Camille Rose Garcia

This new feature will start off with one of my favourite artists of all time, Camille Rose Garcia. Garcia’s work is strongly influenced by many other artists I follow and admire such as Gary Baseman, Al Columbia and Walt Disney. Her work centres around creepy cartoon girls and animals (mainly birds and octopi), her backgrounds are often coloured drips of sickly ice-cream tones.

Garcia has released several art books including childrens’ picture books (she’s currently working on Alice in Wonderland for Harper Collins). She has also created vinyl dolls and hand-made cloth dolls.

Her work usually combines cute creatures with other controversial subjects such as drugs, jealousy and death. Originating from Los Angeles, Garcia decided to take the ‘Low Brow’ approach to art. She shunned the elite circles of pretentious art and worked on comic style works, usually ending up with a kitsch, cheap looking, naive image.

Garcia’s new exhibition, ‘The Hydra of Babylon’, focuses on an under-water theme and the addition of vultures, sea monsters and weird butterflies. She also hand-made several dolls for the show through her one woman factory ‘Pitco’.

Garcia’s work can be found around the net when googled, though her main website for those who are interested lies here:

http://www.camillerosegarcia.com/

WWII Animations – Week 3

The Primary School Teaching students have been continuing to develop their ideas and are experimenting with the possibilities of animation and the software iStop Motion. After an intense three hour session on Wednesday, most of the teachers had animated part of their short. The collection above includes a few of these videos, some of which, have been post edited by myself to increase their drama and impact.

Think Of The Week 8: Remembering Before Sleep

A Lice In Wonderland

Kayleigh M from St Benedicts (S1) provides this week’s ‘AOTW’. She created a coloured study of a woodlice in a single period. Her drawing was then selected in photoshop and placed on a Google Images found photo of soil. I added some shadowing to the insects to make them appear more realistic and be part of the scene.

The idea for this had been inspired by Tricia Fuglestad’s Germs unit.

By Hook Or By Charcoal

Daniel (S4) from St Benedicts is always on the go, he doesn’t like to be too still or too bored for any amount of time. Like myself, he doesn’t have much patience for sitting drawing analytical observational drawings. Pastel is the perfect medium for this type of artist. Pastels are fast and frantic, they can cover large amounts of area in such a short amount of time, they’re a messy, dusty material and can be fairly easy to control when you have the few simple techniques at your grasp.

Daniel quickly drew out his guidelines in pencil, then darkened them with a piece of vine charcoal. He then threw himself into the background, trying to capture the corrugated iron with simple strokes and smudging.

I really like the white highlights on the hooks in this chalk and charcoal sketch, they make the hooks look heavy and sturdy. The fine linked chains look like they’ll break with the weight of them.

Think Of The Week 7: Green Bogeys

The Wonder Of Brooks

The self proclaimed ‘Artist Extraordinaire’ and quite rightly too, Mrs Brooks is a Virginian Elementary school teacher who moderates the blog Wonder Brooks. Her writing style is friendly and involving and I couldn’t help but browse through most of her blog, each post seemed to invite me in to read it. There’s a great range of diversity with some lovely unit examples from pupils including those you see posted. Check it out and maybe even bookmark her, you’ll want to keep going back.

The Tree

Currently working with the Primary Teaching Students, they have chosen their animation ideas and are now developing those ideas into something concrete. Ms Beattie is working on the idea of a growing tree that gets destroyed through harmful human acts. The tree is a symbol for world harmony. Ms Beattie’s ideas were great, though may be too large to complete in the short time that she has. I took a little time out to animate an example of how I would tackle her animation to let her and others see that ideas can be laid down quickly and effectively. Stop animation does not necessarily have to take a long time for it to be attractive and successful.

The Art Classroom In 3D

Most family films (especially animations) are released in 3D now. 3D seems to have re-appeared after a slow demise in the eighties and early nineties. Sure, the technology is slightly more advanced and the picture is slightly sharper, but the idea is still the same. Take two photographs, one from the right eye, one from the left, make them red and blue, merge them over each other at a converging point and there you go; a 3D image.

Channel 4 is running a week of 3D programming, this means that most people in the UK should have a pair of 3D glasses in their home at the minute. I thought that this would be the perfect time to try some 3D images of art pieces in The Art Classroom.

The images might not be as successful as professional ones you usually encounter, though hopefully you’ll get something rewarding from each image. Photographs are taken with an iPhone, then opened in Photoshop to make black and white and merge together.

Let me know if any of these images were successful or unsuccessful for you. I would quite like to try a unit with unique 3D pupil artwork. If you have Photoshop and a camera and you’re wanting to try this yourself, watch the video below:

End Of Year 1