BA1b Fine Art - Reflective Journal & Project Research

This week, I also learned about acid etching with a copper plate. I wanted to expand my knowledge on printing and learn a new skill. I found it really interesting and a lot easier than I thought, however there are a lot of steps to get to the final result - constantly de-greasing the copper plate, cleaning it, melting wax on top of it, then burning it with an open flame to make it easier to scratch on the design, then another de-grease, taping the back to protect it from the acid, creating a handle and then placing it into the acid vat. I really loved the end results and I'm happy to add this to my project. For my design, I decided to use the evil eye design that I used for my last wood cut as I felt this would look good on an etching. I also added the words 'See No Evil' in the top corner to bring back that theme. Even though this was an experiment into a new skill I still wanted to link it in with my project. I did make a mistake when I was handling the copper plate a...

Before doing the etchings, I did a few more woodcuts, this time using a different type of wood that I got from the 3D workshop. For the designs I used one side for the last part of the saying - 'See No Evil' and the other, I decided to carve out an evil eye, designed based on the symbols I had seen online. However, I found it quite difficult cutting into this type of wood, it wasn't as soft as the wood I had used previously, and the marks came out a lot more jaggedy, but I decided to go with it and see how it would print.  For the prints, I decided to go with the traditional colours of the evil eye for the symbol, and decided to use dark colours and black for the text. I tried to do a three way gradient with different shades of blue for the evil eye. I also used different shades of blue. Once I had made the first print with the text I decided to overlap it with the other text based wood cuts to see what that would look like, I used green and pink for the overlapping text, ...

This was the first part of the Painting Workshop for skills 2. I decided to explore painting as well as I felt I could improve on what I had learnt about painting in the past and I also have an interest in painting after doing it for so long. The basis of the workshop was to learn about colour mixing and how different colours compliment each other. I had already been taught about this briefly in the previous year, but it was good to go back and remind myself of how colours work. I really enjoyed thinking about colour placement, and working with others to create these interesting artworks comprised of different painterly gestures and marks. It was also nice to add something to others work, it's like leaving your mark and making your work that much more collaborative and interesting.  We went through different stages when we were creating our piece. We first played with different shades of our given colour which was yellow, adding blue, red and even green to create different...

  After doing my initial print experiments, I decided to experiment with collage. I photocopied some of my screen prints, and collaged them together. I wanted to start to incorporate other elements in with my wood block prints, and start to go into mixed media. I chose to combine images and text together, and layer text on top of each other. I combined the coloured prints and the black and white photocopies together. After this, I then looked back at my other prints and noticed that the one main strong element was the eye. It stood out the most on each print, and because of this I decided to take this aspect further.  I decided to paint basic eye shapes, much like the eye shape I cut out on my wood block, onto the collages. I used blues and greens as I felt that colour stood out best on the red and black and also complimented the base colours quite well. I really liked how it created this reading of authoritarianism and the idea of someone watching you. From this,...

After doing the initial wood block workshop, I decided to continue experimenting with this technique. I decided on doing another wood block print in the same style except instead of SPEAK NO EVIL, I used the phrase HEAR NO EVIL. I felt like I needed to continue the saying and perhaps even do a complete series of prints using these phrases from the saying, which means doing further prints using the phrase SEE NO EVIL.  Much like before, I printed on top of magazine and newspaper pages, I overlapped the image, used different colours - dark colours which helped to bring out the text and marks made in the wood. However because I had another wood cut, I decided to overlap that wood cut with this one, overlapping the text and markings. I really liked the outcome of this as it defamiliarised the saying and created this uncanny image. I think I would like the explore this further, perhaps incorporating collage with print, i.e. collaging screen prints, and the printing on to. I also...