my final pieces

It's Week 9 of Term 3 and I've finished editing the 5 photos that I'm using in my poster series! I also added in the text (slogan of some sort) to the pictures. The main links between the 5 photos are the silhouette (one in each) and the text ("WHERE ARE OUR CHILDREN? don't deprive them of their childhood").

However, I'm not completely done with my final work. I'm planning to cut out the silhouettes and leave this empty space in the picture. This is to better represent my idea of "missing children" and how children nowadays aren't doing the activities they should be doing, such as playing at playgrounds and flying a kite. To do that, I need to wait for the pictures to be printed. So right now I need to start working on my boards.

Long due: (B)ARMOS logo design

This is another assignment that we did quite a long while ago. Every year, we have to design logos for our Lifeskills Camp. This year our camp theme is: (Becoming) A Respected Member Of Society.

This is my mindmap, with some pictures that I found from the Internet. They act as research.

Below are my 3 initial designs:

This is my final design (outlined with black marker):

Long due: experimenting with different ways of drawing

A long time ago (it was so long ago that I can't even remember if we did it this year or last year), we did an drawing exercise where we were supposed to draw certain still items (placed on our tables) in different ways: gestural, close observation and contour. We were also supposed to doodle. Below are my drawings:

GESTURAL

I thought this (^) was pretty awful because I do not like to and can't really draw humans. I was trying to draw a Barbie doll. I think I just gave up drawing the face and thus it has no face :D

I think I used charcoal for this drawing (above). I like how the hat turned out because the smudged areas make the hat look coloured.

DOODLES

I don't really doodle because I can't multitask very well (so usually in class I'm either listening or stoning. but never both at the same time). However, when I do doodle (when I'm really bored or when I was younger), I tend to draw cartoons that came from nowhere.

CONTOUR

I don't like contour drawing, because when I draw I tend to sketch (and end up with very rough sketches with a lot of lines). It was quite a pain for me to complete the requirement of 5 contour drawings for this exercise.

CLOSE OBSERVATION

I shall explain why I am posting this only now, when even my coursework is almost completed. I actually scanned the drawings in quite a while ago (in March) but then due to my forgetfulness, my thumbdrive (with all my scans) ended up in the washing machine. Miraculously it survived, and being the kiasu person I am, I copied all the files in the thumbdrive to another thumbdrive. And luckily I did because the thumbdrive died soon afterwards. However for some reason, I completely forgotten about these scanned images. Until just now, when I was browsing through my thumbdrive. So yup this is why I posted this so late :)

silhouettes

I realised that I have not clearly explained the idea for my final work. It is basically going to be a couple of pictures (of activities such as kite flying, playing on the swings etc). I took the photos used in my posters on my own and then I super impose the silhouettes onto the edited photos. I am using silhouettes in my final work mainly to represent the feeling of missing and gone. As my photos are of children's activities, I hope that by using silhouettes to represent the playing children, I can show that children are missing from these activities.

Below are the silhouettes that I did. For some of them, I referred to photos of children that I took while for others I referred to photos I found on the Internet. I didn't directly outline the silhouettes completely, I also had to edit the silhouettes to fit my pictures.

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This is a silhouette of a kid climbing. The picture that I referred to was of children rock climbing. I had to edit some parts of the silhouette from scratch because the photo that I had in mind was not a picture of a rock wall.

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This is a silhouette of a girl. The picture that I referred to was from a photoshoot, so the little girl was actually posing for the camera. I used this silhouette as a kid peeking around a corner, like she was playing hide-and-seek.

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This is a silhouette of a child flying a kite. I had to refer to 2 different photos for this one, because for the one I had with the kid running, well, he wasn't flying a kite. It is not shown here but I also added in the kite string for this silhouette.

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This is a silhouette of a child cycling. I referred to one of the photos that I took when I was going around taking photos during the June holidays. I'm really proud of this silhouette because I spent the most time on it (the spokes of the wheel nearly killed me). Of course, I had to simplify the silhouette later because I'm planning to cut them out.

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This is a silhouette of a child on a swing. The 2 brown lines are supposed to be the ropes/chains of the swing but I think the silhouette still looks weird like that on its own (without a background picture).

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).