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Final pieces for project 9.

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a whole bunch of workshop and lecture notes from the past term !

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Final pieces for project 9.

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Project 9 - Personal

I kind of knew what I wanted to do for my personal from the get-go, I wanted to make books. And it started with an idea about a frog. Initially it was supposed to just be a story about a frog king who didn't want to be king, but I was unsure the direction the plot would go.

I took my inspiration from these books by Lily Kong, Ed cheverton, and George Ratcliffe

I like these books because of their lack of complexity. The stories are simple (if there is one) and the style theyre drawn in is also simple. They exist more for fun and amusement than for an actual gripping story filled with lore and character arcs etc. I wanted to do a similar thing for my books.

When I sat down to try and brainstorm ideas, I actually just ended up creating the whole 6 books in one go. I drew them out on long strips that when folded, had an a7/a8 size and had 8 pages.

The plot essentially follows a frog (named Gorp), who meets a strange man who tells him he is dying, and that he needs to help him by bringing him the 'sacred herb'. The frog rushes to complete his task, but on the way meets 3 different characters who pose as 3 different obstacles/threats. The first character the frog meets is man claiming he loves him (truth is though, he just wants to eat our poor hero!) the second character is a sketchy merchant who tries to sell the frog the herb in exchange for his feet (and obviously he was selling fake herbs; who would trust this guy?) and the third character is a sad and lonely man who is angry that everyone just ignores him, and he attempts to flush the frog away with his tears (his character design is also a throwback to my legman project) Each time the frog is faced with these frets though, he just hops on over, and continues on his way. Eventually he finds the sacred herb garden, where he gathers the herbs and takes them back to the strange old man, who as it turns out, is magic! And in turn for the frogs good deeds, he turns him into the frog king.

I translated the rough sketches into proper finalised ones, and then scanned them in, re-sized them to be printed the size I need etc. I also tried to colour them digitally to see what that would look like, but decided to keep it simple, and instead just print on coloured paper.

I wanted to have the prints on the matchbox be sort of abstract and made from paper collages that have been printed. I originally wanted to screen print all of them, but due to creating the final pieces during easter I wasn’t able to access the screen printing facilities, so instead just printed them on a regular printer. They ended up coming out not clean and sort of speckley though which I really like, as it gave them a more handmade and not so clean look which is I wanted to achieve if I had screen printed them.

I personally really like the outcomes for this project. I wish we had had a bit more time to work on something as important as a personal project, as I feel it would of let me develop my ideas further and perhaps taken inspiration from different sources, but all in all I am really happy with my final little books. 

I exhibited them in our final year show, and it made me really happy to see people smiling and laughing when they read them.

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Poster I made for a fundraising workshop run by me !!!

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Mock up book for semiotics.

A combination of drawings, photos of the texture on tree trunks, scanned in pressed flora, and poetry in my own handmade font based on the structure of trees.

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various double page spreads and drawings for my semiotics book

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decided to literally combine language and nature into my own font to use in a book

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a collection of sketches from my research trip to the south downs

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a reaearch trip to the south downs for project 8. a study on the shapes of trees.

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Logograms are written symbols that represent a whole word. Known alphabets that use this system include Chinese, Japanese, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Pictograms are common imagery we see everyday. They are representative symbols of everyday things such as the ladies or the mans toilet, or a highway sign with an aeroplane on it to represent an airport. Pictograms are a worldwide and inclusive language and means to understand things.

Ideograms are similar in the sense they are representative symbols, however they are used to represent ideas instead of an actual thing. Such as a red circle with a cross through it to represent the idea of ‘no’. Ideograms are also very graphical and use geometric shapes.

Examples of logograms:

Rain, (âme) japanese. This logogram represents the word rain, and in the same sense is sort of a pictogram, because the

 symbol looks like raindrops being seen through a window.

The logogram for mountain is three horizontal lines joined by a vertical line at the bottom, which also looks like three mountains side by side.

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Project 8 - Semiotics

Plants have long had heavy symbolism attached to them, from the language of the flowers to the poppy that is most known in the united kingdom symbolising the remembrance of fallen soldiers. 

When I began my research on botanical related symbolism and meaning, a lot of my sources instantly told me that it was something spiritual. Which, makes a lot of sense. Plants have always been here and are divine sources of nature, and without them we wouldn’t survive.

A lot of the oldest civilians based their religion from nature, and vast amounts of folk cultures and traditions around the globe assign symbolic meaning to plants and trees.

Ogham is an early medieval alphabet used to write Old Irish, and is sometimes nicknamed the Celtic Tree Alphabet, as each letter is assigned a tree or plant name. Most findings of this ancient alphabet are old inscriptions on stone slabs, and most consist of personal names. 

