Life Drawing 2

Today i used pastels and ink and i think my favourite ones are the ink ones. The techniques i used varied throughout the work i have done... most of the ink work i have done have been drawn on damp paper so the ink would bleed into the paper. I really like splattering the ink over the work too. I liked working with chalk on black paper, the effect was striking and very pleasing to the eye. We did four 5 minute gesture drawings and one 20 minute sketch... my favourite was the 20 minute one as it was most effective. The rest of the drawings were 20 minutes long and personally i think that they get better as they go along.

Phlegm Street Art

I like the mixture that Phlegm has in his work, this one for example has both black and white with shading connected to powerful colours. It has been placed in what looks to be the public toilets... I don't know if that gives it any extra significance or not but I would find it odd to see this in the loo. His work seems completely random with no meaning, yet they are pretty and make you stop and think about whether there is a meaning to it.

Although passers by will fully know that the ground is indeed solid, having a whale half submerged may make them half wonder before remembering it is indeed just a painting that finishes at the ground. The proportions of the whale are out, but it's still obvious what it is meant to be so I don't think it really matters. It looks well placed under the bridge because bridges usually go over water and the whale is beneath the bridge where the water would be.

I like the way this piece makes the shutters look like a stage with the curtains. It leads me to imagine that these bird-like creatures are performing. They are done in so much detail that it seems silly for them to have their legs and feet drawn as such, unless another person draw them on, I don't know why there would be a reason for doing this other than a similar difference in the first picture where parts are black and white and the other is delicately shaded and coloured.

Life Drawing

Third drawing

Second drawing



First drawing



In our life drawing classes today, Sam taught us to measure with the tip of our pencils and said that people will mostly be seven heads high. Meaning that how ever big their head is, the body is about 6 more of them. We also had to try and think of her as a collection of shapes rather than a person and draw what we saw rather than what we would expect to see. My first drawing was in biro and is very cartoon-like whereas the other are in charcoal and are much more sketchy.

Olly Moss

A lot of Olly Moss' posters are in a similar style to this piece and I really like it. The Evil Dead is about zombies and so the hand emerging from the ground captivates this idea. I love how there are two images in this piece, the hand from the ground is one, but in the hand is another. There are silhouetted, naked trees that cut off at the edges of the hand and beneath the trees and a man digging a grave next to the tree trunk. Altogether a very effective piece that captivates the viewer and also sets the scene for the film.

These are actually three individual posters placed together in a set. They are all posters for the Star Wars saga and are in a similar design as the previous poster. Each of the coloured shapes are that of a character from the films. Like Laz Marquez, Moss uses only three colours apart from he uses different tones of the main colour. There is black and white and then the colour apart from the colour of the paper he prints his work onto. Each of these are very powerful and can either be viewed as individuals or as part of their set, yet all will still look great.

Once again, only using three colours, Olly Moss creates the title of a film using what looks to be tooth picks. I know that Rain Man is about an autistic man gambling and most gamblers have some sort of personality that they put across by either wearing sunglasses in every game or chewing tooth picks and so such. I think that may be a relation to the title in this poster. I like the posible idea behind this piece and how it has been put across.

Laz Marquez

Laz Marques is a graphic designer who began studying at the Art Institute of Philadelphia with a focus in Graphic Design. He then moved to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, to get better at and build upon his abilities. At the School of Visual Arts, Laz majored in Graphic Design and Fine Arts, which gave him a better understanding of the principals of Art, even garnering him the honors of being a featured artist in the university gallery on numerous occasions.

His focuses on Entertainment Advertisement has given him the immense opportunity to work with some of the leading film studios on some brilliant films like X-Men: The Last Stand, The Grand, Miss Potter, Elvis & Anabelle and Goya's Ghost.

I really like this piece of his work. Although I have never watched the film, I am fully aware that one of the main scenes in Psycho is that of a woman being stabbed in the shower with horrible scratching music screeching in the background. After the attack, the camera focuses on the woman's blood running down the plug. Combining that imagery with the title is a clever and effective idea in my opinion. It's simple and straight to the point which doesn't waste time but still gets the message across in a very powerful way.

Another piece Laz has done for a Hitchcock film is The Birds. Again using simple colours and a simple layout, he still gets out the message. A common saying when describing someone with messy hair is to compare it to a birds nest. I think that Laz has taken a more literal approach to this saying by having birds actually coming out of the woman's hair. I really like how the woman's silhouette has still got texture in it and isn't just block black. I feel that it really adds character to the piece.

