Week 3

Well, in the past week I've been continuing with the two projects we've been set. One on 'Ideas Meanings and Materials', for which I'm doing a 'postcard wall' of a variety of textures and such that one may encounter when travelling (I've now done 30 cards and have ideas for another 30, but probably won't do them all); and the other project is 'High Definition' which we were asked to look at a small component of a large object and develop that. I've decided to do tiles, and have used screen printing to create a (very messy) stylised image of roof tiles (fig 1 - work in progress), and have also created a small collage of tiles created by painting the same colour paint with different textures (rolled, brushed, stippled etc) - fig 2.


I'm not too sure where I'm going to take either of these two, but that's part of the idea of the project.

Today's drawing class saw us going down to the harbour to get some ideas to take back and work on in the sudio. I deliberately didn't do a drawing of Folkestone Harbour itself, just of selected components of the harbour. This charcoal drawing took all day, and I am rather pleased with it.


The perspective is not brilliant - (eg for teh harbour wall on the right), and the light comes at different sections from different sides, but I did get teh framing reasonably well I think, and I also like the textures that I did. Not sure about the net hanging on the post though...

OK, so now to put on some of the stuff I've been doing since starting the course. The course comprises of three practical sessions a week, and one theory. One of the sessions is developing drawing techniques, and below are some of the sketches that I've done during the classes - these ones are using charcoal - something I've not done before (and I didnt' fix them to start with so some have smudged a lot). The first two were 'drawing music' where we were played some music and had to draw it. This produced some wildly different responses from us students - some being a lot more comfortable with abstract than others - I was towards the not very comfortable end of the scale.

The first one is 'of' Latin Jazz, the second is Bach.




Hmm. Room for improvement there.

One of the other practical sessions was on materails and textures, and we were told to work on a subject that interested us, and think about the materials and methodology to present it - masically to do something we weren't used to doing. After much thought and a few false starts, I decided to use 'travel' as the subject, and to present it in the form of a postcard wall. With each 'postcard' literally having a different texture or representing a different aspect - ie not real postcards at all. We have five weeks to do this project and so far (two weeks in) I've done about 25 postcards. These include ones made up of beer labels, currency notes, camera film, model grass and so on....

Existing stuff

OK, I didn't get round to doing this last week, but finally here goes. Some of the stuff that I have been working before I started this course....


This is my latest version of 'Overland' a 'tube-map' style map of the overland journeys I've done. This version includes the trip I took in the summer from Nairobi to Johannesburg, which invoved rejigging the whole layout. Despite a lot of tweeking, I'm still not happy with the layout - there's too much empty space in the middle, and it's too cluttered. So this is work in progress. I did this partly to practice using Adobe Illustrator. Once I'm happy with the result, I may get it printed to about A2 size and mount it.

I find maps really interesting subjects for artwork; I think a lot of their beauty is that they are functional and that they impart knowledge. Of course my Overland map isn't really either, but it looks as it it should be. However, it is a very personal piece of work - I love travelling on overland journeys, am a logically minded person, and am interested in transport; all of which show in this work.

One of the other tings I have been working on - although with very limited success so far, is utilising data from topographical maps (ie ones that are to scale, instead of topological diagrams such as the tube maps), and playing around to see what interesting affects can be achieved.

This is very much work in progress, it is a map of the road network of East Anglia, with the roads represented in red - major roads with thicker lines than minor roads. The idea is that it looks almost like blood vessels, with the artieries (of traffic or blood) serving the towns and cities (Norwich is the main focal point here). Different parts of the country have different patterns - Norfolk is flat so the roads are generally straight - although there are gaps around the broads to the east of Norwich. Hillier parts of the country show roads following valleys, and have a distinct pattern. Anyway, this is all stuff that I need to be playing around with more to see what comes out of it. I've been using data from Ordnance Survey and putting it into an open source Geographic Information System (GIS) application called QGIS.

Where I am now...

I have just started studying for a BA in Visual Arts and Design at the University Centre Folkestone campus of Canterbury Christ Church University. This blog will show the development of the various projects undertaken during this time - whether part of the course or not.

However, first I will show some of the stuff I've produced so far. Mostly this is photographic, but there have been a couple of bits of design work as well.

Blog the first

OK, so this is my first bog about art. I've already done part of a travel blog (www.joesafricanjourney.blogspot.com), and have a website (that desperately needs updating - www.joethephoto.co.uk). This one will be about the projects I'm working on and my first foray into the world of art beyond a bit of photography and playing around with Illustrator.