Drama!

G'day fellow bloggers......

My art teachers is also my theatrical arts teacher and she tries to incorporate our art and drama sessions so that it is easier on our very primitive minds. This term our drama assignment was to make a shot sketch for a film depicting a traditional carnival character. I chose the Midnight Robber; a classic carnival character. Basically he is an ancient evil entity who finds pleasure in terrorising his weak helpless victims with elaborate, often verbose monologues depicting there inevitable and inhumane death. His black attire, complete with a human skull tattooed onto his cape is designed to strike fear into his prey and his signature high pitched whistle marks both his entrance and exit off the stage.

I have written and performed a few midnight robber speeches in the past and can I truly appreciate his misanthropic disposition.

My comic sketch featured a young school bully by the name of Bob, whose close encounter with our favourite fiendish foe of the night, causes him to come to a realisation of his own bad ways and stop his terrorism of the innocent school children:-

It was a really simple sketch with not much attention paid to detail, but the lack of detail gives it a nice 'cartoonish' look. I enjoyed putting this story together and I hope you have just as much fun reading it!

Until then fellow bloggers.......

Leather craft!

G'day fellow Bloggers....

Nb - This post is on work that was covered from January 2012 in my Term 2 of Form 3......

Alright, so now we move into a very exciting area, i.e. leather craft. As you may have guessed leather craft involves crafting various items out of leather. Now, I best say before-hand that this topic rightfully requires genuine leather for one to call it LEATHER craft. However I was not fortunate enough to get my hands on any leather, and as such Mrs. Davis allowed me and those who were equally unfortunate, to replace the leather, with leatherette (artificial leather).

What do you ask that I crafted out of leather? there were actually a variety of options to chose, from simple purses, to leather handbags and everything in between. However i finally decided to make a wallet for my piece. So too did many other students, if not all. Mrs. Davis, having understood that it was a unanimous decision, she decides that she would instruct us all on exactly how to make the wallet:-

To get started, I'll explain the various techniques associated with leather craft, or leatherette craft for that matter:-

1. Punching - this techniques involves using a simple leather punch, to bore holes through sheets of leather for either lacing or decoration.
2. Lacing - using laces to bind individual parts of an item
3. Carving - using a template and swivel knife to crate embossed patterns in the leather
4. Stamping - involves the use of shaped stamps to create an imprint onto a leather surface, often by striking the stamps with a mallet.
5. Appliqué - Sticking or stitching smaller ornaments onto the already made item.

The first step in making the wallet, is to make a template out of normal A4 paper. The out-line of the template should look something like the below picture:-

Just fold on the dotted lines.

You may notice that the corners and edges of the template are spliced. This technique is known as mitering. Mitering is simply cutting the corners of a medium at a 45 degree angle. In this case we have mitered the edges of the paper so that when they fold, they don't lap over each other.


If you want to add additional pockets to the inside of the wallet you will have to cut out more templates like the pictures shown below, and stitch them onto the wallet before you stitch up the sides.

Again, just fold on the dotted lines.

Now, use your templates to cut out the individual pieces of your wallet from the sheet of leatherette.

Before you begin to sew, you may want to attach a piece of velvet to the raw inside of the wallet to cover it up. It makes it look more professional.

Time to sew up the wallet. Sewing is rather tedious, and, if your are doing this for the first time (like i did) you are bound to stick your fingers with the needles a what lot (and potentially get blood poisoning in the process). I advise you to practise a bit before you attempt sewing the wallet.

There are many differed types of stitches and I also advise that you try them all. here are a few commonly used stitches:-

Choose which stitch you want to use and sew the wallet together. First sew the inner pockets (if you have any), then sew the sides up after folding them inwards where the dotted lines would be.

Nb- You can also punch holes with a leather puncher (or even a paper puncher) and lace the wallet together! This is a faster process, but must be done neatly if you want it to come out good.

And that is pretty much it! I did the exact same thing as stated above and it came out rather well:-

Despite the holes that these hours of stitching put into my fingers,  it was really fun to do something like this for the first time, (and hopefully the last).

Leather craft isn't my speciality, but it's never bad to try new things once in a while!

Until next time fellow bloggers..........

End of Term Exam Form 3 T1.........

G'day fellow Bloggers........

