really materialising and coming along :)

This first draft for my poster series is for the kites theme. This is just the edited photo, I'm still not sure of how I want the poster layout to be. Also, after getting some comments from various people, I'm going to edit this further, so this is really just a rough idea of what I have in mind.

My 1st draft!

The original photo:

a failed pinhole experiment

When I was going around taking photos for my coursework, I also took some pinhole pictures of the similar theme. My pinhole camera was a DIY one, I think it was meant as a DIY toy for kids. I bought it in a random gift shop in Taiwan last year on my GCP trip. It's not all that great, but it made me curious enough to buy it and try it out.

the box that my pinhole camera came in. it came from a company called "kids.labs."

a picture of my pinhole camera. I assembled it myself :D

it doesn't need batteries, doesn't have a LCD screen and a proper viewfinder (it's just a plastic frame stuck on top of the camera, I didn't really trust it since it was like 5cm away from the pinhole). it also used film, so I didn't know how the pictures would turn out and if I used the camera correctly. I could only keep taking till the film runs out.

my roll of film.

As the pinhole camera used a normal 135mm film, I sent the film for developing at a printing shop. Unfortunately, when I went to collect the pictures and film, the staff there said that they couldn't print out any of the pictures, because they were apparently all too blur/unclear/wrongly exposed etc. Basically they didn't develop any of the photos out because the pictures probably won't show. Though I was upset and disappointed, I looked through the film again and realised out of the 20 over shots that I took, some of them actually came out pretty successfully (the exposure and everything seemed correct).

So below are some of the pictures I took using the pinhole camera. I took photos of the film against a light source so the pictures on it would show better.

this, if I'm not wrong, is a picture of a kite in the sky. I think I took it at West Coast Park, thus there are so many trees in the foreground.

this is a picture of a swing.

this is another picture of the same set of swings.

this is a picture of a hopscotch.

I really want to try taking pinhole pictures again and hopefully figure out what went wrong with my pictures. Through that I hope I can take better pinhole pictures and hopefully be able to develop them.

However, I think I should move on with my coursework, so I shall put aside my pinhole camera for now :)

A coursework update

Hi there :) I realised I have not updated my coursework progress for quite a while, so here it is. This is the last week of the June holidays. During these 4 weeks I focused on going around and taking photos for my coursework. I was hoping to finish taking photos over the holidays so that I can move on to editing and making my final product when Term 3 starts.

Below are photographs that I took of the different themes that I wanted to use.

Swings.

Bear. Torchlight. Silhouettes. Don't you think this bear looks like a superstar haha.

I would like to leave this theme as a mystery :D Partly because I'm still experimenting with the compositions etc. The broad theme for this idea is imagination. The brillant imaginations of children :)

Playgrounds. The havens of kids.

Mimosa plants. I don't know about you but when I was young I would never pass a mimosa plant without touching it and watching it close :D

Kites.

A child cycling. Basically just kids doing what they do best (having fun).

my latest artist's statement

Nowadays, children are getting very busy because their parents make them take up a lot of lessons since young, such as piano, drawing, tuition, swimming etc. Thus, the current generation of kids seems to have less free time to do whatever they want. Also, with the level of technology available now, they tend to spend less time outdoors playing. I have friends who grew up with only tuition classes and all sorts of enrichment lessons, and I was shocked to find out that they never played games that I used to enjoy so much as a kid. I have also seen my younger cousins huddling in corners playing PSPs and mobile phone games instead of going outdoors to run about and play, like I used to do.

My coursework is inspired by this negative trend and is thus themed “Childhood”. To me, my childhood was when I was the happiest as my life then was very carefree. I spent a lot of time outdoors when I was younger. Till now, I still miss my childhood a lot.

I hope that through my coursework, I would raise awareness on this negative trend of kids getting less time to truly be kids. What I have in mind for my coursework currently is a campaign involving a series of photographs. I want to showcase certain activities commonly done by children through photography and hopefully these photographs would evoke a sense of nostalgia in the viewer. The photographs would be in the form of posters and/or postcards with taglines reminding the viewer to remember the fun in the viewer’s own childhood. The campaign is targeted at parents of young children, in the hope that by reminding them of their own childhood, they would refrain from scheduling too many lessons for their children. This way, their kids would have more time to play and enjoy their childhood too.

Inspiration

In this post I will be blogging about the inspirations for my coursework.

Quite a while ago we went to the United World College to view their students' art exhibition, in the hope that we can find some inspiration for our coursework there. Below are two artworks with ideas that I plan to use in my coursework:

Above is an artwork of silhouettes of two children/toddlers.

