The book explains itself really.  It was originally for part of Advanced Higher Graphic Communication but then the project took over and turned into a book.  I interviewed / surveyed over one hundred and forty people to get opinions, photos, thoughts and memories on the Royal High’s Fringe production ‘Hairspray’.  I’d really appreciate some feed back.

This slide show has pictures of some models I made (for the playpark project), competition entries, my book and some research pages.

As part of the Advanced Higher Art and Design course, Expressive Unit. I desided to base my project on nature and plants. From this I started practicing drawing leaves and plants. Using this bank of research I then came up with some ideas on what to do with it and how to arange it. I chose to use a technique called phyrographing. This is when you have a special stick which conducts electricity to the rod which is then heated up. When this is hot enough you can burn wood to get special patterns. The nib can be changed to a variety of shapes and sizes which is usefull when trying to get differnt textrue. After a couple of practices and development I created a final piece which is 30cm by 70cm on wood.

For Advanced Higher Graphic Communication i recreated the setting from the well known film ‘Toy Story’ as well as the main character ‘Woody’ In this he interacts with a watergun (which i made in Pro Engineer) and made it look as if he is shooting at Rex. In the slide show you can see some of the furnature and characters from different angles and interacting.

I recently won a local competition through seniour section for making a scrapbook showing what our unit got up to in the centeenery year. In it is a re-creation of a tellitubbie scene, a chineese themes double pages where I attempted to write in chinese using chaligraphy pens and a campfire.

While I was away skiing in the french alps there  were a few statues that cause my eye which I thought might be interesting to post. In the slideshow there is one of a clock which is pased on Salvador Dali. There was another one in the center of the town but we were moving to fast to take a picture. The other picture is of two people with buildings ingraved on their bodies. Unfortunatly the description next to it did not actually describe the supture but the artist life. The last picture is of myself skiing.

On Wednesday the second of Febuary my Advanced Higher Graphics class had a day trip to Glasgow where we were kept busy all day visiting interesting places. We drove in the morning on the mini bus then headed straight to Kelvingrove museum. I took a picture of a stuffed tiger in here as it was relevent to my AH art project. We then walked to to the tube station and had lunch in a near by pizza hut. And pritty much cleared out the boofy. Shortly after we took to ‘the light house’ in it there was several design projects ranging from archatecture to enviromental. I took several pictures from the work displayed on the walls. At the top there was a view of Glasgow but we were so high you were mostly looking down on the roofs. On the way to the design offices we briefly visited Willow tea rooms, of whichs building is a Charles Rennie Mackintosh. We reached the Snook design offices which is run by Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond who is a former pupil from the Royal High School. They gave me a great insite to a whole new area of design which they were clearly passionate about. I especially liked how a large amound of their work uses information and oppinions from either the client or who it is aimed at, simalarly to how I brought together my Commemorative Brochure for Hairspray. This approach will definatly give a better end result. It is inspireing to see strong motivation and confidence to start thier own company at a young age in Glasgow. After visiting them I feel that after getting to grips what area I would like to specialise in, start my own company. I feel that this would be a good path to take as it means you can be your own boss and I am confident in leading through experience mainly in guiding.

After this visit we went to see ‘Black Swan’ in the cinema. Personaly I did not enjoy this film but was mainly because of personal taste and small phobia of birds. Before leaving had a quick bite in KFC then drove home.

Over several months my friend and I attended a Portfolio class which lasted 2 hours every Friday. Over this time we mostly did expressive work which involved experimenting with a variety of new materials. The lady who took the class was especially keen for us to ‘express the inner self’, which to begin with sounded a bit crazy, but we carried on any ways, and eventually made some unusual pieces. You will see in the slides that they all start with cardboard or some layer which is thicker than simply paper. Then on top is a variety of  sand, earth, wax, car grease, paint, chalk and coloured powder.

In higher Graphic communication I did my thematic presentation on a watergun. For this I had an actual water gun from which I did sketches and took measurements. Using these studies and information I could then recreate it in a 3D solid modelling programme called Pro Engineer. I encountered several problems with this program as my watergun had an intricate outer design which resulted with the extrude tool not working on it properly. I solved this by starting again and doing the outer shell with a different tool. This alternative approach resulted in a slightly altered appearance but it did get the job done. Once this section was completed, technical drawings were set out and printed. Along with this I made busness cards, envelopes and letterheads. I based a children’s story around the watergun and illustrated it using PagePlus, then had it printed by Blurb.com. Look at this link to see the full book: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1404890. In the slide show I have included some pictures of the book being read.

Here are some pictures of what I have done so far.  This includes a dress done in tester decorative paints from Homebase.  Also there is a series of drawings of the same outfit but with different styles (left to right) line drawing, tonal and oil pastel.  Similarly, I did a series of techniques (left to right) right hand, left hand, where the pen doesn’t leave the page and finally with eyes closed.