Summary

Over these past 6 weeks I have learnt so much in terms of education and of me. I have discovered in more depth what I like and what I am good at. I have thought about things that I never even considered in the past, this makes me feel like Ravensbourne has already taught me so much. Moving through the testers of each pathway, I have explored many different techniques and processes in many different forms.
Searching for things to do with my past and present was fun, I searched through and took photographs of the things that are really important to me. Some of this was recent including travel tickets and some were from when I was much younger. I learnt more about myself in this task, looking at this collection of items in front of me that in a way represented me. 

In fashion, I created a garment out of simply paper and glue. I loved designing the dress, exploring different ways I could approach the task. I used my instinct and all the ideas that came to my head I drew as ideas in my sketchbook. I have definitely learnt during the beginning of this course that using my instinct can work. Sometimes over-thinking ruins the idea. 

Having learnt the basics of photoshop, I improved my skills on the computer and discovered what amazing things one can do using programs such as InDesign and Illustrator. Also writing the review on a piece in the Tate reminded me how I like to focus on one work of art and concentrate on the concept on it. I really enjoy going to galleries especially with a group of people, getting other ideas and perspectives of works from other students.
I never thought I would be able to make an object that I could not only sit, but also stand on, out of cardboard. I used my logical mind and created a design for a chair that held my weight in the 3D design week, I must say I was quite impressed with myself, although the design could have been a little more elegant. Working in a group for the bridge creation was fun. Getting everyone involved and putting everyone's ideas into one product, we managed to produce a great bridge that held the car all the way round, following all the requirements!
The lens based media week taught me more about film media as I have already studied photography at A level. I learnt that anyone can create a story, with any prop or journey! This week I learnt that I would definitely like to set myself a project sometime in my life to make some kind of short film, using a simple idea.
At the beginning of the course I thought that fashion was the right pathway for me, but after learning more about graphics I changed my mind. I love making clothes and designing products, but the talks on both pathways helped me make my decision. Graphic design has more option for me and I get to focus on a more broad industry. I am happy with my choice and I am very excited to start the pathway in graphics!
The lectures I have attended have also helped me pick my pathway and it was inspiring to hear about people's careers and how they differ through this wide range of artistic choices. To be taken through individuals work helped me understand more about how each individual pathway continues as a career.
Overall, these past few weeks have given me a chance to find what I like and what is not for me. I have met some great people and enjoyed being lead by the tutors and influenced by the people around me. I am very much looking forward to starting individual projects and the rest of the year!

Lens based media

For lens based media, we started off by spreading out a collection of photographs that we previously had taken of scenes, people, landscapes and things that relate to us and are sentimental. I chose a range of photos from travels, my family and friends, all photographs I had taken and were of good quality and meant something to me. We were asked to chose one of these photos to draw on an A1 piece of paper. I chose to draw with pencil a scene from a trip I went on to Amsterdam one February when it was so cold the canals had frozen over. This was a memorable trip and I got some good shots out of it. 

Although the piece was unfinished, the next task was to pick a section of the drawing and isolate it. At first I separated part of the building from the drawing, surrounding it with trees and ground. To me, this simply looked like a cropped drawing, which it was, and did not stand out. The aim of the cropping was to create a whole new image, I did not feel like this worked so I picked a different part of the drawing to crop. My image was full of people ice skating on the frozen canal, the people were spread out and some attached. An isolated image caught my eye on the bottom right of three people standing on the ice. Seen as this was a quick drawing, they were not done accurately yet they are recognisable as human figures. After taking three of them in a group I decided to go further and isolate just one of the figures. This created a whole different drawing completely non related to my original scene. 

The next task was to go around the area of Ravensbourne and photograph a list of things in a creative way. The list was: Fall, Crush, Echo, Happy, Sad

I attempted to interpreted this task in a unique way, using less obvious things and trying to find a clever way to relate to these words. I came up with a few ideas including the surroundings and people I was with. 

CRUSH

ECHO

FALL

HAPPY

SAD

The next day we sat in tables of four and on a large piece of paper, and were told to draw six people/animals that were memorable in our past. I used the first things that came into my head, suggesting they were most memorable. Some were my friends, some people I've met once, some people I do not know but had memorable faces, and some had memorable personalities. I also sketched a strange looking dog that my friend fostered for a while, no one knew what bread it was as it was so interesting looking. 

Next we were asked to draw a happy place, a sad place, somewhere idilic, a worse nightmare, and some other surroundings/things or people of a theme. My happy place was on a warm beach at sunset, and my nightmare was in a swamp of crocodiles. 

