MMU Learning the way of The Line

The day started with a lecture of slides showing various artists who are known for their interpretation of drawing. The drawing I refer to is that of a linear nature, which includes artists such as Tim Knowles and Hannah Barton.

Trees Drawing - Tim Knowles

Cassette Tapes - Hannah Barton

 The lectures broke us in, and after a break and another short slideshow we were introduced to what's known as "drawing with our bodies"... which I get, I just don't quite find - what's the word - as substantial in terms of instant appreciation? Well, to be honest, I'm split on this one. There's a part of me that is yelling "PRETENTIOUS" down one of my ears and another part of me that's got his hand perused on his chin, nodding as he's taking it all in.

Suffice to say, the techniques worked, and I was feeling rather open and calm today. Even if I was rather "oh, really? C'mon, really?" but, letting it soak in, I see the effects and I appreciate the philosophy and the thought process in the exercises.
Said exercises go like this:

1. Close your eyes
2. Imagine yourself in bed on the edge of sleep last night

Or perhaps like this:

1. Close your eyes
2. Drink a cup of water veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery sloooooooooooooooooooooooooowly
3. (or do some everyday task veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery sloooooooooooooooooooooooooowly)

Then there's this:

1. Close your eyes
2. Have a partner stand in front of you
3. Now air molest them - I mean trace their outline and stuff... you know, for art purposes. Feel that line, that's right, feeeeel iiiiiiitttt.

 Like I said, these activities did at first appear pointless (much to the reactions I got from people in the same room afterwards) but they do have a psychological effect that helps alter the mood to help with creative thinking. It is possible to find joy in simply drawing lines over and over, much like the clerk who copied letters all day long in Gogol's "The Overcoat".

The idea of scrawling my signature over and over on a piece of paper has been done before in one of my sketchbooks, but looking at it from a larger piece of paper, with more attention to the type of line making I used with charcol puts a different light on it.

Squiggle Squiggle!

Amongst the things we tried was also zen like drawing of lines, one after the other, again and again and again and again... You kinda get into it and start to enjoy the joy of just drawing a line - a bit like racers who enjoy getting a corner turn just right. It's an exercise inspired by the likes of... an artist I would try to name if I had been quicker taking notes in the lecture *sigh* [As a note to any teachers, would it be a possiblity of getting a copy of the slide shows you all make? I'm finding a couple of artists don't seem to have an online presence, if anyone could let me know of a possibility before I come find you about it sometime this week it would be greatly appreciated :) ].

Line... line... line... line... line... LINELINELINELINELINELINELINELINE line... line... line...

  We even tried a technique of never looking at the drawing. As in, the entire time our eyes focused on the object that we were drawing, so we would have to draw an image blind, but based on the movements of our eyes, a so called "record of the journey of our eyes". Again, I'm split on this. On the one hand I respect and appreciate the concept; it's a nice idea to linking your eyes and hands in a different manner and really makes you focus on key elements of drawing rather than bogging yourself down on if the drawing is alike to the object. However, on the other, all I see is a very lateral take on drawing, but if all I end up with are very indistinct squiggles that don't really appeal to the/my eye then forget about it.

Yes. They are shoes.

Thankfully, we got a wonderful finale that involved just letting us draw the shoe (from own feet I might add). It was all to incorporate all that we had learnt during the day, the zoning techniques, the zen line drawings, the squiggling of signature over and over and the 100% focus on object drawings. All were amalgamated into this still life of one of our shoes. The results are rather satisfying:

SHOES!

MMU Homepage on Location: Behind the scenes

There were some giggles to be had whilst on location.

MMU Homepage on Location

The brief this time required that I take a photo in the style of selected film genres, on location with my summer project.

So, out of the choices given I selected three genres with films to correspond:
SCI-FI: "Moon" (2009)
X-RATED: "A Clockwork Orange" (1971)
GOTHIC/SUPERNATURAL HORROR: "Jacob's Ladder" (1990)

Yes, "A Clockwork Orange" is/was an X-rated film due to the violence and sex portrayed in the film. It was also surrounded by controversy due to acts of extreme violence that was apparantly cited by scenes in "A Clockwork Orange". After receiving death threats, Stanley Kubrick, the director, pulled all copies of the film from being shown in the UK. It was rereleased in the UK under cult-film status.

