Culture meets Nature: Drawing

To continue on our theme of 'when culture meets nature' we each chose two words out of a hat, one was a natural thing, and one cultural. My two words were 'mountain' and 'shoes'. I started off by doing some observational sketches of shoes, both mine and other peoples.

I then sketched a mountain the best I could from memory (unfortunately I couldn't find a mountain in Wolverhampton) 

I then tried to combine the two, by making a 'mountain of shoes' starting with a pile of shoes, turning into a mountain further up

 Some close-ups of the drawing:

I then tried to combine them in a different way, by making the mountain into a shoe. I did this by putting laces up the side of the mountain, and trying to make it shoe shaped, while keeping the form of the mountain. I then cut away the excess paper to better show the shape.

Space: Playing with scale

Today we were looking at space, how people occupy space, and how artists create the feeling of space, or lack of it, in their work. My favourite piece I looked at was by Joel Shapiro, and it was a cast iron chair, all alone in a large room. It started me thinking about scale, and how people perceive it. A chair is something that is supposed to be a certain size, supposed to be big enough for a person to sit on, so this very small chair, that would fit in your hand, is very strange to look at, and might make people viewing it feel uneasy and confused about what to do. I wanted to use this idea of making something that is usually big, very small. I thought of different ways of doing this and I liked the idea of making whatever I decided to make out of a different material to what it usually is (Shapiro's chair is made of cast iron) after brainstorming as a group, I decided to make a cityscape, scaled down very small, and I decided to do this out of paper.

I decorated the buildings with fineliner pen to give them windows, and I liked the contrast this had with the bright white paper. I think the black and white buildings worked well on brightly coloured background as this added to the feeling that this shouldn't be there. I tried to find locations that were easily identifiable in terms of scale, to show how small the buildings are.

I arranged the pine cones to show the scale of the buildings, but also so the buildings were tucked away, in a corner, so people passing by wouldn't notice they were there.

I really like this photo because a wasp came and landed on it, but unfortunately, it's a little bit blurred because i moved slightly, but the wasp flew away so i couldn't retake the photo

These photos also have the wasp in, but not as visible as the first one.

This photo is very clear but unfortunately the wasp is not in it.

I then put it on a leaf I found, as I like all the colours of the leaf, contrasting with the stark monochrome of the buildings.

I will take more photos of the buildings in different locations in the next few days to see which background I think looks best.

Group introductory project.

for our introductory project, Applied arts and fine art (the courses are merged in first year) were split into groups and given the theme 'When nature meets culture'. we brainstormed for a while and decided to make a timeline. One side would start with civilisation and buildings, going from skyscrapers, round to more organic structures like cottages. From the other side, we would start with mountains, to mirror the skyscrapers, and have lots of colours and plants, nature untouched by humans. we decided to link the two sides with water, which is important in both nature and culture, so the nature side had a stream, coming down the mountains and round to the middle, where it met a canal, a man made stream, coming from the culture side. I took pictures of the parts to show the many different styles of drawing that our group created.

 we also used some yarn and origami to make it slightly 3D, to add interest to what would have otherwise been quite a flat piece.

 Other groups, though they had the same starting point, had very different final pieces to ours. i found it very interesting to see the different ways it had been interpreted.