Leeds Love Arts - Active Arts Proposal

I realise I didnt write about this at the time but its worth noting I learnt a bit about writing a proposal for an arts project and put it together on InDesign. This is the result.

The proposal contains our aims as a group, why we do what we do, how we do what we do and what we plan to do for the already existing Leeds Love Arts mental health festival.

This was taken from an online guide on how to write a creative proposal. I worked quite hard on making the 2 pages look right using layout techniques I learnt at level 4. I think it all lines up and looks neat as a composition. This was sent off to TestSpace and they reacted well to it but ended up asking us how intended to create revenue from it after telling us they were a not for profit organisation so we went else where.

Leeds Love Arts helped us out by putting us in contact with a man at the market place who gave us a free space to run our workshops.

We pick up the keys on monday the 31st and run the workshops on the 1st and 2nd of November.

Lana Johnson has put together the schedule and organised the people who will be supervising the workshops.

Anne Marie Hurst and the Skeletal Family shoot - Clockwork Eye Productions

My freind Danny asked if I could help with 2 days of shooting for a band called the Skeletal Family in a warehouse in Keighley. I figured I would learn some new skills in set design, lightning and camera work so I said yes.

We filmed 13 music videos all in the same room but the aim was to get every music video looking different using a mix of camera technique, lighting, a smoke machine and set design.


We overcame this problem by using quite a lot of close ups for a start. We redesigned the room several times. For one shoot we covered the floor with candles and shot with one camera from the floor up and one from above waist height forward.


For one video we shot from the ceiling down with close ups of the band behind. For one we backlit the band with powerfull floor standing lights called redheads and filled the room with smoke and so forth...

I learnt how to use a hand held HD camera and about white balancing.
White balancing is where you film a white piece of paper in the lighting you are going to be working under and press the white balance button on the camera, this tells the camera that under this light, this is white.

Smokey room, red lighting + candles

Hanging lights from the ceiling, using a crossbar and climbing hooks.

The powerful Redheads backlighting

Danny between the two red heads.

Mental Health day at Inkwell, Chapel Allerton

I went to Inkwell in Chapel Allerton which is a community arts space. I went there to volounteer for Leeds Love Art Mental Health festival. I met a bloke there called Steve Willingham who is a Leeds Based artist who produces these paintings. He works in a similar medium to me in that he uses fine liners, paint markers and inks. Ive posted this as something to aim towards in line work and symmetry which I struggle with.

I also spoke to the folk who run the venue with the idea of volounterring for them, which they said was definitely ok. I would be working in place with some fairly great resources. They have a kiln and produce some great models. They also have a lot of painters who go there. The venue is for people with mental health problems to go and create art in a community.

The only problem was that the days for volounterring fall on thursday and friday when I am busy with college. I'm going to contact them again after christmas.

Blaize Community Arts - Stop frame animation

Did an animation workshop at glusburn institute. I was working but spent most of the time doing my own animation which ill post up soon. I worked with plastecine, a stock background using iStopmotion and final cut pro. It was good fun but the point was to teach people to be creative with stop motion animation... I'm not an expert but with Blaize's kit its dead easy. Look at the pictures!

I learnt to use Istopmotion which is a very basic bit of software. Its very effective though. We were working with HD cameras mounted and point vertically or horizontally at a piece of blue paper. We then used chroma key to put backgrounds behind what we animated.

I also worked with a group of 15/16 year old helping them to make theirs.

This is the one I made

This workshop was a good experience for me as I may be taking this project on in the future as Blaize community arts have been asked by the arts council to start training up young people to manage their projects.

Blaize have become well established and successful by paying attention to what the Arts Council want to see in community arts and playing to those needs. This is an important thing to learn if I want to be a community artists.

Hand coloured prints

#1 - This is pretty much the first time Ive used watercolours. They have never appealed to me before. I am starting the understand how they work, they layer up and smudge when you apply water to them. Sounds really simple but its hard to put into words.

#2 The shadows are better in this one as Ive used a blue tinge I think. and the different coloured stone work has a good effect. Ive tried to have the colours be more intense in the foreground.

#3 I put a gray wash on this first and it just looked murky. I didnt like it so I didn't spend long on it. I started messing about with bleeding as the paper was damp.



#4 - A freind suggested I try a different colour scheme entirely so Ive used bright colours on the building and neutral colours on the characters and some detail so they stand out. I like how the bright colours look against all the gray and white.


#5 - Started with a yellow wash then built up the colours on top of that.

I plan to have 18 of these done (thats how many prints I have...) in the next 2 days.

Update:

Ok so what with going and doing some filming and lighting I'm behind on these... I'll aim to have them done over the weekend.


#6 - This is a continuation of the colour pallette developing in numbers 1 and 2. I like how its coming along especially in the stone walls.


#7 - This was trying out a new pallette. No comments here really.
#8 This is a continuation of number 5. I liked the yellow wash so I decided to do it again but better.

Print-making

I went to the print-room with the idea that I would take the line drawing of the street and replicate it onto good paper in order to colour them 20 different ways.

As directed by staff in the print room, I took the drawing, photocopied it making it as dark as possible, cleaned a screen using the chemicals available (b-strip and i forget the other one,) painted the screen in light sensitive emulsion, exposed the image onto the screen in the exposure unit, cleaned off the unhardened emulsion, let it dry and then began to print.



First off you register where you want your paper to be and mark it off with masking tape. This is only really necessary if you are going to print more than one colour which I wasn't but I did it anyway to show the process. You then print your image onto the plastic sheet which sits over your paper initially, this is so you can line up for a second colour. Its not shown in the image above unfortunately...

This is an image of my screen attached to the printing table. This wasn't a difficult process, you just have to clamp and make sure its fixed in place.



The first mistake I made was to use a screen made for fabric printing, this means the mesh is slightly wider. The above print is a result of using a fabric screen on paper and not turning the suction on on the table to hold the paper down. The lines are too think and its double printed.


This image is a result of not being fast enough in printing more, the mesh became clogged and the printing here is faint and broken, I think that might be a higher risk with fabric screens too. But when I got it right with the paper printing screen I made as many copies as I had the paper for as fast as I could and this didn't happen.


This is the final result and a satisfactory print.

Interim Crit and Pushing Forward.

After a truly terrible interim crit I've had to have a rethink. There was no where near enough work on my blog and the truth is I really hadn't done nearly enough work. I was distracted by other projects and probably being slightly lazy...

So in order to improve for the remainder of CommTech I have looked on other peoples blogs first off.

I noticed that people have been putting down anything that inspires them so Ive started doing that.

I also noticed that people were really just giving anything a shot. I think I've had tunnell vision slightly, Ive felt studious with my book on perspective and technical drawing but I'm really not yielding enough work.

My plan for today, is to get the line drawing of the street replicated in the print room (I prepared a screen yesterday) and begin to experiment with different methods of colouring. Especially water colour. I will document my progress through photographs and writing.

Other processes to try:

printmaking with multiple colours

using perspective now to create something large and organic looking. IE a city scape or similar.

possibly try large model making as this relates to character design and public art.


In regards to what I want to be moving towards I'm considering animation, illustration and making as these things are skills I can use in the foreseeable future working with blaize community arts and on the festival circuit.