Ashleigh Lambert - BCU Viscom Illustration

My blog for my studies at Birmingham City University.

[ashleigh-lambert96]

More photos of our finals exhibited.

[ashleigh-lambert96]

Finals

These are our finals mounted onto black board on our wall for the exhibition. Alongside our groups finished prints are traditional prints created by Darren in our group. The final prints display the structure that harry made, alongside everyone’s individual pieces to add to our collaboration final, including my graffiti finals. Everyone in our group has been able to take part narratively and/or physically alongside our sketchbook work that displays our developments towards this final collaborative piece.

[ashleigh-lambert96]

Here are the finals printed out A3 size on glossy print, they are now ready to be cut and mounted onto black mounting paper to present in the exhibition. I have never printed glossy prints before and so I thought it might not come out as well, but my group were more confident in choosing gloss than I was. After the prints came out, I was surprised at how nice the gloss shine looked on the print and felt better about the groups decision.

[ashleigh-lambert96]

Photographs of where our finished finals will be exhibited, depending on how the prints will work, our group was thinking about printing them out on black board to add to the white exhibition wall. We will have to see how it looks.

[ashleigh-lambert96]

After a group discussion, we have come to deciding on our collaboration finals that will be put up for exhibition on our wall. I think the finals look sharp and strong with their grey scale tone and think that they are suited for a finished final. Now we need to print them out. My group have suggested to print in a glossy print so that they look shiny and blend nicely with the greyscale tone, I’m not sure what to say but I will accept their opinion and see what the prints will turn out like. 

[ashleigh-lambert96]

I selected some photographs that we took in the photo studio and then edited them on Adobe Photoshop. I experimented with the images hue, tone, effects and layer modes. I will have a discussion with my group about mine and their edited images and decide upon the best to use as our collaboration final.

[artonstreets]

Digbeth, Birmingham

[ashleigh-lambert96]

Interesting piece, the magnifying glass is making me think it’s symbolising the term ‘invasion of privacy’.

[artonstreets]

City of Colours 2014 (Digbeth, Birmingham)

[ashleigh-lambert96]

Zabou, Graffiti artist

I found this secondary image on the internet of a piece of graffiti in Digbeth, created by the artist Zabou. I find it rather Interesting, I really like the style and how Zabou are relating their work to politics, delivering her message by adding aggressive animal heads onto a humans body. Their work actually reminds me of Banksy’s, could they be an inspiration? 

[ashleigh-lambert96]

Photoshop Portrait Painting Tutorial, Ilya Kuvshinov

While browsing the internet, I came across an artist called “Ilya Kuvshinov”, the artist has a very inspiring art style. I looked through their work and each piece made my jaw drop. The artist uploaded this link to a painting tutorial of theirs on Adobe Photoshop:  https://vimeo.com/140019934 The whole video inspires me, I hope to be just as good with digital painting and improve on my style as the future comes.

[ashleigh-lambert96]

(Late) Secondary research sourced from the internet, Google images.

I was resistant on my secondary research into this project because of the differences shown in Digbeth when some of these images were taken in the past to how Digbeth looks now, shown in my primary photos. This is because the graffiti continues to change on the buildings and I wanted to focus primarily on how Digbeth looked nowadays.

[ashleigh-lambert96]

(Viscom Lectures) (BCU) Protest

The fifth and final lecture was called "Protest" and talked about what protest was and times that protest was shown throughout the years. A protest is very direct and to the point, the words "Empowerment, supervision, participation, revolution and activism" were brought up in the lecture and all relate to the word protest.

Teenage rebellion in the USA was brought up firstly, and talked about 1950's America and how it gave teenagers a 'specific identity'. The story of teenagers were best told on films in 1950's cinemas in America. The movie "James Dean, Rebel without a cause", Nicholas Ray 1955, was used as an example and talked about how teenagers are forging their identity. The opening title was shown first as a clip from the film. Another clip was shown with a teenager and his parents, the teenager was being suffocated by his baring parents and torn between his own wants and his parents expectation. Finally a last clip was shown as an aftermath of the teenagers behaviour, "Race scene" followed a tragic consequence as a dare turns into a disaster and showed what happens with the 'notion' of the teenager.

“Ai Wei Wei Dropping a Han-Dyansty Urn, 1995″ Is a photograph of a famous protagonist Ai Wei Wei dropping and smashing a urn worth millions, which could be considered as a strong act of vandalism. The photograph is really powerful and as I realised the urn was worth that amount the photo became cringe-worthy. I suppose it goes to show unless you know how valuable something is; it wont matter that the item is being damaged.

As I have been talking about graffiti for my project, looking at graffiti in the protesting view, graffiti has been known to protest against many subjects and as a piece of work that gets seen by the public commonly, it could be considered to work very well. I have talked about the artist Banksy in my work, they are well known for displaying work around many places to the public eye, and their inspiration is from political and social events. Banksy delivers messages through their graffiti to the public much like a protest would. 

[ashleigh-lambert96]

A select amount of images taken by my phone with the studio rooms lights on, showing the differences with and without the studio room light. More photographs were taken with a digital camera of the lights on to add variety to our work. 

[ashleigh-lambert96]

I had changed the settings on my phone to take photos at a grey scale mode called “Noir” and took a few photos. Interestingly, after I took the photos they looked very different and unique. My favourite photograph is the first photo at the top, and the shapes and light symbolised a city near an ocean, with a moon in the sky. 

[ashleigh-lambert96]

A select amount of images taken with my phone while the studio lights are off and the coloured lights are being used. 

[ashleigh-lambert96]

We had took our structure piece into the photography studio to take many photographs that we could choose from and edit into our collaboration final piece. Along with us, we took some coloured lights and some white fluff in a bag, this was so we could add some more variety to our photographs. The white fluff was also a good touch to add a misty, fogged atmosphere which blended with my eerie theme. We had taken my buildings into the room but unfortunately wasn't used due to the fact they did not look very well with the structure so instead my graffiti pieces were only used as part of the collaboration. 

[ashleigh-lambert96]

The idea of adding graffiti to the octopus came from the movie “Shark Tale”, as a group we had all seen the movie Shark Tale. In the movie a whale had been drawn graffiti on him. This had given us the idea to add any graffiti onto the octopus’ body. 

[ashleigh-lambert96]

After carefully cutting out my graffiti prints, I had stuck masking tape onto the back of them, which I found was the easiest way to stick them on so that I could avoid ripping off the acrylic paint on the structure by accident. I then placed them on different areas that I thought suited best, keeping the octopus’ body in mind. However, a discussion with my group; they really preferred the lion graffiti amongst the blue area of the structure that wasn't part of the octopus because of the contrast between the blue and peach colours.