I picked the film "Moon" due to the interest with GERTY. I wanted to use the scenes that featured GERTY substitued wtih my computer from the summer project. The thought of attaining fishing wire to suspend my piece in mid air or something similar to the way GERTY is suspended came to mind, but I was unable to find where I could purchase items that would help suspend my computer, nor are there any really suitable locations around Manchester or locally to me that seemed sci-fi enough. There was a possibility of creating a set myself in the garage, but considering the time restraints, it didn't feel realistic to attempt.

GERTY vs. my Computer... no similarities whatsoeveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer...

"Jacob's Ladder" had an interesting aesthetic in parts of the films, especially during the protagonist's hallucinations. The film was chosen due to what I knew about it from a video game series that was heavily inspired by it, the Silent Hill series. However, the stills I chose were more simple to achieve, unlike some of the shots from the more disturbing imagery; which is a shame, but the decision was more achievable.

I picked my stills from each film:

Luckily AV and TK made some free time to come aid me in the project, so we met up on the saturday (02/10/2010). But but but, I asked them to come in later and earlier in the day I scouted locations throughout Manchester. I tried to keep the locales within the town centre in order to make things convenient and practical for everyone, it was especially interesting that I ended up keeping the areas within the northern quarter mostly (an excellent place for urbanscape).

I finished up with these locations as possibilities:

Sci-fi:

• Krispy Kremes (on Mosley Street)
• Arndale Centre (13th floor)

X-rated:

• Noise Lab (Market Street)
• Nexu Art Café (Northern Quarter - next door to the "Travelling Man")

 Horror:

• Small side streets throughout the Northern Quarter
• Alley ways in China Town
• Side streets in Deansgate
• A tram
• A train

After making a decision, my models arrived and we got to work:

 A big BIG thanks to AV and TK for coming out in their free time, as well as special thanks to the people at Nexus for allowing us to photograph in their café, seriously people should check that place out, it's great.

Some Music

I was thrilled to find Bytejacker up and running their online series again since taking a break to reform it. During the comeback episode they played music with bit chip tunes, an overall nice electronic sound (to my ears at least).

George & Jonathan, a duo which I'd like to compare to the likes of Justice and Daftpunk, guys who found each other during their education years and stuck together making music.

So yeah, hit the link to enjoy some bit-chip tunage :D

Little Nothings to DGN

Dear DGN,

Small sketches made with a 0.1 fine liner on A7 manila paper.

MMU Summer Project 2010

 Well, here it is. I've created a simple papercraft of a desktop computer:

 What I used:

• White Card
• Hobby Knife
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Photoshop
• Internet/computer Images (via Google)

The papercraft is a neat little thing to do, I got most of my influence from a website called www.cubeecraft.com. To anyone interested in making small little models and "cubee" renditions of their favourite characters seen in pop culture, they should check the site out; all designs are free to print out and all you need is a printer with some strong paper or card.




This desktop computer model however was designed from scratch personally. I used Illustrator to make the design, using the vectors to make boxes and lines (however the same job could have easily been done in something like Paint or even Windows Powerpoint). Smaller details such as the monitor buttons and graphics for the cpu tower and keyboard had images taken off the internet/computer screenshots and were printed on with the model design.

After some more fiddling, testing, trial and error, I've succesfully made the piece. Femme bot seems to like it.

 

For those who wish to make one of these for themselves, here's a link to .pdf files (requires Adobe acrobat or Foxit reader) of the design sheets to print out and cut, all packaged in a neat little .zip file (remember to use an archive extractor to get access to the files i.e. winzip or winrar).

http://rapidshare.com/files/421497089/Desktop_Computer_Papercraft_LZ2010.zip

 

(note: if there are problems with downloading the file, feel free to email me at liyizhang92@gmail.com)

Hello World!

Hi.