Emma D’s Machinature CD

Emma D (S3, OLSP) has been working hard to finish off her CD Booklet Design that she has created along with the rest of her classmates.

Each pupil had to draw, colour, scribble and paint four separate studies, as well as create two separate transparent prints and write a set of lyrics for a song.

The studies, based on the conflict between nature and machines focused on plants, cogs, circuitry and animal patterns.

Emma’s patterns are extremely neat and vivid, her pen work is interesting and dramatic and along with her fun and dynamic robot painting, she has created a wonderful CD booklet.

The process wasn’t just visual images, Emma and her class were asked to produce or customise a song/lyrics to feature in the booklet. Emma’s lyrics below are based around a song by Adele, though read as if they should be in a Radiohead album.

A beautiful booklet and a great object to keep and look back on in years to come, great work Emma.

Saving Birks Cinema

I’d been asked by a friend to provide a custom made postcard for the postcard auction in Aberfeldy to ‘Save Birks Cinema‘. The postcards, created by amateurs and professionals, will be auctioned off to raise money to hopefully rebuild the cinema. I thought I’d do something a little tongue in cheek by showing my love/hate relationship with the cinema. The boy is cynically remarking how he’s glad he saved the cinema, even though girls around him are on their mobile phones and throwing popcorn. Just so you know, the film they’re watching is ‘Jaws’.

 

http://www.birkscinemafriends.org.uk/

The Greenhouse Effect

Caitlin G (S6, OLSP) finishes off the shadowing on the leaves of the foliage in her drawing above. This botanical house piece has taken her weeks to finish, it’s an intricate pen drawing with an insane amount of detail. It’s form and use of dark and negative shapes help steer the eye around and across the work. This is just a small part of her advanced higher unit, if the rest of her work is touching anywhere near this one in quality, she should do extremely well.

Insecticide

Kyle, Nicole and Kieran (S2, OLSP, Top, Middle & Bottom Above) finish off the vines on their amazing Timorous Beasties co-ordinate pattern. They will then photograph them and make a pattern to repeat on a surface such as wallpaper, upholstery or textiles. Ryan (S2, OLSP, Below) takes time to consider what kind of vines, stems and leaves he will place around his Weevil motifs.

Super-Canine-Dogilistic-Expert-Ally-Drawing

Ally B (S2, OLSP) has created this amazing work for the Super Hero competition being run in West Dunbartonshire at the minute. It’s based on her actual pet dog, which makes it even more personal and unique. I love how she has drawn detailed boxes of Super Honey’s powers. Here’s wishing her the best of luck in the competition. Good luck Ally!

Tasja’s feLINES

This week’s featured artwork comes from Tasja (S3, OLSP). She’s working on her initial drawing for her design unit. She will take her chosen animal and design three dimensional forms and patterns with it, but it is this first drawing on her investigation sheet that the judges will see.

Tasja hasn’t exactly captured her resource, though I’m glad she hasn’t, she’s added more of her own self into the drawing and that is much more interesting to me that an exact duplicate. Looking at the style, I can see that she is interested in graphic/comic style art, the Cheetah’s face is almost human, it’s protruding chin and sculpted face, it resembles a male human face.

She focuses on details of pattern and width of line. By changing the thickness of her line, she makes her drawing interesting to look at, as well as making her drawing easy to look at by varying her lines. Use of dynamic curves (thicker lines on the bends or curves of lines) gives her drawing an air of action. The animal is standing still, though looks like it could pounce at any point. A great piece of work.

Saara’s World

This week’s chosen artwork comes from Saara A from Notredame Secondary. Her project was to take a famous painting and adapt a story to it using four re-drawn panels. Saara had decided to go with ‘Christina’s World’ by Andrew Wyeth, a famous painting about a crippled girl crawling across a field. I was interested to see that Saara went for a different story focusing on the drama of running away rather than the actual reason for the painting, it really was quite refreshing. She originally wrote the story in her native language then translated it to English. It was then edited and typed into her A4 folded book.

Click to see larger readable version.

The Hungry Crocodile

This week’s ‘Artwork of the Week’ fell out of my diary yesterday. I’d forgotten that I had put it in there for safe keeping. A little too safe I guess.

I had shown S1 pupils how to make A4 folded books, a simple but effective way to self-publish by using a photocopier and a single side of a sheet of A4 paper. Kate M created this great little book in a period (50 mins). I liked the book so much I had to ask Kate if I could keep it. I placed the book inside my diary to keep it safe and only found it when I was looking back through it for an address. Enjoy.

Heather B (S1) – As Prolific As Studio Ghibli

After receiving a serious amount of creative work from Heather B that would make an elderly artist proud, I had to make an entire new category to draw people’s attention to pupils like herself. ‘Pupil Spotlight’ will be an irregular feature that will highlight certain pupils that are extremely productive and talented.

Heather B, although being a young S1 pupil, has produced triple figures worth of images and animations, expanding her skills and experimenting within the medium of manga and anime. She sent me a link to a folder with nearly eighty images and shorts, all of which were absolutely incredible. It has taken me a few weeks to finally get around to publishing some of my favourites, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it was worth the wait.

Using a mixture of sketches and computer colouring, using a tablet and drawing with a mouse, Heather mixes her traditional drawing skills with her computer knowledge to her advantage. The above image has been drawn by mouse, which I’m sure, some of you will know how tough it is to get anything worthwhile out of that tool.

The video below is a little 2 second sample of Heather getting to grips with animating a little creature’s face. Notice how the blinking eye and fluid motion of the chatting mouth make the little guy look and behave realistically.

Below, another eye study. By getting the eyes right on a character you can bring them to life. As human beings, we are prone to looking towards the eyes upon first contact. Therefore, for any character to make a impact, the eyes must be believable.

Heather does not only push her skills in drawing linear and simple line characters, she also spends a lot of time working on giving the impression of style and subtlety as evident in the orange and tree studies below.

I’m sure you will agree that there is a lot of talent exposed in these images. I know as a fine artist and designer that using tools such as stalling software and crashing movie editors, uncontrollable computer mice and frustrating pen tablets, that sometimes it is a good thing to achieve any kind of output, but to actually achieve the output Heather is producing now… is staggering. Below you will find a few images of how one of Heather’s images comes together using a variety of sketching and layout, designing and impressionistic computer painting, then composition and combining.

Don’t Hyde Your Working Out

Above are some of my favourite examples of a scribbling technique I tried with my S2 classes. Pupils were asked to try and create a ‘frustrated’ scribble drawing of Mr Hyde using a Fine Berol Pen. I like how each drawing is completely unique even though pupils had all used the same resource image. It shows that even from S2 very strong styles are developing to help each pupils work stand out.