As you can now see by looking at all these pieces, Laz uses only three colours. White, black and red. I think this is effective and economicle as it would cost less to print them. I hope to use a similar idea for my T-Shirt design.
I love how the colours have been used to split up this image, it is simetrical apart from the words and the colours. It works really well and you can tell from the colours and the posture of the 'fighters' that they are on very different teams. I think that the contrast in colours represents the vast contrast in the characters in the film.

In his autobiography on his website, Laz says "Above all else, I have remained true to the on thing that I have understood for years, that I cannot live a day with out my passion to create."

A Critical Analysis on the Work of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was born in Ireland to English parents in October 1909 and died on the 28^th of April 1992. I have noticed that the majority of his work has a bland or empty background with only the subject. He is described as being a “figurative painter known for his bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery”. 

http://www.gerard-schurmann.com/media/bacon.jpg

            The first picture I have chosen to critique is one of a man with a twisted face, set on a pink background. The distorted figure looks to be aloof slightly, peering down from where he sits. There appears to be some sort of instrument sticking out of the sitter’s nose. It looks somewhat like a horn and I don’t understand what its function is. The majority of his paintings that I have seen are bizarre and I fail to find a meaning in them, yet can’t turn away because they are interesting and it makes me wonder what it could possibly mean, if anything.

            The white collar and black top suggests he is a business man of some kind and possibly important, which could suggest why he looks aloof. Pink seems an interesting colour to use as the background, while it doesn’t make the sitter stand out incredibly, it still draws attention to him. In my opinion, some of the colours used in his skin clash with this background and so it wouldn’t have been my choice of background. I do, however, find it interesting how he has severely distorted the features yet it still looks like a man. I have already attempted to recreate a piece of his work and wonder why it was he wanted to create this man in the way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Study_after_Velazquez%27s_Portrait_of_Pope_Innocent_X.jpg

            His painting ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ does have a meaning to me. I know that pope innocent was found to have sent love letters to his brother’s wife and they were supposed to have been meeting in private behind his brother’s back. This, in any walk of life, is unacceptable… but for a pope it was absolutely awful. He was a very powerful man and there was another artist, who I can’t remember the name of, that painted Pope Innocent holding a letter. He had told the pope it was an important document to show his intellect, however its real purpose was to depict the letters he was sending and therefore what an awful man he truly was. I feel that this painting that Francis Bacon has created is related to this. He has painted him in the same position on the same chair as the other painting I have seen and I feel that it shows him being taken, screaming into black hell for his crime.

            The colouring in the painting is dark and, to me, shows evil. His skin is blue and lifeless, which lead me to think of his death and hell, while his open mouth suggests he is screaming. This is how I arrived at my conclusion. This is a very powerful piece and I very much like it. Though the theme is dark, I think it important that the pope has finally been depicted in art outright as a bad person, rather than the sneaky hints that were necessary for the artist’s safety at the time. If it had been discovered that the artist had intended what he had, he would have been executed. There is a splatter of red on his gown which could represent blood.

http://elitechoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/francis-bacon.jpg

            The last painting is of another distorted man on a black background. Unlike the first one, this man looks almost sad rather than aloof with confidence. The dark background really makes the sitter stand out as opposed to the pink of the previous painting, this make me feel that Bacon wanted to draw us to this sitter and look at him more carefully. The man is wearing what looks to be a black top with a leather jacket, deeming him less important than the other sitter, perhaps. Maybe we are meant to compare these men because they have been created in a similar style. If so, it would seem there is a real confidence difference between them. The first, in his shirt and blazer looked to be very confident, perhaps even arrogant because of it. The second, wearing more practical civilian clothes, looks as though he is unhappy and dissatisfied by something. It could possibly be his work he isn’t satisfied with. There seems to be a lot of discolouration in the man’s face. It almost looks bruised, though it could also be a distorted form of shading. This is the painting I attempted to recreate in my lessons, though even after completion, I still didn’t fully understand a meaning behind it. Not until I compared it to the similar piece just now. However, this may not have been Bacon’s intention.

            I enjoy his work and find it interesting how he can create something or someone that is so obviously a human without using typically human shapes. His work reminds me of Picasso in the way that the people are distorted; the difference is that Bacon uses more shading in his work.

Not so... Life-Drawing

Although we were asked to create a life drawing, we were given a skull to work with... I found this ironic.

I have used chalk and a charcoal stick and a hard charcoal pencil to create this. The proportion was rather badly done to begin with, so I worked to pull it back in. I'm still not completely satisfied, but this was the most successful of all the attempts I made to correct my mistake.