Originally there were 20 Ogham characters divided into four groups of five. Each group was named after its first letter:

Aicme Beithe – “the B Group”

Aicme hÚatha – “the H Group”

Aicme Muine – “the M Group”

Aicme Ailme – “the A Group”

The characters are made up of parallel strokes of straight lines, and to me they incidentally crudely resemble the way trees actually look, looking like trunks with branches.

For the celts, trees were a very important element of their culture and every day to day life. The Tree of Life is famous symbol known to us today, with it embellishing a lot of emblems and jewellery, and for the celts it was a very important symbol as it represented how the forces of nature combined to create balance and harmony. 

Trees were seen as living beings, and also as magical, they were the guardians of the lands. Trees represented not only strength and wisdom, but also longevity and rebirth.

The World Tree is another ancient famous symbolic ideal of the tree, representing the axis of the universe, connecting realms and connecting earth to the heavens in its branches, and the underworld through its roots. Norse mythology called this tree Yggdrasil, which was an ash tree.

Flora also hold an important place within paeanistic beliefs. On the 1st of may, the spring fertility ritual of dancing around a decorated maypole symbolises the marriage of the vegetation god to the May queen. The pole is a phallic symbol, but also represent the spirit of the tree. Another pagan celebration is held on the 21st of june, the summer solstice, wherein it is a time to celebrate nature and the shift from spring to summer.

In European folklore, the mandrake was associated with magic and witchcraft, alongside death and insanity. 

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some drawings from our trip to the Horniman Museum in london

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Looking at other photographers work who work with shadow and light-

Fred Eerdekens is a belgium artist born in 1951. He works with multiple elements in his work, first creating a three dimensional piece while considering material and language, and then light and shadow. He then converts this 3D art piece into 2D by taking a photograph of the piece, along with the shadow it casts. The reason I decided to research his work in particular for this project is because I find this method very intriguing- he is almost drawing using the shadow that he makes with his modelled piece. Another interesting thing to note is that the three dimensional object has no resemblance to a word, and instead looks more like a nonsensical squiggle, which means Eerdekens is really considering the shadow the object will cast while he is making it. To me, this also gives a feel of a ‘words left unsaid’ kind of concept, wherein sometimes we want to say something but it comes out wrong or doesn’t come out at all. It is a very interesting concept, using 3D shapes to write or draw in this way, and definitely something I’d like to try within this project. 

Fan Ho was a Chinese photographer, born in 1931 he first started his venture into photography when he found his fathers Brownie camera. A lot of his work centres around candid photography and urban life.

His photography is in black and white, which creates a strong contrast between light and shade, which is why i decided to research him for this project. 

His best known work is a piece titled ‘Approaching Shadow’, with a model posed against wall on a white wall on the left, and then with a diagonal split of darker shadow added later to the photograph in the darkroom. I really like this manipulation of the image and the geometric composition. His layered works are also very fascinating, creating an illusion of shadowy ghosts. This layering and post production editing is someone I would like to try within my own work.

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In contrast to the two previous artists work i’ve looked at, who both use heavy emphasis on shadow in their work, Dana Maltby is quite the opposite. He uses light in her artwork, and intact it almost looks like he paints with it, and has been described as a ‘light painter’.

Instead of relying on light to create shadow, he uses artificial lights in all arrays of colour, which creates an image that is bright, bold and fluorescent.

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mood boards for our 1 day moodboard project using old photos I've taken over the years. themes ‘nature’ and ‘moody’

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A couple of photos I edited post production to have a more graphic edge.

All in all, I enjoyed this project, as I like photography, but I think I could of done more with it. I would like to try the idea i had out where I shine light through a stencil, and also perhaps get a film camera and take black and white photos, and maybe play with the results… collage maybe? I think the part of the project I enjoyed most was the short film bit, and using the green screen, I think I would definitely like to produce a stop motion animation oneday using it, or something along the lines. It was also very fun to make the props, I just wish I had a bit longer to develop the masks a bit further. 

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This is our photography project, to get us inducted in how to use the photography services that uni can offer us.

These are the photos I took on the day we were given the project, I used the camera on my phone and just took a bunch of photos around Snoopers Paradise, of objects I thought manipulated light in an interesting way. I think a few of them came out looking pretty cool, especially the ones taken through old glass ornaments. I am going to try and get a proper camera.

I thought it would be interesting to photograph my plants, as they could cast interesting shadows. I used the flashlight on my phone and shined it at the plants and took the photos with the camera, I played around with the shutter speed a lot but couldn’t seem to get it just how I wanted it. Regardless, I think the photos look pretty cool, I like how big the shadows were cast- I think this could create an interesting image, if I had lots of plants and lot of various light sources to cast a lot of shadows onto my wall, it could look like the silhouette of a jungle. 

I also tried playing around with how water could manipulate light, by placing glowsticks into a jar of water. However, the results aren’t as interesting as I thought they could be, and the camera didn’t quite pick up what it looked like.