Silvia Pelissero

I found Silvia Pelissero online whilst searching for artists similar to previous artists I have been influenced by. I have recently found that a particular style I really like is watercolour and ink. Pelissero paints portraits with both materials, her varnish and ink drawings are very abstract compared to her realistic watercolour and acrylic portraits. Both styles show a lot of depth as she put splats across the page which I feel portrays distress and anger. I really like this style and I haven't really seen any other artist that has a similar style, I'm really inspired by her great drawing skills and the ink portraits and I'd definitely like to experiment with varnish drawings as I haven't heard of using this material before.

Digital porfolio

Digital porfolios are an easy way to showcase your work online, they are easily accessible which allows many opportunities for worldwide work. The software used to create a portfolio makes it easy to update often and add new work, this means its effortless to keep up to date.However creating the portfolio for web means that the file format has to be specific to online use, choosing the right file format can be difficult, especially if you need the portfolio to be accesible for multiple browsers. I will be exporting my portfolio as a swf. file as I'll be making mine in flash to allow me to create effects.


Interactivity throughout your portfolio is key to optimise the users experience, having simple interactive components such as buttons, rollovers and tweens gives the portfolio more interest and appeal to it. In my portfolio I will be including simple interactive elements to attract clients and viewers. Other interactive elements include web banners, advertisements and e-learning content, these are clever and simple ways to advertise your work and you could include your adverts on other websites to expand potential audience.


Overall digital portfolios are an advanced way to promote your own work, they offer many advantages and by creating my own digital portfolio and know it will be beneficial for my future. 

Equality Animation

This animation was for a college project that was meant to raise awareness for gender equality. My idea for this animation was for a womans head to have thoughts of careers and activities float out of her mind, drift around and then she dismisses all of the 'manly' stereotypes. Although I know the message isn't very clear I like the simplicity of my animation and the black objects which I first drew out in illustrator. The lines  I created on the animation were done in flash and I had to draw a line for each frame, this was very time consuming but I really wanted the effect included.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Jaume Plensa

At Yorkshire Sculpture park the Jaume Plensa exhibition was the first I visited, a lot of his work was shown including indoor exhibitions and large sculptures outside that blended nicely with the scenery. Jaume's work is mainly  The first room I visited was showing 'Hear no evil,see no evil, speak no evil' where he had three statues hung from the wall made from polyester resin. Each three statues discreetly had different words around the face such as 'anxiety, panic, insomnia'. My favourite part of his work was the interactive ones, 'psalms 29' was situated in the corridor, the idea was to gently stroke your hand across so that they would gently chime. This was a nice peaceful attraction to his exhibition and it would be nice to look into incorporating something similar for my Tapton Grove project. Another interactive display was 'Jerusalem' where there were several gongs placed in a circle and the intention is to gently tap the gongs with other visitors to create a calming noise in the room. Each gong also had a extracts from 'the songs of songs' engraved on them for the visitors to enjoy and read.

Barbara Hepworth

The family of man

Squares with circles

Sophie Ryder

Crawling lady hare 

Crawling lady hare

Sitting

Greyworld

Playground

Anthony Caro

Promenade

Andrew Goldsworthy

Hanging Trees

Hanging trees

Winter/Horbelt

Basket #7

Basket #7

Sheffield Hallam

Sheffield Hallam showcased their student’s work around many campuses throughout Sheffield.  I felt that some exhibitions were associated quite far away from others, which made it difficult to find. The types of courses exhibited were Graphic Design, Product Design, Architecture, Furniture Design, Photography, and Animation.  Although the exhibitions were situated in scattered areas I felt that it was well directed and easy to find. I felt that all the displays were produced to a highly professional standard and each display had a business card for contact, the standard of work was also very high which impressed me a lot.

I felt the graphic design exhibition had a lot of creative pieces of work and students had produced different briefs with many different outcomes. One piece of design that I felt was very unique and had a lot of meaning to, was Ben Powell’s graduation piece. He said it was a visualization of the emotional effect that people have had on him in his life and how they connect to each other. The overall image is quite intriguing as there a lot of different colours and the shape is interesting. Once you look into how it works it also becomes very clever how he has mapped out each relationship and given them a colour to how they have made him feel. I think it’s a nice way of seeing your relationships as an overall image and I would happily try to create something similar.

I came across Kirsty Wilkinson seems to have a wide range of styles and she appears to apply both digital and traditional mixed media work. My favourite part of her work is her mixed media work, which were observational drawings of people around Sheffield. She’s applied newspaper, train tickets and any paper to the image to add a nice texture. Her digital work is produced in a different style with more clean concise lines and an example of this is her film posters she’s creating for her graduation project. Her film poster for Taxi Driver was screen-printed and she used two guns and a line above it to create the outline of the empire state building because Taxi Driver is in New York. When I first saw the film poster I knew that it was designed to have another meaning to it and once I looked on her website I saw why she had created it like that. What I also like about this image is the simplicity and how the bold black lines stand out from the simple yellow background.

