Landscape Art

Landscape art is a centuries old art form and one of the most celebrated around today. Almost every Master has painted landscape, and in art's formative period (1600's-1900's)it was one of then only accepted forms of painting. I did my landscape in the style of van Gogh. I used pastel on sugar paper. I took the picture from a photograph of Tuscany my father had taken.

I am very pleased with the way my piece turned out. I created it using very small, intense flicks of the pastel, which is very tiring and time-consuming. It's hard to see, but this piece is in fact A1 size, which is an immense area to cover. I started out by blending and smudging the background colours, which were mostly blue. After this I slowly built up the colours using the flicking technique. I had to be careful to use the right combination of colours to build an overall impression of one colour; for example sulphur yellow, corn yellow and spring green to create the impression of a field in spring. I had to spray it several times with fixative in order to stop the immense amount of pastel rubbing off. All in all I am very pleased with it.

Final Magazine Layout

I am currently designing my final magazine layout. I am going to base it on the Libyan riots and the magazine layout template I am going to use is this one from Vogue.

I began with this photo of a woman in the Libyan riots.

It came out grayscale in photoshop but I decided I liked it more than colour because it has more gravitas. I tried putting the font in the bottom left corner, as in the inspiration piece, but the overall lightness of the background made the white type hard to read. I tried putting the typography in black but it was even more hard to read because there is more black than white in the background. Then I selected around the type with the marquee tool. I then created a new layer; selected a light gray from the colour palette dialogue box; and then set the layer mode on difference; then using the paint bucket tool filled the selected area. I then duplicated the chosen text layer; right-clicked 'rasterize text' on the duplicated layer; turned off original text layer via the eye tool; and on the rasterized type layer, cntrl-I to invert the colours. With the bottom word 'freedom' I repeated the first steps and then found that half the text couldn't be read because of dark background; so on the rasterized type layer I used the square marquee tool to create a selection around the word 'freedom' and inverted the selection using cntrl-I. This allows the audience to read the word in the lighter type format. The third line of words 'to be' I selected the difference-layered box over the word and dragged it down so that half the word was exposed to the lighter background, giving an asethetically pleasing effect. I left some of the words without a layer box because it created contrast and interest. Then I duplicated the original photograph and inverted it. Then I selected the woman's hands and deleted the inverted layer within the marquee box exposing the inverted background below the original background.

I am pleased with this final piece. I chose the words 'the only thing to be gained is freedom' because I feel it is a true message. I would not change this.

Cityscape - Independent graphics work

I made a cityscape from photos I took of Brighton. My design was a cityscape with a sort of colour wash over it and a bridge in there somewhere. I started out with three pictures and cropped my favourite bits out. Then I used the magic eraser to take the sky out because they weren’t all the same colour. I also changed the brightness so they looked like they were all taken on the same day with the same amount of sunshine. For the next step I chose two more photos and did the same things to them, then I shifted the layers around until it looked sort of natural. I like the yellow house but I don’t think it looks natural, however I am not going to change it because I think it adds colour. Then I cut bits out of the background of the photos that I like for the city background. I decided in the next one that I didn’t like the lumpy-looking bit so I cut it out and moved the skyscraper over a bit further. in this I wanted to start building the effect of a city, so I put a panorama in the background and filled the middle up with chimneys. I don’t mind so much that it doesn’t look too real as I am going to overlay something. I overlaid a picture of stained glass onto my city and made it transparent by changing the opacity, and then I set it to vivid light so it stuck to the buildings but not the sky. I really like this because I think it looks like the city is covered in graffiti. I changed the hues in the stained glass to make it look like the sky as well. I really like it as I think it is really beautiful. I also erased some of the background of the stained glass and changed the overall background to light grey instead of white, which showed the colours up more. This is the first thing I’ve done properly in Photoshop that I really like so I am very proud of it. Next week I want to learn how to make the joins between layers look less fake. I think this piece is very beautiful and I am very proud of it.

