Setting up exhibition

Transforming the studio into a clean aesthetically pleasing exhibition was a task that was always going to be difficult. I knew this from the beginning so I tried to keep my work space as clean as possible, but it managed to get messy regardless.
The first plan of action for setting up the show, was to move everything out, tables, chairs, and to send any discarded pieces of work home or in the skip.

With all the furniture moved, the next step was to transform the booths into walls. Starting with a room that looked like an eastern market, we propped up large white wooden boards around the room to form walls. These were placed strategically to allow for installation pieces and to allow for more space. Me and some others assisted Bill in the task of setting the walls up and moving them between rooms for other classes to set up their shows.

As the walls were set up, more furniture was moved behind the walls to store things like the cupboards, tables and drawers which also provided a useful storage area for our work

Next we sealed the gaps between each wall, first using white tape but then resorting to using Gum strip. This was a challenge because we had to have one even strip going straight down the middle of the cracks and with a lot of the walls they needed re-doing later on when the paint lifted and warped them.

With the walls up and gum stripped, the next step was painting them. We used matt white emulsion paint, rollers and brushes for cutting in and dark marks. The painting process was the easiest, but it took a long time to get right since the walls needed a few coats and other problems like with the gum strip occurred.

Between gum stripping and painting, the walls were sanded down and holes filled simply using filler. Before painting all nails and staples were removed.

For the next couple of days whilst people’s work was getting put up I tasked myself with cleaning the studio, such as washing down the sink area and walls, scrubbing the floor and just tidying up in general, as well as assisting in things like lifting boards.

I assisted Nicole in the arranging and presentation of her paintings, looking at keeping the pieces level and what order they should be displayed in.
As a group we also decided which of her pieces should go up for exhibition cutting her 8 originals down to 6.
At the same time, I was doing the same with my work where, with the help of the tutors, I picked which paintings I wanted on display (cutting out my first Doctor Doom piece) and under Jamie’s request I brought in two of my paintings from my previous unit.

With my first set of paintings up, I continued tidying and cleaning up the studio, helping out when needed and doing things like painting mirror plates and touching up marks on the walls.

Whilst my last painting was mounted onto the wall, me and my peers built up the exhibition shop in Bill’s workshop. Displaying work for sale both original pieces and prints from reprographics in a way where they are visible and accessible in the room.

Dr Doom Painting 2: Latveria

For my final painting I had to change my initial idea of producing a Roman styled Dr. Doom piece based on some concepts I created. I created two graphic compositions based on my photographs and drawn concepts in order to see which of the two compositions I would paint.

I used Ed and James as models for my artwork.

To create my compositions I photographed Ed and James and cut the photographs using my editing software.

I used the body of a riot police officer for the first composition along with Ed’s body.

I used this photograph of a riot helmet in my compositions also

I also photographed the model church at Blackburn cathedral and I used it in the background as a castle.

For the buildings I used a photograph from the ruins in Pleasington and an image online.

For the debris I found an image online and duplicated it before laying it on the floor. The helmets were also taken from an existing image online as well as half of the soldier’s body in the first composition. The poster is just a reference at this point as I created my own poster to stick on as collage.

I created this poster using my editing software and working from a drawing of the Dr. Doom mask I did. I chose the font and colour because of the visual similarities to Russian propaganda posters and I tried to keep the design of the mask as simple as possible. The second stage of the poster design was adding a textured overlay to make the poster look more organic as

The symbol on the poster is the fictional Latverian flag symbol

opposed to flat colours. Then the final stage was warping the graphic just a little so that it was in perspective to the wall it would sit on.

After I drew out my Latveria canvas I filled in the darkest areas using brown and blue paint. For the debris I mixed a pallete of brown, blue, white, red and yellow paint and dabbed my thumb into the paint and pressed it into the canvas. This created a thick coloured texture similar to stone.

I added some more colour to the piece focusing on the walls and church in the background. I used excess paint to fill in the shirt and jacket on James.

My next step was focusing on painting the soldiers in the background. I then used the remaining paint to work on the floor and wall a bit more as well as more of James’ clothes and his face

I next focused on James’ hands and clothes so that I could paint with a sense of depth.

I then took the painting into college where I worked on the painting as a whole

I had some advice on my work and so I redrew the fingers on the painting and made a list of areas that needed work.