I thought the artist was very creative in making use of silhouettes and thus I also plan to use them in my coursework. Another interesting thing was that the artwork was of children/toddlers, which was relevant to my theme of "childhood".

This is a painting (I think) of an outline of a rose against a brick wall. What intrigued me about the painting is that the white dashes were not painted unlike the rest of the artwork. I believe that the dashes are yarn. I would like to do something like that for my coursework, but as my final work would not be as big as the rose-brick wall painting, I might just use thread and sew them on my works.

???

There is another thing that inspired me but I can't find it anywhere... It's an advertisement that used to appear frequently on the newspapers. It's this normal family photo but a member of the family was a silhouette. Does anyone know what the advertisement was about and where to find it? I think it's something about someone dying o.o

If anyone knows can you tell me? Thanks :D

Ideas needed!

As I've previously said, I am focusing on childhood memories for my coursework. At this moment, I need some ideas which I can work on so I will just ask a question:

What do you used to do as a kid?

it can be touching the mimosa plant and watch it close, climbing all over the playground etc etc.

you can still be doing these stuff haha.

please please comment :D THANKS :D

Past works

Below are some of my artworks that I did last year as assignments:

Acrylic painting

This painting was done with acrylic paint. For this assignment, we were told to choose a portrait painting and try to imitate it. Sadly I can't remember the name of the painting or the artist at the moment :( I was pleasantly surprised by how the artwork turned out at the end, because it was my first acrylic work and I wasn't very good at painting. Of the entire painting, I am most proud of the man's shield because I think the colours blended well and it looks very much like reflecting metal. I remember spending one entire lesson (3 hours) on it :D On the other hand, I thought the man's face was too orange. I also thought I could have painted the background better because the blending wasn't well done. It was the first part that I painted, and I didn't have time to improve on it later on. What intrigued me the most about my painting is that the man looked much younger in mine as compared to the original painting. Maybe it is because of the way I drew the man, it looks less realistic as compared to the original.

Abstract Art

For this assignment, we were supposed to choose a picture and draw abstract pieces based on the original picture. Our teacher gave us a quota on the number of abstract art works we had to do so that we can make full use of our creativity. My first few pieces were mostly similar to the original, I only used different materials to copy out the picture. However, as I went on, I felt that I became more daring because there simply wasn't that many different materials to try on. I began to break the picture up into different parts and even imagine the subject of the picture in different scenarios. Overall, I think I learnt more about thinking out of the box through this assignment. On a side note, the picture on the left (<---) is my original picture. I took this picture myself sometime last year. I think I get an advantage in this exercise by using my own photo instead of using one found on the Internet because I can recall the time I took this picture. I can imagine myself taking photos of the same subject from different angles and from there create some of my abstract pieces.

Below are the abstract pieces that I did:

This piece was done with oil pastels. I like this piece a lot because the flower has more vibrant colours (the pink) while the water reflection are mostly coloured with pastel colours. This makes the subject of the picture stand out more.

This piece was the product of me imagining the subject of the photo (the flower) in another scenario -- in this case, the middle of a highway. I felt that this piece is meaningful because the original picture was taken in Botanical

Gardens. This piece kind of makes me wonder what will happen to all those flora and fauna if the area was developed into infrastructure for humans.

This was done with felt-tip markers and crayons. I feel that the background could be improved on because there are quite a lot of white spaces that weren't coloured. I think the crayons that I used were for toddlers and young kids (because I found them somewhere in my closet), so the colouring didn't turn out as well as it would had if I used crayons meant for art.

This was done on black paper with white colour pencils. I drew the flower in an imaginary lake/pond.

This was drawn entirely with colour pencils. Personally, I liked how the picture turned out because the colours blended well with each other.

After that, we had to form pairs and try to combine our two pictures together into one abstract piece. We also had to make use of the style of a particular abstract artist and use one of his/her works as reference. My partner was Hannah, whose picture was also of a plant. I couldn't remember the artist whose works Hannah and I referred to though...

This is our final artwork, done with markers (for the detailed parts) and ink (for the background). The artist that we chose distinctly uses "batik style" in her works, and we imitated her by having very detailed patterns and vibrant colours in our work. I also used ink for the first time when doing this assignment. We had to wet the paper with a wet brush before dropping ink on the paper. The wet parts were supposed to be paths for the ink to flow evenly, like in batik painting. It was tougher than it sounds because we were really afraid that the paper would tear after it gets wet. Our final artwork's background had a furry texture because we kept wetting it over and over again after it dried :D

(sorry that the formatting of the post is pretty screwed up :/)