Academic Writing

We had a whole day of academic writing. It wasn't very exciting.Having written a 4000 word extended essay last year there wasn't a lot I could be taught about academic writing or referencing or anything.
I'm not going to bore you with the details so here is a picture of some people cleaning the windows of The Shard on my way into London. How do those guys even get in the little metal box knowing how high up they're going to be?!

A day at the National Gallery

So we spent the day at the national gallery drawing. I liked this because I like drawing. and given that it rained pretty much all day its not a bad place to pass some time.
The day consisted of wandering through different centuries of art work and drawings bit of bodies that we liked the look of.

The idea was at the end of the day we would be able to put together all these body parts into creating our own creature/monster/figure.
I really wanted my to have a mermaid's tale. But there are no mermaids in the National Gallery. Trust me, I have looked, several times. The closest I could get was a lobster. I found a dragon and some boats, but no mermaids.
This is my drawing:

Sorry, the picture quality is rubbish.

I'm not really sure what I think about it. but i like the wings, the subtle lobster tale, and all the flowing draping fabric. She looks kind of like an angel or some sort of fairy queen. I'm not sure why I wanted a deer's head in there but with her sprinkling flowers over it maybe she's come from heaven or something to take the poor deer to a happy place? I don't know, I'm not even religious.

Do you think it works as a drawing?

Hey there Mr Squirrel

Here's a picture of a squirrel to brighten this awful  rainy day. It literally did not stop raining all day today. and you know how that makes me feel.

IT Skills (basically Photoshop, Illustrator and more presenting "me")

Here is the product of my day..............

We basically just had to create a poster to advertise ourselves. I went for a nice smiley picture of me, images of the Eiffel tower, the empire state building, the Disneyland castle and of me dancing, all put over the top of a sun-setting ocean. We had to incorporate text and I chose all french quotes which I like.

What do you think of my logo? Does it make any sense?



Below I have translated some of the quotes.






" A women without perfume is a woman without a future " 

"There is only one happiness in life, to love and to be loved"  

"Fashion is something similar to suicide" 


At the national gallery all day wednesday, bit of a change.

Did you know I get two copies of the Adobe 6 design software completely free at Rave? That's over £1500 worth of software, for nothing. Thank you very much, don't mind if I do.

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Fashion & Textiles- Day 3

Final day of F&T today. *sad face* but its ok because I know i'm choosing it for pathway so its not long until we will be reunited. and I am enjoying trying out different things too. (not so much academic writing skills which I have next week)

Today we had basically the whole day to create our paper garments and then this afternoon we had to model them for photos. Simple.

I think I look pretty fierce. The piece was inspired by the architecture of New York City and I think it works really well in contrast with the circular windows but is also complimented by the angular nature of the building too. 

NICE. 

Fashion & Textiles- Day 2

First of all check out the view from my commute every morning...

Oh, Hey there Canary Wharf!

Also did you see how sunny it is? Woo hoo

Today we did a lot of collage work, working on top of magazine figures to create 3D clothing structures. Tutor picked out mine to show the class.. oh yeaaaaaaah.
We then had to photocopy and mulitply a section of one design and use this to create another design, still with 3D elements.

And finally, use these multiplications of our first design to create something on a mannequin. Mine turned out like a mini explosion contrasting the architectural shapes with the photographic images of curved paper.
Est-ce que vous aimez?

Tomorrow we get to make a garment that we have to model in a fashion show. I have been struggling to decide which pair of heels I should take with me. 

For those interested, here is a view of the Thames and the new cable from out of one of the windows at Ravensbourne. 

And here is a view of the inside of Ravensbourne:

The space is very light and open, and apparently the idea is that you should be able to walk into any area or space that you want and just listen/join in. Watch out Fashion design degree, I might be paying you a visit. 

Fashion & Textiles- Day 1

Honey, Im home! 

So this week is Fashion & Textiles, which I have been obviously looking forward to as this is what I want to do in the future so bring it on. 

The theme of this week is "paper manipulation", which is cool because it means thinking outside of the box, outside of the conventions of normal fashion and makes you push your boundaries. That and no one can get hurt on a sewing machine. We spent this morning playing around with paper and creating 5 structures from paper. I tried to expel the idea of fashion and garments out of my mind and focus on coming up with interesting architectural structures, see below. 

  

We had to upscale one of our structures to about half body size, I chose the curly one, partly because I liked it and partly because it was probably the easiest to make at such a big size!

This afternoon we had to go around in groups putting our structures onto mannequins, sometimes it was working with our own, and sometimes with other peoples. I was grouped with a couple of girls i'm not really friendly with, but it was ok because they pretty much just let me direct, pinning things on where I thought they looked good. Here's a few photos of what we came up with:

 

This last one is my curly creation. I think it  looks pretty cool! I can imagine it knitted as a giant scarf or something. 