I focused on fixing the facial features, the hand shape, the floor and the helmets on the soldiers. I also added the poster using pva glue. What worked really well about this is that the water broke down paper a bit so it left behind creases which helped it blend into the wall.

I continued working on the piece in little ways, touching up the floor, darkening the poster and adding a thicker layer of mist.

To see my the piece develop fully watch this time lapse video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXRgESJA9IU&feature=youtu.be

The theme of this piece represents Latveria, the ficitional country run as a dictatorship by Dr. Doom. In this painting Dr. Doom’s army of robots has been re-imagined as a private army of soldiers using brute force and brutality to enforce Doom’s law. The use of the poster is to tie the piece into the comic book world and my theme in a subtle sense. It’s an ambiguous piece of scenery in my painting because it opens up questions as to what or who Doom is. I like to imagine that in this world, Dr. Doom exists only as a propaganda figure and the use of the mask is to a token of fear to the people of his country. Because Dr. Doom isn’t present himself in the piece we know as much about Doom as the people in this world do and the poster works because we don’t know ourselves if Doom is real but only of the intimidation of the poster.

Green Arrow Painting 2: Longbow Hunter

I was having difficulty coming up with a second composition for my Green Arrow work, so after a group crit I took the advice of my tutors and peers and looked into connecting it more to me like the first one and the area where I live. Something I’ve noticed since walking home from college in the winter time at night is how the streets are lit by street lights and everything has an orange glow. After noticing the t.v. shows I watch Daredevil and Arrow portray their supeheroes in this same colour filter of street lighting I tested it out as a direction to go down myself.

The background is taken from an alley on my street. I added a shadow cast onto the building behind my Green Arrow to reflect a film noir style effect and the heavy rain overlay helps blend the character into the scenery

I created this composition which utilities the character, my location and the connection to the street lamps as well as going back to some early research I did into film noir.

My next step was to re-prime the canvas. I had previously started my second Dr. Doom piece on this canvas but after discussing a new direction with it with Richard I re-primed this canvas to give it texture.

The original Dr. Doom Painting

I Primed this with a heavy application of white emulsion paint. I then used a wire brush and brushed streaks along the canvas to texture is.

Next I Washed yellow ochre paint along the canvas, this way you can see the texture and to loose some of the white background.

Here is a time lapse video of me drawing out this piece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE7aj9IhQHM&feature=youtu.be

I drew out the shape of the canvas using chalk pastels, and then washed tones into it using blue and brown paint.

I continued building up tones using browns and blues to fill in most of the image

Again more applications of just brown and blue were added

Next I began working a full colour pallete of red, yellow, blue, white and brown and a small amount of sap green, to begin painting the base layer

I implied an impressionistic style pattern to painting the brick work in the walls

Some more painting, small additions

The pants were painted in and a dark wash put over the floor

I focused on adding more tone into the painting to avoid it becoming too bright

I painted the archery bracer in for a first attempt and painting the hand closest to the viewer

At this stage I had finished the base layer and had to touch up small bits, one of them was that the arrow was crooked so I fixed that by taping the sides of the arrow and re painting it straight

I applied a heavy amount of layers to the bow to give it a close wooden texture and I continued the impressionistic style of the brick walls

I re-painted the archery bracer and my final step was to paint the heavy rain. This required research. I knew that painting white streaks along my work would look too unrealistic and my research showed my that you only see rain when it’s surrounded by light, and since there’s no obvious light source seen in my painting this was difficult. So I went to a fellow artist who advised me that due to the texture canvas I could use rough sand paper and a long ruler to scratch the rain into the piece. I took a risk with it and it worked. To get the rain effect, I moved a long ruler down my canvas keeping it at the same angle and used sand paper and wood to scratch the top layer off. To finish off I added splashes bouncing off objects in the painting (the walls, the hood, the bow, etc)

At first this was my least favourite of the 3 paintings I had done, but after applying the rain effect with sand paper this has become one of my favourites. I think it gives it a gritty quality which I like in my work and I’m proud that the risk payed off.

Rain Study

For my 2nd Green Arrow painting one of the key elements I want to include is the heavy rain that I put in the initial composition.

The idea behind the rain comes from journeys walking home around this location in the winter during heavy downpours of rain and the night and the rain obscured my vision, and it was an appropriate tool to help blend the character into the background.

