I have come to the end of my project called 'fragments of ilkeston' in relation to structure. Overall, it has been an interesting journey I was able to work with different materials like wood, Lino prints, ceramics, oil paint and fabric. Turning parts of Ilkeston into pieces of art has allowed me to appreciate the architecture and other historical elements of the city. At the beginning of my project I started off by turning photographs of buildings into pyrographic images laser burnt on to wood. Initially, this turned out successful, it resulted in images that looked like they were old and from the past. Which was the look I was going for.
some of the challenges that I did embark on this task, was trying to get all of the images to have the same intensity of burn. As you can see one of the images looks more faded out even though all 3 were done at the same time. With that being said, I guess it was something that was inevitable to prevent, unless I had kept a note of the level of intensity as this was being done on the computer. Later down the line, I ended up making 6 more and initially I wanted to make them all the same size. however, this didn't end up happening because not all the photos were the same size. The only thing I could have done to avoid this happening is to suppress all the images to same size .
my second piece of art was a painting of St Mary's church bricks, this painting went well I wanted to explore the structure of bricks and its shapes. I did this painting on a large canvas using oil paint as a medium.
I was impressed with how the result turned out, my teacher also suggested to do another brick painting but with some added textures using a different medium. I took on the advice and decided to do another brick painting but of the dale abbey bricks. The first time I attempted to do this it went wrong because it didn't look like a brick wall. I drew the lines in the wrong places and didn't have the pattern of bricks. So I decided to keep going with the piece in order to use to experiment with textures. I used plaster wall filler on my canvas to achieve this rough texture. In the end I ended up doing another brick painting which went successful. The only challenge of doing this painting was waiting for each layer of plaster to dry before I applied paint to it, I also used a fan to speed up the process. I think one thing I would have done better was to have done this on a larger canvas as I think it would have aligned better with the first painting that I did. However, at the time I didn't have a big canvas with me and was also short on time.
Another highlight of my project was making Lino prints of the water fountain sculpture in Ilkeston. I made 6 of them in total which turned out good, the only thing I would have changed about this piece is to use a smaller Lino cutting tool as this would have the lines sharper.
Overall, these were some of my favourite pieces to make during the project. Moving forward, one of the things that I believe I did better in this project than the last one was making more art and using different mediums. I exceptionally enjoyed working with wood and doing more Lino printing as this allowed me to explore different ways of making art. In the future. I will definitely be working with Lino prints more in the future so that I can also improve on my technique. Another I did better in this project, was manage my time better every time made a piece of art I would write up the process on my blog instead of leaving it all last minute. This really helped instead of leaving it all last minute. In this project, I don't think my concepts and meanings were as strong as the last project. I feel like I struggled to come up with a concept that was as meaningful as my last project. So initially when I heard that we were doing structure, I thought that it would be good to focus on the architecture and physical structures of Ilkeston.
When I decided that I was going to focus on that, I made my theme about the fragments of ilkeston. I took parts of ilkeston that I found historically interesting and aesthetic pleasing and made them into art works. in a sense I wanted the viewer to just get a taste of the town of Ilkeston. I believe going forward I will develop my concepts further in future projects but also being aware that every concept will be different depending on the project. To conclude, I did enjoy the process of making art works during this project and researching the history behind ilkeston. I'm looking forward to having my work exhibited in the Erewash museum.
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