Drawing 2 - Interior

Opposite to the previous session , we now began with interior drawing , our task was to pick a location within the creative arts building and draw what we saw from our perspective using a range of techniques and drawing instruments. For my location i chose to situate myself on a high point , looking through the glass barrier out into the rest of the creative arts building , i thought this was a perfect able as it captures the linear structure of the building , i also felt that it had the most potential for shapes to be created in the building. In this task we were pushed to add tonal shade values and colour to our piece to distinguish them form a generic pencil drawing.

Below is my interior drawing from the creative arts building. I began by using pencil to sketch the rough outline of the structure. Once finished i went over these line using a thick finaliser to add weight to certain lines allowing them to stand out and define the build more than other less important lines. After i added a tech of shadow to give the building depth and finally an element of colour to define different parts of the building such as blue for glass.

Personally i feel that i struggle with these drawing tasks as it is something i haven't really pursued when designing , i prefer to make quick simplistic sketches than go into detail. Although i feel that my skills are slowly improving there is still a lot i need to learn. hopefully the future sessions will open me up to different drawing styles and ways of thinking when using drawing instruments. i feel that having more time will allow me to express my creativity more.

Sense of Place - Animated GIF

Love Spreads - The Stone Roses

Love Spreads

The GIF above shows the flow of images I took when visualising audio in my Sense of Place project. To create the image I used the vibrations of the speakers to move the paint. On the gif you can see how the vibrations make the paint get to its peak as the they change throughout the song.

Above is the video 'The Sound of Taste - Schwartz Flavour Shots' , This video inspired me when creating my visualising sound photoshoot as Schwartz have used the vibrations of sound to add life to their Herbs and Spices. I feel that one of the main messages that this campaign is trying to get across to the audience is that the Flavour Shots are bursting with flavour. 

Included in my project are other examples of songs i played through the speakers to map the sounds however they are just still images and not presented within a GIF format.

Typography Seminar

This seminar consisted of each person in the session being given 3 post-it-notes and given the task to design a typeface for the 3 letters we were assigned. I feel that typography is one of my weak points within my studies therefore it would be good to get a different perspective of what everyone else think of it and how they approach the typography task.

The letters i were given were Q R and S , it took me a while to establish an idea for these but eventually i settled on creating the letters out of basic shapes instead of drawing some kind of funky 3D text. i tried my best to make the 3 letters easy to read but detailed in the style they were produced. 

As you can see above my 3 letters flow into each other by one part of the shape being present in the other letters. If i was to improve this design i would make the pieces of each letter slightly bigger as they were quite small and flimsy and took a while to arrange correctly.

After everybody finished their pieces we arranged them into a typography alphabet which displayed the different designs to the rest of the session , i felt that this was useful as i would be able to take inspiration from this.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

For one of our studio sessions this month we visited The Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP). Although it was pleasant to get out and about to shoot images for my primary research i felt that the location wasn't ideal as my sense of place project is very city based. However it did provide a alternative view on how i could take this project through a different route. 

Part of the park that stood out to me was the Rob Ryan : Listen to the world exhibition. Rob Ryan creates intricate creations out of cut and folded paper which is a very difficult and unique technique. The pieces that stood out to me were cuttings of villages and structures that looked almost like maps. These were relevent to my project as they were very similar to vector images that could be used to create a simplified map. I like how Rob Ryan creates his work as they are more of a physical finished piece which can be held and interacted with making it more interesting than a standard print. I also like how if a light is shone onto the work it creates a shadow in the shape of the art , this effect could be used to increase the size of the work onto a wall or object.

http://cdn2.digitalartsonline.co.uk/cmsdata/slideshow/3470641/Rob-Ryan---There-Is-Only-Time-detail-courtesy-of-TAG-Fine-Arts.jpg

http://robryanstudio.com

Pictures of us at the sculpture park

Urbanised - Film

In this lecture, we were shown Urbanised (2011) a documentary film by Gary Hustwit. The productions message was to "change people's ideas about something that already exists", and to show the use of architecture and how it can be adapted to suit the rapid development of population and culture within the modern world.

The film began with a voice over, stating: 'everything we see has been designed and planned'. we were then presented with several unique locations; Copenhagen, New York, Chile, Brazil, Detroit, Brighton, Cape Town, Stuttgart and New Orleans.These were all key locations where architecture had influenced the place and created significant new change to the location. For example in New Orleans houses were severely affected by Hurricane Katrina, so a lot of the land that was being built upon had no set plans, as this was originally not meant to be un-occupied land the city allowed  architectures to have a lot of fun with the plans, because there was no requirement to be met or no specific way how any structure should look.

Below are some of the notes i made during the film: 

Convergence

This lecture focused specifically on Convergence. "the process or state of converging". Convergence means is to change something or to make it a little different.

We were given a mixture of answers/opinions of what convergence was from different people. Here are some of the statements that were said:

"Convergence is an ambiguous term used by various disciplines to describe and analyse processes of change toward uniformity or union. Its application in the communications sector, often referred to as media convergence, also encompasses valuable approaches and insights to describe, characterise and understand the digital creative economy." - Media Convergence, Michael Latzer.

"Convergence is a ‘cooperation’ and cross-promotion." - Grant, Wilkinson.

"Convergence is doing journalism and telling stories in the most appropriate medium." - Quinn.

Blog Setup / Vimeo Account

This process and production session involved initially setting up our blog to allow us to start documenting about our Theory , Process and Production and Studio lectures. In this session we also begin to start our small animation about a book of our choice and set up a Vimeo account to show it on.

We created our Blogs using Blogger , which is run through Google , other potential sites we could have used were Wordpress and Tumblr however they are all more technical than blogger so we used it to get our posts up and published as soon as possible. We were shown how to lay our blogs out then were given time to customise it to how we wanted it to be presented. Although mine is nothing special in the design aspect of things it is still clear and presents information easily. The 3 main items we had to blog about were Process and production , Contextual/Theory and Studio sessions. As well as anything personal that we think will fit in , e.g. videos , book , exhibitions and artists that may link to my work.

http://benmoulson.blogspot.co.uk

My Blog ( You're on it )

We then set up our vimeo account which literally involved putting in an email and password so didn't involve any serious design aspects like blogger. After setting up our Vimeo account we were given the task to think of a book we enjoyed , in this case i picked A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (1962). Although unfinished yet my animation consisted of the iconic Clockwork eye emerging on the page and leaving swiftly. I wanted to make my animation like this as i felt that it would allow the audience to identify what the Book was without seeing the title. In my next sessions we will use After effects to string our frames together and hopefully create a successful animation.