Applied Arts

What do i think Applied arts is?

when i first saw Applied Arts , it was at college, i had never heard of it before, so i had no idea what it was all about. looking at the workshops i generalized it as jewellery making and working with metal wood and plastic. slightly like the 3D design specialism but on a smaller scale. 

but after taking a week in the class and looking at artists it is alot more than just a generalization  it is as much about the process as it is the finished product that you create.

i learnt lots of new processes in the metal works and how to manipulate metal to create new shapes.doing these i now appreciate how jewellery etc is made. 

artists doing applied arts can use the processes as the main point to their work, or make the shapes into a hidden meaning or represent something to create something more spectacular and something with more meaning that audiences can relate too.

thinking of my own designs i found hard even with shapes to play with as i couldn't relate the processes with my shapes and how i would make them. applied arts first designs have to be simple and then added to to make them more complicated. 

i enjoyed working in applied arts and will think about using those porcesses in my 3D design practical work, it could create some brilliant effects for my work. 

it is a more hands on experievnce and making something that you could possibly wear is quite exciting and satisfying at the end. 

Georgia o'keefe

We went to the library in one lesson to research into artists.
i looked at the fine artist Georgia O'Keeffe.

In the book i read that she works to an immediate response to there environment around her,

"flowers are small, we haven't time to notice them" she wants people to see flowers the way she sees them.

she is mostly known for her sketches and paintings of flowers.



as well as looking at the whole flower head she also does close ups of the middle of the flower, this shows a completely different composition and explores shapes that we never knew were in flowers.

she works to a technical perfection, with dense visible brush strokes and a special primer. she specifically focuses on colour which makes the image stand out, creating a beautiful theme for the flowers. she wants us to think they are beautiful too, which i think she puts across very well.

i would love to create some work like hers, focusing on the close up of flowers as i don't think people focus on this enough.

Abstract Fine Art Pieces

These are two pieces that i painted in Fine Art class at college. they were based on drawing round the shapes of random objects and focusing on the shape that they created, using different colours and textures to create an interesting composition.
we used the objects themselves to create lines and different textures. this presented us with an abstract image.even our hands.
i duplicated some shapes to create a bigger shape. and we used the projector to enlarge some objects onto our paper.

i prefer the second one i did as it has a better colour palette. the first one was just a massive splash of colour that had no thought to it as it was my first experiment. the second one i thought about just using monochrome colours and then using an accent colour to stand out, so i chose red.

i enjoyed experimenting with shapes and colours on large sheets of paper but to me fine art is more detailed than this and i would have liked to have done a piece for longer that meant something, to do with the metaphors we did in the previous lesson.

Damien Hirst

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWSb9QMlLoQ


This is a video i found on you tube about the Damien Hirst Exhibition at the Tate Modern this Summer.

he explains all what he thinks of his work and shows you around all the exhibition rooms which i found really interesting.

Damien hirst is an English Artist , Entrepreneur and Art collector. He dominated the Art Scene in the 1990s and is the dominant artist in the group young British artists.

He concentrates on installation art , conceptual art and painting.
His work is widely criticized as some people believe that his work is not art but to me his art has a meaning, it is art that makes you think and this is my favorite kind of art.
 his shark installation art is based on fear, people have always had fear of sharks and to have one that close to you is shocking, it makes you step back a little.
The big volume of water also has this effect on you.
Fear and safety are put together here as you can be scared of the object but you can still get up close and examine the shark as you could never do anywhere else. this to me sounds exhilarating.

 his work with the surgery objects also leads itself with fear. when faced with a surgical object we are scared of it, it shocks us and we want to step back away from it, but still we rely on these instruments to save our lives when we need them. how does that work?

 this piece is called mother and child. and the focus is on the seperation. they are in seperate boxes which emphasises the face that they are not together, plus they are both split in half which emphaisies the detachement of the mother and child.
is this to do with religion? shouldnt mother and child always be together for protection?
you can also see the full insides of the cow which can disgust some people as they dont want to see this, but is this to relate to the fact that we should be disgusted if the mother and child are apart?


IN my opinion i love Damien Hirsts work as it adds drama to the art world. people speak about their opinions on his work which has made him and is art world famous so he must be doing something right.
the fact all his art has a hidden meaning excites me and makes me want to develop my own ideas about his work.
art can be anything, art IS anything, because everything has a meaning.

Sunflower Seeds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PueYywpkJW8&feature=related



This is a Link to a you tube video of Ai Weiwei's Sunflower seeds art project that was shown at the Tate.

Some people who don't see art, would just think of this as a massive room with loads of sunflower seeds on the floor, but if you actually appreciate where this whole idea has come from then you will be surprised.

i didn't know anything about it to start with and i was shocked when i saw the whole process of what he went through to get this art piece finished. it was more about the process.

The sunflower seeds are not actually sunflower seeds. they are pieces of rock cut up into little tiny pieces and then hand painted by people in poverty in different countries that don't earn alot of money at all
they had to paint thousands of the same seeds over and over again. what kind of job is that?

now these were transported all the way to England and Ai Weiwei spread them out himself on the floor of the Tate. Audiences were allowed to walk on the seeds when they came to visit it,

is there a metaphor behind this, we are walking on the hard work of people in the foreign countries who have sat their for hours painting the seeds. are we walking on their lives? are we trampling on their lives? 

is it an emphasis on poverty in other countries and the richness of our country?

i love this work and how he focuses on the process of including other people from different countries to make his point

Laser Cutter

As we started to work 3D, we used one piece of machinery we could use was the Laser Cutter. its a laser that cuts (surprise surprise)

We got an object , we had the end of a light bulb and the switch and drew out it in ink and pencil to get the ideas of the shapes.

Then with the laser cutter we decided to create the shape using circles and spacing them out apart on a wooden stick to create a larger 3D image.
using squares we would create the textured look half way down the object.

i really enjoyed designing this because i had a clear image in my head of what i wanted to achieve. 

i think its worked really well as we have the shape of the object (that you can see on the photo below)

the cogs and the switch that we have made with the rectangle i think is a great abstract look of the object that audiences would be able to get.  

the laser cutter creates a great clean cut without any rough edges. much better than cutting it out ourselves. 

we had trouble with the hole in the middle as our hole was to big so the pieces kept falling down on top of each other, so we added seperaters to the middle which we think was a great save as it still looks clean and not messy.

My Technical perspective Drawings

We learnt how to use 1point perspective drawing and 2point perspective drawing skills, to make sure the shapes and 3D shapes looked in proportion which is vital to draw in 3D Design

We then added colour to make it stand out from the paper. Adding the black line around the edge of the box makes it look much nesater and create definition to the box.

we then rubbed out parts of the colour on the 3D box to create light and shadow. this makes it look even more 3D

adding a box to the background mmakes the box at the front not stand out as much and look like its floating on nothing. it looks much more realistic this way

i really enjoyed learning how to draw using technical skills, as this is more of what i would like to do, i would like to learn more of this.
it is used in architecture and interior design alot. aswell as product design