Independent Graphics Work - Unit 12

This is my favourite graphics piece I've ever done. I used some advanced techniques and created a beautiful final piece. To begin with I use a picture of a house in Brighton that I'd taken. I decided I was going to create a juxaposition between city and nature. I vanished the sky using the magic eraser tool, and zoomed in to delete the tiniest bits of white sky. Then I started putting flowers over the top in different opacity layers. For example the large lily in the middle is under pin light, but the others are mostly under vivid light. I also decreased the opacity to 75 on each flower. I decided I didn't want the flowers on the sky and wanted them cropped simply to the walls, where they showed up best. Firstly, I outlined the sky using the marquee tool; then, I used a clip mask (by holding the alt button and clicking between the layers) to exclude the flowers from the sky and keep them only on the walls. I thought the floor looked a little funny so I clipped that too, but I now think it may have been better to leave the road. The abrupt contrast between the flowery walls and the sudden change to the gravel road is odd. I washed the whole of the background blue for the sky, but it looked unrealistic, so I used the smudge tool to drag a few pieces of white across, to look like clouds. My favourite part of this piece is the vividly coloured lily, which really stands out. Overall I love the vibrancy and colour of the piece.

Primary Research - Saatchi Gallery

We went to the Saatchi gallery.

Chosen Artist Research - Chuck Close

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close was born July 5, 1940 in Monroe, Washington. He is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist. A spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralysed, but he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by the entire art world. Close suffers from a facial recognition disorder (prosopagnosia), meaning that when he sees someone's face, he will not recognise them again, even if he sees them every day. Somehow the features of the face do not fit together as they should but are percieved as different organisms. Close may recognise someone from their body language or unique scent, but he has trouble remembering them by facial recognition techniques, as is usual for the overwhelming percentage of the population. Close says "I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognizing faces." By painting portraits he is able to hold on to the face in his mind easier, and recognise the person.

Although his later paintings were created using a different method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Usually each square within the grid is filled with rough regions of color (usually painted rings) which give the cell an overall hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 2.73 m by 2.12 m canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of mars black acrylic. Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions. The Big Self Portrait is so finely done that even a full page reproduction in an art book is still indistinguishable from a regular photograph.

On December 7, 1988, Close felt a strange pain in his chest. At that moment he was due at a ceremony honoring local artists in New York City and was waiting to be called to the podium to present an award. Close delivered his speech and then went across the street to Beth Israel Medical Center where he suffered a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. The cause was diagnosed as a spinal artery collapse. Close called that day "The Event". He has relied on a wheelchair since. Astonishingly, however, Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist with tape, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant. Viewed from afar, these squares appear as a single, unified image which attempt photo-reality, albeit in pixelated form. Although the paralysis restricted his ability to paint as meticulously as before, Close had, in a sense, placed artificial restrictions upon his hyperrealist approach well before the injury. That is, he adopted materials and techniques that did not lend themselves well to achieving a photorealistic effect. Small bits of irregular paper or inked fingerprints were used as media to achieve astoundingly realistic and interesting results. Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control.

The Face Magazine

The Face was a British music, fashion and culture monthly magazine started in May 1980. Its best selling period was in the mid-1990s, when editor Richard Benson brought in a team that included art director Lee Swillingham. Benson ensured the magazine's written content reflected developments in music, art and fashion whilst Swillingham changed the visual direction of the magazine to showcase new photography. By the time of its May 2004 closure, monthly sales had declined and advertising revenues had consequently reduced. The publishers EMAP soon closed the title in order to concentrate resources on its more successful magazines. In an ironic twist, Jason Donovan led a consortium that made an abortive approach to EMAP to save the title prior to its closure. In 2011 The Face was added to the permanent collection of the Design Museum, London, and featured in the Postmodernism exhibition at the V&A.

This risque picture of Gisele Bündchen on The Face in the 90's. The police tape reflects conflict and the barely-covered woman is perhaps reflective of the conflict inside herself.

Madonna on the cover of The Face. This image is reflective of conflict because Madonna is wearing a scowl and clothing which is traditionally threatening. The colours are conflicting; they only use red, white, black and navy blue. It makes it look harsh.