We have to come to a very important juncture in my Form 3 Art experience, i.e. the End of Term 1 art exam!
I feel as though exams were created to make our lives even more miserable, there is the need to study constantly if you want to do good, then if you do bad, you have to face the abusive remarks of parents (not that i have any experience in that field) and around this time of year you just feel like your brain will explode, spewing out all the information that you crammed the night before all over the place. I SWEAR, that if i was in power, I'd make it so that there would NEVER have to be a word like "test," or "exam," or "report card." I'd KILL i ever saw another paper with that algebraic gibberish on it. Sometimes.....sometimes..... i just feel like putting a gun to my head....and..and just end it all!!!!

Sigh...but then again, that's just my opinion. Don't mind that at all. Anyway, on a lighter note; the Art exam required that we incorporate the paper sculpture techniques that we learnt over the years, in making a package for a jewelry item (not unlike the ones that I showed in my previous post). We had a very generous time limit of 3 hours and within minutes, when i looked about the class, I saw little boxes and bags taking shape.

My package came out really well and professional, especially with the little call card that i put on the inner cover:-

I scored full marks on my End of Term for this piece and I was really proud of myself having done something so professionally.

And with that I end the coverage of Term 1 of Form 3, but don't worry we have even more new and exciting things to re live in the coverage of Term 2!

Until then............Fellow bloggers...

Jewelry (or is it Jewellery?!?)

G'day fellow Bloggers...........

Important!; To whom it may concern:- This work on jewelry was done from around the 8th September 2011 to around the end of the term. The date of the post is not the actual date of Start/Completion.

You know, I've always wondered the correct spelling of the word Jewellery (or even jewelry). We all know what it is but there are always controversies over the spelling, i.e. the Americans spell it Jewellery but the British spell it Jewelry, both of which seem to be accepted by our modern society. This is starting to sound like a Language class, but surly by now you know where I'm going with this. Yes this post is on the art of Jewelry (I'll be using the British spelling of the word here) Making!

So...I'll give you a heads up here.....I have never done this before, so whatever you see here isn't going to be the $1,000,000.00 ring that you saw at Jared's. Nope, I'm not that good. But I will tell you that I did a pretty good job at making some fine jewelry.

Before I get into the practical and show you all of the pictures, I wanted to cover the basic theory aspects of it like the ground rules and guidelines and materials for this jewelry making.

General Materials:-

1. Roll of jewelry wire - you should chose your jewelry wire carefully as they come in many different gauges. The lower the magnitude of the gauge, the thicker and stiffer the jewelry wire. The jewelry wire that I used was a
2. Tools to cut and manipulate the wire - you will need some different types of pliers to achieve certain types of patterns when working with jewelry.
3. Hot Glue - a glue gun may come in handy is you want to attach other miscellaneous objects to your jewelry.
4. Lastly, you can use just about anything to add creativity to your jewelry such as:-

• Broken Glass (edges must be smooth)
• Pebbles
• Coral
• Coconut shells
• Bamboo (dried)
• Drift wood (very common and can produce very beautiful furniture)

• Plastic from broken items
• Aluminium and copper sheets
• Papier Mache
• Toilet Paper rolls
• Donkey eye (if you live in Trinidad and Tobago, then I don't know why you wouldn't know about donkey eye; It is:- 

• "A seed resembling a donkey's eye that is often found on Trinidad's east coast beaches (eg - Manzanilla). The seed gets so hot when rubbed vigorously that it can almost burn skin." -  http://www.amazing-trinidad-vacations.com

 As always there are some basic predefined steps in doing art:-

1. First you must crate a theme, like a slogan or phrase
2. Then select suitable materials that would complement your theme
3. Then select a client or clients that would suit your theme
4. Lastly examine your various jewelry and packaging and choose a design that you like

Here's a few more tips and guidelines:-

The finished product should not have loose ends of thread, wire or glue hanging. Elements can be attacked using metal epoxy, twine, soldering, jump rings, brackets, knots, etc

Now you might be wondering, "What exactly is a jump ring?"

A jump ring is simply a metal ring that is used to make chains, jewelry and chain mail. They are made by wounding wire round a cylindrical object to create coils which are broken off one by one to make individual rings, that are in turn, interwoven to create the jewelry.

TECHNIQUES THAT CAN BE APPLIED

1. Soldering
2. Boring Holes
3. Gluing
4. Wrapping

 After arming us with this basic knowledge of jewelry making, Mrs. Davis gave us our challenge:-

"Design 3 (three) item of jewelry as well as the packaging of the product (using paper sculpture techniques) and an advertisement promoting these three products"

So here are some pictures of the end product of my hard work:-

And here's some of the packaging that went along with them:-

 And last but not least...an advertisement that i put together for the Jewelry:-

And that's it. It took a while to get everything done, but it was all worthwhile in the end.