When it comes to painting rain I want to avoid painting streaks at all costs, I think if I start painting rain streaks on my work it will look very amateurish so I’m going to look into ways other artists paint the rain.

Bob Barker

Bob Barker is an artist who’s work I saw whilst in Manchester. His style of art is he paints foreboding images where you have something joyous such as children playing but in a gloomy townscape.
Barker has a good approach to painting rain where he relies a lot on reflection as obviously the ground would be soaked through that is would pick up reflections from all kinds of light sources like a river. His use of lighting as well is used to hide the rain as the reflections of water droplets would only be visible in the darkest of the area anyway.

Frederick Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam is an impressionist painter who’s painted quite a few rainy scenes. Although I really like his paintings, I’d struggle to incorporate this style into my own art work based on mine being a night scene. Hassam paints rain by relying on reflections like Bob Barker does but also in the patchy and muddy quality of his work. If I were to use this in my own piece I would have to paint the entire thing over in an impressionistic style which even if I did that, it wouldn’t match my other work.

I will look at real photographs of rain now and see what ideas come from that.

The main thing these rain studies tell me is that light is the key and rain is only visible when around and reflecting light. There is also a glow from the street lights reflected on the wet path in these photographs. The rain itself is very thin and practically mist and the only splatters on the floor seen are very fine. The darkest areas of the photographs show no rain because no light is reflecting this. I will struggle to adapt rain into my painting because there is no clear source of lighting so I will need to ask my tutors they’re thoughts on the problem.

Dr. Doom Painting 1: Visage

Upon returning to college I worked on a Dr. Doom portrait piece.

To enforce the Roman elements of my interpretation of Dr. Doom I chose a cape bracer design from ‘Gladiator’ to replace Doom’s usual style bracer.

Here is the development for that painting

My initial drawing, working on a black primed canvas like I did with my Constantine pieces, I used soft pastels to draw out my image. I always quite like the outcome of the chalk on black as it looks like a neon kind of image.

I then filled most of the image in using acrylic paints, at this stage it was already close to finishing within a few hours. I’ve learnt from my experience this year that a painting on a black canvas like this takes much less time to complete because the shadow is already mostly filled in and it’s just a case of paint colour and highlights.

I was struggling painting the metal on the character, this is why I researched the metal studies in one of my last posts. A lot of the feedback I got was that the mask wasn’t clear enough and that it looked to obscure to make out. As for the arm, I taped a paintbrush to the canvas to try and replicate the metal band around the paintbrush and paint what I could see.

With Richard’s advice I simplified the mask down to 3 colours of a white, grey and black tone. This would help clear the subject up. I also followed his advice on painting the arm, however I was told I needed to simplify that down too because there was too many light changes going on in the arm.

I put some more tones into the mask because the three weren’t enough to give it the quality that I wanted although I did simplify the arm down in terms of lighting. I then made a start on the cape bracer by painting in all the highlights.

I finished this off by working on the cape bracer, trying to match it with a bronze / gold version of a roman bracer.

Green Arrow painting 1: No man is an Island

During the Easter Holidays, I began working on my first Final piece.
I worked on Canvas using acrylic paints.
Here is the development of how my painting turned out

I began by drawing out the main figures and shapes on the canvas using soft pastels. I don’t think I’ve mentioned why in the past, but it’s because the soft pastels are easy to manipulate and remove if necessary, they can quickly fill in a large area with an idea of colour, and also as you paint onto them, they activate and mix with the paint.

My first stage was to block in some colour, mainly the green because it would be a green heavy piece.

My next step was to add some shadows using brown and blue. The blue is a cold tone whereas the brown is a warm tone, mixed together the two create a black colour which helps fill in most of the painting.

At this stage I washed blue paint over the entire canvas. I did this by watering down some ultra marine paint and soaking the canvas with the blue ink mixture

The ink wasn’t strong enough so I repeated the process

further paint applied

more paint added, particularly to the muddy shirt

At this stage the painting was mostly complete, few additions were still needed for example the numbers on the bridge

I then added the fog which would represent the current green arrow emerging through from the past green arrow.