In our groups we then created three stories out of the drawings we had all created in six different frames, using no words, only pictures. It was fun to make up these stories and alter them to include everyone's characters. It was difficult to produce a story that made sense seen as we could not use words to explain and only had six frames! This brought our creative imaginative drawing side out. 

After this story we were told to go home and take photographs to create our own story about anything we like. We were given advise to make the story original and unique and the photographs to look supernatural and abnormal. For the story board we were to have six final photographs taken that clearly depict a beginning, a middle and an end. This included: a subject matter, a problem and a solution. 

 Inspired by the given suggestion of 'flying pigs' I made my story about a magnetic fairy that I have in my house from when I was younger. 

The story was about the ice cream fairy going on a journey to find ice cream. This is the ice cream fairy. 

The fairy went to the shop to get ice cream to give to all the children but it was run out! The fairy then had to travel on the tube to find more shops to get the ice cream. On the way she got stuck under a leaf!

Finally, she found another shop that was full of ice cream!

THE END. 

To complete the story board in class, we were to run it by our class mates and comment on each others stories, saying what to improve and what was good. To improve it we were to take out a printed photograph and replace it with a drawing of something better. To complete the story board we mounted the photographs and drawings on an A1 piece of paper. 

To improve my story I replaced the frame where the fairy gets lost under a leaf with a different story line, slightly more gripping... The fairy misses the tube to where she has to get to and its the last one! Th solution is she flies. 

To finish off the day we got into groups and chose the most interesting story out everyone's and announced it to the class. We were then given fead back on the story, how to improve and what was gripping about the simple stories. It was also important that the photographs were self explanatory, so it was easy to understand visually. 

GRAPHICS

I liked the way that Andy lead the graphics week, we started off my creating drawings not with just our hands. For example the first task was to look at the person opposite for 30 seconds, then close our eyes and draw them from memory without looking. This was difficult as obviously we could not see what where we were drawing and it ended up all over the place with features mixed up all over her face. It was amusing to see where my hand took me rather than my eyes, and although all the facial features where in slightly wrong places and the face was wonky and incorrect, one can notice the Alice-like features in the drawing. For this piece I chose to work with charcoal. We also had a limited time to finish the drawing, we were given 5 minutes. 

The next task was to pick a different person to draw and use our mouths to use the pen rather than our hands. I chose to draw Steph with a pink sparkly pen, a colour that I think relates to her personality. It was challenging to keep a straight line in the drawing and the facial shape ended up very wonky, but overall I think there are some recognisable features in the drawing that relate to my model. I focussed on the features that are prominent and recognisable to the individual such as her hair and glasses. We also had 5 minutes for this piece, which is a short amount of time. The idea was to make it look as much like the person as possible. 

Our next drawing was to be done of another student but this time it was supposed to be drawn with our alternate hand. I am right handed so I used my left, it sounds a lot easier than it is! This time I chose to use another colour, a green felt tip pen. I used Victoria as my model and kept looking back at her face to try and search for the distinctive features of her face. I tried to get the face shape correct but this was hard with the other hand! My aim was to reveal the distinctive features in my drawing in just five minutes. The drawing is rough due to my weaker left hand. 

The final five minute drawing was a self portrait drawn without taking the pen off the paper. This was also difficult as I had to concentrate on not taking my hand off to overcome my natural reflex of doing so. This distracted me from focussing on the distinctive features of my own face and it turned out looking like how I used to draw when I was younger and less experienced! All these drawings were on an A3 piece of paper. 

For the second part of the day we looked at scale and were told to draw someones ear on an A2 piece of paper. Again we had limited time for this therefore I concentrated on the characteristics that distinguish an ear. Using an orange crayon, I made sure that as well as drawing detail of my ear model Meg's ear, I used tone and shading to make the ear look realistic (even though it was orange). 

We then put all the ears together on a large space to see what everyone had produced. It was great to see them all together and notice people's techniques. 

We were told previously to bring about ten magazine cut outs of famous people to bring in to work with. This was so we could make a collage out of them to create a new face. We could do this in a way of our choice, I chose to focus on facial skin tone and colour. Using my cutouts, I separated the skin tones into lighter and darker tones to create a female face. I used a range of celebrities eyes, nose and mouths so it did not just look like one person. We were then told to create a view finder of 2cmx2cm out of a piece of paper the same size (A3) in a random place and see where it ended up on the collage. It sat just under the left eye of my new celebrity showing a few different colours of skin tone. I then sketched this in my sketchbook. 

Making a poster. We were told to make a poster of a retrospective of what we want to be in 20 years. I decided mine was going to be a poster on packaging design.