That is all for this post, but we are not through with the coverage of Term 1 yet. We still have one more thing to cover i.e. the End of Term Art Exam which will be in the next post of my blog.

Until next time fellow Bloggers.............

Back in Business!

G'day..........fellow Bloggers!

Important!; to whom it may concern:- This work on jewelry was done from around September 2011 to around the end of the term. The date of the post is not the actual date of Start/Completion.

Alright! So I'm back and I've got to make up for lost time. I'd like to start from the first Term for Form 3 since that was were i left off. The very first topic that was done was the replica painting of that of a famous local artist. Mrs. Davis told us to chose one of Jean Micheal's Cazabond's Paintings and do a close as possible replica of it. At first I didn't even know who Mr . Casabond was, but after some research i became quit acquainted with his amazing work:-
He did all sorts of paintings:

From Natural landscapes---

....to buildings...

..and even people...

But the painting that i decided to copy was this painting of a seascape:-

Unfortunately I don't have pictures of the step by step process by which i did it but since i have portrayed a few paintings in the past....it shouldn't be too difficult for you fellow bloggers to understand the process:-

Materials;

1. watercolor paper
2. acrylic paint
3. palette
4. varying sizes and types of brushes
5. water
6. rags and cloths to dry the brushes

Process;

1. First, i drew grids on both the blank watercolor paper and the printed picture of the Cazabond painting.
2. Then i matched up the individual squared from the picture with the ones on the watercolor paper.
3. I made a simple outline sketch of the painting.
4. Then it was time to paint

Mixing and matching colors can be very tedious but i got the hang of it over time. Its impervious that you use lots of water when dealing with acrylic paints, since the tend to dry out quickly on paper. Watercolor paper is the ideal media for painting with acrylic paints. It's insane the amount of water theses things can absorb without tearing!

So after a few days, i wounded up with this:-

I think it came out pretty great, considering that I'm not a pro. But this is still a major working progress and more fine detail will be added to it eventually.

So I guess that is all for this painting and i hope that you enjoyed reading this, just as much that i enjoyed painting it.

On the next post I'll be covering the jewellery making or in technical talk; "Sculpture and Ceramics".



Until then fellow Bloggers........

A lot of catching up to do....

G'day fellow Bloggers......

It's been a long while since I've blogged, about a year now. Since then many things have changed, I'm in form 3 now going up for the NCSE exams in about a month's time, I've done some brand new art work for my great art teachers Mrs Davis and guess what...I'll actually be doing Art for the CSEC exams.

I never thought that I would ever be saying that...because I am really a science nerd but my Art teacher saw my potential and it would really be a shame if it would all be lost. So for the next year and a half, I'll be doing Art at an Ordinary Level (O-level.).

Just in case your wondering, I chose Painting (and mix media) and Drawing as my primary Art categories to work on, hence forth, most of the work I'll be posting will be painting and drawing pieces.

All right so i know that I've got a lot of catching up to do, but I've decided not to do all of it on one HUGE post. I'll be doing separated posts examining each type of Art piece, one by one. In my next post, I'll be covering a replica painting that I did around September of 2011.

Until then, fellow bloggers..........

Let's blog about Blogging.................

G'day................fellow bloggers,
It's been about a year since I've been doing this blogging thing and I must say that it has been a really liberating experience. You see usually, we as people are confined to the limits of paper and pen, however an individual with such a mind set will be left behind in an advancing world. What I like about Miss is that she encourages us to use the technological advancements surrounding us, and to apply it into our work. It is relaxing to blog because it takes your mind off other things and it is a lot less stressful than writing a simple journal on paper.

The experience is more fun whenever you go digital. For instance, let's say that I have a picture that I want to show, just take a snapshot, write up a post, then publish it. It's as simple as that, and now the whole world can see my blog!!!

Art cannot be defined by limitations and those limitations have been set by an individuals attitude on his work. But the way in which the fun of blogging have been incorporated into work, those limitation have just been broken.

For me, my blog means sharing with the world, sharing ideas and creations of my own, and even assisting others with their work. Blogging is the most effective and simplest way to do this. 

All in all it was really a great experience to do different things. Hopefully Miss will continue to encourage the blogging experience in Form 3. My Art teacher is really great and she tells you it as it is, no matter how cold it may be and that is what I like about her, always innovative and opionative.

There are many ways in which a blog can impact on you, and I do hope that I have made my Impact too.


That's all for now, fellow bloggers......................