14.10.21 - Urban Bird Drawings & Creating Colour Palettes

At the beginning of the project I talked about looking at pigeons and their relationship with the city. As my ideas developed I have moved on to the prospect of making ceramic buildings with imprinted text and windows reflecting those found around the lace market, however I still want to incorporate pigeons into the work. I experimented with colour by creating this palette based on different shades that appear in a pigeons feathers, which I can then apply to my ceramic buildings when I glaze them. It would be a really subtle reference to the birds but I really like the idea so I'm going to test out different glazes in the ceramics room when I can, and then compare them to my palette.

 

I did these fine liner sketches of pigeons and added a box behind them where I painted in the different feather colours to make a contrast to the monochrome drawings, and I like it because it is like a heavenly window of light or a strange portal to a different dimension. 

I decided to repeat the process with magpies as the subject, and the colour palette is slightly less varied but the colours are much more vivid. I did some sketches of the birds with drawings of found objects scattered among them. In my early ideas I mentioned the urban myth (or maybe it's true?) of magpies and crows collecting shiny objects, so I started collecting metallic rubbish of the streets myself in case I could incorporate them into my work. I haven't found a use yet but I like how the drawings look as they show the clash between nature and the artificial. They also give a sense of ambiguity which we talked about in this weeks lecture as there's no way of knowing where any of it came from or who dropped it.

Can tabs, a screw, brand new 2p, a shiny star, random metal thing, electrical component?, lead fishing weight

The last bird I looked at was crows. They interest me because they are highly intelligent and have a particular relationship with humans, for example they can remember and recognise faces, warn each other of dangerous people and even form bonds with people by bringing them 'treasure' in return for food. Some people have even trained them to bring money. The colour palette is obviously much more limited here but it would still be interesting to see multiple ceramic buildings all in various monotonous shades, I think black would represent pollution sticking to the once-pristine walls and create a sinister, foreboding aesthetic, just like crows do in the Gothic genre.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

29.1.21 - Objects in the Bath and Shower

Image
One of the first things that came to mind when I got the re-arrangement brief was to do something with my collection of beanies. Because they are so colourful, I decided they should go against a plain background, so I cleaned the bath out and started filling it with the animals.  The first set of photos shows the animals in a random arrangement where I photographed them from different angles... For these close up images I placed the camera in the bath with the animals and blindly took the photographs, not knowing what the results would be. The flash came on for these pictures which makes the in-focus areas appear very sharp with a clear representation of the animals' surface textures. They also remind me of claw machines in arcades, which gives the images a nostalgic feel - all of these beanies were manufactured in the 1990's and early 2000's. This is the thing that opens and closes the plughole in the bath, and it created some strange reflections of the beanies which look
Read more

'Shades of Green' exhibition at St Mary's Church

Image
'Shades of Green' is a Nottingham city artists studio group exhibition, with various works about the longing to be in green spaces during lockdown and the artists reactions to isolation. My favourite was Karl Wilby's 3D piece with the whales and flowers. I think it's really clever how they seem to be floating in the air and are feeding from the flowers like humming birds, it's also really interesting to see whales represented in such a small scale, it's quite surreal and endearing. I like the contrast between the reflective coppery metal flowers and the matt turquoise whales which suggest the colour of oxidised copper, showing a transition from new to old - shiny to rusty - maybe also alluding to the endangerment of the species. There seems to be quite a strong connection between this piece and our fabricated nature project because of how naturalistic the whales are, when in fact they have been made through 3D printing which is as artificial as it gets. The meta
Read more

Mike Kelley Style Photoshoot

Image
  Mike Kelley's 'Ahh... Youth' piece inspired me to make my own version using old teddies from home, including some from my parent's childhood and some from my own - plus a recently acquired 90's troll doll from a car boot sale. I set up the studio lighting in a way that would reduce shadows behind the objects and used a white background like Kelley's image, which gives a professional atmosphere that  elevates them from being worn-out old creatures to something special and celebrity-like. I used a tripod so that they are all to scale with each other, and I like the empty space around them, it's like they have room to breathe and think. I also had to adjust the ISO, white balance and shutter speed on the camera to suit the light and conditions of the space, then I used manual focus to get the sharpness that allows you to see all the details and textures. After uploading the photos to the computer, I cropped them on photoshop and classified them into two separ
Read more