Amsterdam

After a very long time of not posting anything as I was very busy writing an essay about Tradition and Originality as well as writing my personal statement which I think was even more difficult..and obviously applying for universities and preparing my portfolio I have finally decided that its time to catch up and start running this blog properly.

I think writing about our recent overseas trip to Amsterdam is a perfect way to start! The trip unfortunately was only 5 days long but it was enough to visit quite a few truly amazing museums and Galleries. It is really difficult for me to decide which place was my favourite but for now I’ll just say that I absolutely loved Vincent Van Gogh Museum. Firstly becasue I’m really interested in Japanese culture and seeing Japanese art influencing western Art and someone like Vincent Van Gogh is very fascinating. Secondly, I actually wrote about some of his works that were inspired by Japanese woodblock prints in my personal study which I was writing while I was at Sixth Form, and now I had an opportunity to see them in real life which was just amazing. 

 The picture on the left is an original print by Hiroshige and the one on the right is Flowering Plumtree (after Hiroshige) (1887) by Vincent Van Gogh. In his copy he changed the colour a little bit and added borders filled with calligraphic characters he borrowed from other prints. Later on I will write some more posts about all the different places we visited and about our exciting ‘Bike seat cover’ project but for now some photographs of Amsterdam.

Painting

Some time ago I posted about the two day painting project that I was doing at college and promised to post the picture of the blue and yellow paiting that I was working on at the moment, once it’s finished. I finally finished it and so, here it is!

I also took one a black and white picture of the painting to compare it with the  photocopy I was working from. I wanted to see if my choice of where to use yellow and where blue was rigth or not and I think I did a pretty good job!

Lastly..Massive Thank you to my cat for stealing all my brushes so I can take a stretch break every 4 minutes.

Painting

Recently at college I started another mini project this time mainly focused on painting. I was asked to create 4 A5 collages and make photocopies of them. Out of the photocopies I made I had to choose two and using only 5 colours (Black, dark grey, mid grey, light grey and white) I had to paint these on A4 piece of paper each. When two paintings were finished I was then asked to choose one of the paintings, photocopy it and then paint the photocopy on another piece of A4 paper.

At this stage we were finally allowed to introduce some colours.Exciting!! However we could only use blue and yellow..and only if we wanted to. So I scanned the last painting I created and started to paint it on A2 piece of paper which was much bigger than paper I used before.

The aim of this project was to learn different techniques of painting and mark making. We also learned about how different people interpret the same thing differently according to their own personality, experiences and likes.

So here are some photographs to illustrate each stage I went thorough in this project:

Work in progress

I will soon post the picture of the finished blue and yellow painting!