Rogues Gallery Brief

I was asked to design some script for a 30 year old woman who wanted the words: Strength, Respect, Loyalty tattooed on the top of her back in a custom stylised font. This was my outcome! Really happy 🙂

Script Writing and patterns

Diagnostic Project

This is my Taid and he was in the Army Catering Corps for 22 years. I really wanted to do my project on him and his ACC life as i am truly inspired by him and all that he did! and the weekend prior to our assessment, i attended remembrance Sunday in London with him where i pushed him in his wheelchair as we marched around the horse guards parade and  the london cenotaph to remember all the fallen soldiers past and present. I regularly attend his army reunions and have fallen in love with all the ACC guys. I painted this portrait of him and i love how you can see his happy eyes and i made him mostly black and grey but enhancing his medals and the remembrance poppy to show importance.

I created this final piece from inspiration from a tattoo style called ‘Buena Vista’ where they work in layers incorporating image, text and splashes of colour. The writing in the background is a poem written by one of the ACC guys i really loved it.

For my maquette i wanted to experiment with textiles and created a poppy that can be worn on remembrance day. It had the famous poem of the fallen written on the petals.

Abstract Impressionism

Abstract Impressionism is a type of abstract painting (not to be confused with Abstract Expressionism, a similar but different movement) where small brushstrokes build and structure large paintings. Small brushstrokes show control of large areas, expressing the artist’s emotion and focus on inner energy, creating expressive, lyrical and thoughtful qualities in the paintings. Abstract impressionism is an art of abstract painting in which the artists expresses themselves through the use of colors with no need of objective representations.

In abstract impressionism it is not rate that artist finishes his paintings and only after that, he begins to find suitable name or just numbers it. On the contrary the traditional impressionists know from the beginning what they are going to paint. Abstract impressionist can act in certain emotional state and put paint as he feels it to be the best without any intention on final outcome. Of course real object are painted to and can be recognized. But shape, texture or colour of painted object is not important. Any detail of panted object can be ignored.

Abstract impressionism originated in New York City in the 1940s. Term “abstract impressionism” was for the first time used by Elaine de Kooning. Abstract impressionists can be divided into three groups. The first group are impressionists without need to pain anything concrete. Like if you imagine abstract Monet. Various colors, different positions and shapes, but very similar style. The second group “Color Field Painters” like Mark Rothko whose works possess intensive colors simple shapes and various qualities such as sizable canvasses and flat compositions. The third group is very similar to abstract expressionism “Action Painters” like Pollock and De Kooning but less, rapid and aggressive moves and much more soft style with delicate connection of surfaces of different colours

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Picasso and the birth of modernism

The artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) said that “museums are just a lot of lies.” If he said that today, he would be damning himself; his work is in the collections of many of the world’s most famous museums and there are several entirely devoted to him (one in Paris, one in Barcelona, and one in Antibes.) At the beginning of his career, the majority of people considered Picasso’s work too shockingly different from what they expected from art.

However during the course of the 20th century, Picasso and his fellow modernists transformed popular taste. Picasso and the modernists considered themselves as rebels of the art world at the time seeing themselves as completely unique and different to the aesthetic norms but they found themselves eventually embraced by them. By mid century, Picasso was enjoying his celebrity status and fame that no living painter had known before. He was in a film and on the cover of various magazines making him a true modernist hero.

Picasso took inspiration of sense of mission from the Impressionists in particular Gustav Courbet, who were trying to be different from the art norms just before modernism took place.Picasso and his group wanted to annoy, outrage, and disgust the middle class and the leaders of middle-class taste. Their goal was to change the world. Paris was the great capital for these ambitious and angry young artists to meet like-minded companions–and continued to be so decade after decade.

In a few decades, modernism did indeed conquer the world, in a way that Courbet and his followers were never able to do. Having won, modernism could no longer play the rebel. Picasso’s very long life–from starving artist to painter as hero, prophet, and icon all in one–spans the story of modernism’s outward struggles, inner conflicts, and ultimate triumph.

Spacial awareness painting/drawing & Photoshopping

This is a big spacial awareness piece that ive been working on and adding to for a few weeks now i tried to take a very colourful approach to the brief.

I created this on photoshop from an image taken of my spacial awareness drawing. I enhanced the colours and also doubled the image, added someshapes and sharpened some bits too. This was mainly just a practicing task 🙂

Pop Art!

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc

Andy Warhol

was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.

Roy Lichtenstien

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement.His work defined the basic premise of pop art through parody.^[2] Favoring the comic strip as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style.

Tom Wesselmann

American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He planned to become a cartoonist until his final year at the Cooper Union in New York. The powerful work of Willem de Kooning provided both inspiration and inhibition as he attempted to find a new direction centred around a tangible subject. Choosing the figure he began to make small collages of torn paper and found materials; these culminated in large, aggressive compositions such as Great American Nude #3

The Bauhaus, Manchester Art School and an object from Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius. The Art School was unique because it had an unusual concept of combining fine arts and arts & crafts to create Design. Design being something that has a harmony/balance of function and form. As well as having equality between craftsmanship and mass production. One of its key principles was that form follows function. The idea that “minimal” isnt an aesthetic, its the whole point… Many of the teachers there were famous for their own art work and were involved with many of the art movements at the time such as; expressionism, constructivism, fauvism, modernism, futurism etc. Gropius is responsible for the glass wall in buildings that we see so often these days and many different modern objects and architecture designs have branched off the ones founded in Bauhaus. The Bauhaus had a short life, it operated from 1919 to 1933 where it was forced to close by the nazis in germany.

The Manchester School of arts is a building hugely influenced by Bauhaus and its teachings. One of the most obvious being how open everywhere is. The aim was to break down the divisions between the subject areas and public space so that the barriers between disciplines is removed and all can work in one open space. This is an atrium with real purpose: providing public (who are allowed in thus far) and other students with glimpses of works of art and their making. Different disciplines can see what their confreres are up to and are encouraged to mix and collaborate: graphic arts with fine arts, architecture with fashion, photography with jewellery etc.

This building is a catalyst for the exploration of design and creativity. As the school prospectus states, ‘Manchester School of Art believes an art school is more than just a place. It is a bridge between the acceptable and the possible, between what is and what if.’ They could be describing Feilden Clegg Bradley’s remarkable new building.

Many of bauhaus’ creations are still widely used today. For example the Tubular Steel Chair by Marcel Breuer:

This design has simple straight cuts which can be produced and assembled by machine rather that a single craftsman. The different size tables nest together for convenient storage and also have the ability to ship off efficiently. This brought the cost of manufacture down which was important because the economics in Germany were poor at the time. You can still find these tables in most retail home stores and are used worldwide still.

Stylized roses

 I was given a brief in The Rogues Gallery to draw up some custom design stylized roses as roses are a very popular request in tattooing.

Penrhyn castle craftsmenship

 Work our work based on Penrhyn Castle, I wanted to have a go a making something similar to the craftsmanship around the castle specifically the famous staircase and ceilings. They reminded me of filigree and flourishing patterns and so I wanted to attempt to make some filigree shapes out of clay. I was happy with how they turned out but unfortunately they got damaged during the firing process.