P.S Not sure if you can see the cool circular ravensbourne windows? I will take a picture of the building tomorrow for those who don't know what it looks like. and of the view from my classrooms. Its a pretty nice place to study. 

Lens Based Media- Day 3

Over our two days off we had to go away and come up with our own stories and photograph them ready for our third day. I wanted to do a story about squirrels but turns out they're pretty  uncooperative as models! So I went with a fairytale kind of thing about a girl/princess trapped in a cellar who gets lucky in getting rescued, then gets greedy, eats some berries and dies. HA.

Here's the movie trailer I made for my "film":

What do you think? Should I hit Hollywood and see if anyone will produce it?

We had a big group crit on friday afternoon, going through our photos and stories and working out how they could be improved so that we could go away and retake photos before submission on Sunday. At the time this really frustrated me because I was happy with my photos and I didn't want to have to change them because my story didn't include a certain number of struggles or whatever before the resolution. I wanted my photos to be metaphorical and not completely obvious in their meaning so being told my story needed to conform to the "classical" conventions of a story annoyed me. But in hind site I suppose the suggestions to create more of a sympathy and connection with the girl in the story do make sense so I altered the story over the weekend. Here's my final 8 images:

Pretty creepy, huh? I tied up and gagged my sister, smashed a glass, stained the window sill, and had my best friend crawling out of a coal hole. The things I do for my art!

LBM FINISHED.

Next stop ----> FASHION & TEXTILES.

Lens Based Media- Day 2

I don't think I have a lot to say about this day. Picture the situation... 1 sheet of paper, 3 people and some pens. For the whole day!

We basically spent the day coming up with stories, character, problems, solutions etc. I know that stories are encompassed as a part of film making but really?

Our group came up with "an epic, heart warming adventure of one species fight for survival". At which I was told by the tutor that I should pitch movies to Hollywood directors. The story was about a poor group of nits, who were fighting for survival on top of someones head. and each week the poor things had to sacrifice one of their community to the giant dreaded nit comb. Sad, right? So then they come up with a plan to knot the persons hair into dreadlocks so that it can't be combed. Genius. and they all live happily ever after in the dreadlocks drinking bloody marys.

Believe it or not all of this came from inside of our imaginations with the inspiration from a builder who's been working around the O2 with some serious crazy dreadlocks. MADNESS.

Lens Based Media- Day 1

So I know I have been slacking on the posts recently, sorry! But i'm going to recap on everything I got up to last week so that you should be up to date.

Lens Based Media basically encompasses anything lens based, duh! Photography, Film, Animation, Moving images etc. Over the weekend before we had to take a series of photos which represented "this moment within my life" (see below)

On the first morning we had to take one of these images and we had an hour to upscale it to A1 and draw it. A1 is big. I chose to draw my little collection of perfume bottles, more because I thought it would be interesting than because they are the most important thing in my life!

 I think it worked out ok. We had to then look at cropping the image by covering bits and photographing it, seeing how this changes the way an image can be perceived. With mine it made them completey abstract as there isn't a great deal of narrative within perfume bottles but I suppose it highlights contrasts between curves and more straight edged lines, maybe brings out architectural elements in the bottles?

In the afternoon we looked at photography and how ideas or emotions can be captured in the way a photo is taken, as opposed to the actual subject of a photo. We had an hour to wander round the O2 and area surrounding ravensbourne to take photos. Did you know there is a cool Nissan thing in the O2 where you can go and play car racing games like in arcades?! It was a productive hour.

Pretty much sums up day 1 of LBM. 

Graphic Design- Day 3

So this was our final day of Graphic Design and we basically had the whole day to come up with a visual representation of ourselves, including text. This is what I came up with:

It basically is my face (kind of) with images of things that are important to  me layered over the top e.g. the Eiffel Tower, Ballet shoes, Micky mouse etc.

Overall week 1 was good, people are nice. I'm not sitting eating lunch on my own like in Mean Girls! Woo

Graphic Design- Day 2

Day 2 was all about text and typography and playing around with different ways of writing text.

(I can't work out how to flip the first one, oops)
Pretty cool, huh?
I didn't mean for them to look like blood either I was just using the colour red.


For our final piece we had to come up with a text representation of our thoughts on the Superhuman exhibition that we visited at the Wellcome Gallery. I focused mine on the questions I thought were raised by the exhibition. Why do we enhance ourselves? What are the possibilites for the future? What potential do we have?

This is some of what I came up with. In there are the words: Potential, Acceptance, Superhuman, Possible and Perfect. I turned the P into a question mark which my graphics tutor liked so thumbs up for me. Feeling like things are going pretty well.

Opted for something more summery to wear, turns out the studio is actually pretty cold:
Cardigan, H&M
Top, Katie got it for me in LA        
Skirt, H&M