Chesterfield College

Chesterfield College exhibited many pieces of work from creative courses such as Graphic Design, Fine art, Art and Design, Photography, Media, Fashion and Hair and Beauty. The displays of work were shown around college and some pieces were given more depth into their display and appearance as one memorable exhibit was put in a small room with eerie lighting and a peculiar setting. There was a lot to explore at the exhibition and every display had a lot of paintings and sketchbooks to look through and enjoy. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of work being shown and the quality of their pieces as some was produced to a very high standard.

A particular artist caught my eye as I was looking around, her display showed some very interesting mixed media pieces with materials such as pen, ink, paper, thread and watercolour being used. Emily Cox showed a very distinct style that I hadn’t seen in the exhibition, which excited me as she explored a lot with watercolour and her sketchbook was presented in a very appealing and interactive way. Each page was individual to its own and she explored with a lot of different ways of creating an image, such as drawing on acetate and simply holding it over brown paper and sewing onto a photograph. I felt her sketchbook inspired me the most, she showed many ways of creating an interesting sketchbook page which can be simply copied, such as using patterned paper on the background, putting artist research in a envelope and using space well so there isn’t much negative space on any pages.

Her sketchbook had an entire theme of the circus, which allowed her to create vibrant and interesting images. This image above was taken from her sketchbook where she had many pages full of paintings. What I like about this particular painting is the use of fabric and thread for the text as it adds another layer to the image and highlights the text. I also really like the rough use of watercolours which haven’t been used neatly nor has the pen but the image is still very bold and striking.

Whilst exploring one small exhibition room I came across another striking display with some fascinating pieces of work. Jessica Clark’s display had a lot of thought put into it as she had given the display a scene, which was a bed with a bedside table. On the bed sheets she had wrote many secrets as this was her theme throughout her sketchbook and work. Similar to Emily Cox, Clark’s sketchbook was very well presented as each page included a lot of work, annotation and a distinct theme. She explored a lot with typography so her sketchbook was filled with different styles of type which inspired me as she had clearly researched a lot into this project. Whilst scanning through her sketchbook I came across a small visual that I felt worked very well on such a small scale. The image of a couple kissing is very obvious when you first look although it can be quite difficult as she has only drawn the faces and a minimal amount of shapes, but she cleverly used watercolour to make the image flow. The secret that she unveils flows nicely around the picture and using a thick handwritten text gives the image a youthful feel to it.

Her work on display was also very captivating. The image above is very simple yet I was instantly drawn to it, the hands in the background are drawn with lots of vibrant inks and the way that the ink as run down the paper adds a lot more interest to the image. What I like is how the inks have blended together creating more interesting colours to the image. The text is handwritten and she has added brown paper so that the text is legible. I feel that although this image is simple it has a lot of appeal to it as the inked hands make the image very bold.

Manchester Metropolitan University

The Manchester Metropolitan degree show provided a wide range of high quality pieces of work that were exhibited around the university campus. The degree show provided the chance to explore a wide range of Art and Design courses available at Manchester Met, to which most appealed to me including Graphic Design, Photography, Fine Art, Embroidery and Illustration with Animation. I felt that Manchester Met had a lot to offer, as there was plenty to look at and lots of interactive displays that gave the exhibition more appeal and interest.

I feel that the visit to the degree show was beneficial for me as I got to witness a lot of inspiring work that I definitely feel will influence my thoughts and style in my future work. One designer whose work really excited me was a Manchester Metropolitan student called Rebecca Hall. Her course was a BA(Hons) in Illustration with animation. A captivating piece of her display was a diary she had created for a month of her student life. In this diary each page was carefully made and customized using different media. What I liked about this diary was the simplicity and ease the diary portrayed, each page would have handwritten text and simple drawings of her day. A technique of hers and many other designers that I saw at the degree show was watercolours. I would certainly like to experiment myself with watercolours as I have seen some very nice images made with watercolours, what appeals to me most is the way watercolours blend with each other and the easy way of creating shades. The image below on the right is a large piece of her work that was on display, the most eye catching part about this is image is the delicate colours to the birds. It was produced on fabric, a unique and powerful way to add texture. The letter block text keeps the image legible and striking which also works well with the soft watercolour used with the birds. 

Another designer whose work I approached and admired was Elizabeth Power. When I examined her work I was immediately drawn to the detail she put into her portraits, I could see that she had used pen and watercolour for shading which gave a striking appearance. I felt the handwritten type she included on the paintings worked very nicely with the image as a whole, giving it a feminine feel to it. A small technique that I felt added more layers to the image and gave the white space more appeal was the ink running off the drawings. 

Although I wasn’t able to get many photographs of Charlotte Jones’s work the only photograph I managed to take is a very striking and engaging drawing. The drawing mainly works monochromatically and the only use of colour is on the candle, which I feel could be a emphasis on the object highlighting a meaning. The drawing has only been drawn with highlights and the use of bold black lines adds a haunting feel to it. A subtle technique which makes the image portray quite a dark and depressing emotion to it is the paint brush strokes around the candle, this seems a nice effective way of using negative space but yet it can help exclaim the emotion.