One last layer of fog was applied and the piece was finished

Newspapers

I am going to experiment with painting Green Arrow characters onto relevant newsclippings. I believe this will connect with his theme of fixing social issues by reflecting them upon real news stories. In my research for this I struggled to find any images directly from newspapers that tell these stories so I solved this problem by finding online articles and creating my own newspaper clippings using a variety of online tools.
http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp lets you create a clipping from a newspaper

http://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/newspaper-generator.html creates a full newspaper front page

and http://www.inthepaper.co.uk/ also does this feature.

For a Green Arrow article, any will be particularly relevant so long as it tackles injustice in the community, but to start this going I wanted to start with the castaway story of Green Arrow. I found an article online about a fisherman who was castaway for 13 months living off fish, birds, turtles, rain water and urine. I took the entire article into the newspaper creator and re-named the man from the article to Oliver Queen (the real identity of Green Arrow). To make the newspaper relevant in the comic book world, I changed the name to The Daily Planet and the Author of the article to L. Lane, something that would be relevant in the world of these characters. The article about the castaway can be found here http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/03/world/asia/marshall-islands-castaway/

I then also created another newspaper clipping, this one in regards to Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy. Speedy is notorious in his fictional history for having a substance abuse problem and being briefly addicted to heroin, in an award winning story of the dangers of teen drug abuse. To reflect on this I found a similar article about suburban teenagers and how easy it is for them to buy heroin in their neighborhood. Again I altered the names so that the story is about Roy Harper (Speedy) and the newspaper to make it relevant and next I plan to use inks and watercolour paints to paint the characters based on my photographs over the articles.
This article can be found here http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/28177849/secret-in-the-suburbs-heroin-cheap-easy-for-teens-to-get

Re-Assessed Compositions: Filters

After showing Richard my Green Arrow Compositions he pointed it out to me that the images themselves are very flat. Because there’s no real dynamic lighting in the original photographs, he said I should look into adding colour filters and manipulating the images with photoshop to create a better blended image.

He also showed me stills from an old version of Robin Hood that he used to watch called ‘Robin of Sherwood’ which was a more realistic and grounded approach to the character which is partly reflected on by the imagery.

I settled on this as the composition I wanted to work on because I like the formation of it and the relevance to both the character and my own town.

Using my editing software g.i.m.p 2.0 and Photoshop I created these variations of the composition.

This is the piece I decided to go with, I think it creates the right sense of tone and mystery. The blue filter works great to create a cold eerie setting and the white fog breaks the balance between the two versions of Green Arrow well, as if the past version is subjected to the mist whilst the present day Green Arrow is breaking through towards the future

Using my own editing software I created this composition where I tested out a green fog layer only showing the character breaking through it. I don’t think this works in terms of colour but the smoke and fog is definitely the way to go.

Here is the same picture but with a thinner smoke effect which I think works better

Here I experimented with adding smoke to the piece. My criticism of it is that it’s too overpowering a mist or steam would work better.

I quite like this one because the style reminds me of the old ladybird style childrens books I read as a child. It’s not the style I want for my final piece but just a radically different approach that I like.

Compositions

Using my photographs, I then went ahead and created a variety of compositions for what my final pieces could look like.
(here is a video of the compositions being made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ17qCRW2WU&feature=youtu.be)

Firstly Green Arrow.

The challenge that came with my Green Arrow compositions was finding a way to make the pieces tell the story but not be a busy image. Originally my plan was to take photographs of Aidan in the same pose, but with the mask on it one shot and off in another so that I could try recreate a john stazeker style composition showing both the island Green Arrow and the urban Green Arrow. I tried this, but the photographs didn’t quite line up, so instead I had to find another way to portray a sense of narrative.
I used my editing software to create layered images reflecting on the styles of double exposure so that the painting shows both past and present Green Arrow in their natural environments simultaneously.
For the backgrounds I used previous photographs from my Daredevil work, because I got a lot of great urban photography that I didn’t get around to using, and photographs from some woodland areas I ventured to around Oswaldtwistle and Accrington. I think they need work on them so I’m going to ask for feedback from Richard.

Secondly Dr. Doom

Using Blackburn Cathedral as a background, I created these compositions reflecting on Dr. Doom’s natural castle like environment to create Carravagio inspired compositions. Like the Green Arrow ones, I think these need a bit more work and so I plan to get some feedback.

My photographs

After my photoshoot, I sorted through my photographs to find my best.
Here are my best shots. Using this collection of shots, I plan to create some photoshop compositions which I will then work from for my final piece