Georgia Griffiths

I began my project with looking into Alexander Calder's work. He uses wire to create 3D portraits as well as integrating wire and everyday objects such as buttons and broken plates. I also admired his use of composition, especially in the way that his wire portraits have been photographed, creating looming shadows of leering faces. Above is one of my own creations inspired by his work. I then decided to move on to making sculptures of faces in a new medium: clay. I really enjoyed working with clay as it is slow-drying, so gave me lots of time to play around with it, moulding and reshaping as I went along. The model of an old, bald man came about from my imagination. I then decided to paint him blue and integrate wire to represent his wild imagination or crazy thoughts and intelligence. Integrating wire in both clay models proved to be very effective as it gave them more depth and perspective, despite being quite abstract. This is effectively transforming the ev...

I enjoyed this project very much. I didn't have a good idea about what graphic design really involved before this project. The project title was 'In With The Old' and we were asked by the tutor to pick a retro object and create a poster to advertise it. I really enjoyed using traditional methods of graphic design rather than PhotoShop and Illustrator which is what I would usually have associated graphic design with before this project. Experimenting with colour, text and composition I found was really key in graphic design. Directing the eye of the viewer to the key features of the design was important, and could be helped by using shapes and symbols to guide the eye around the symbol. Overuse of colour was seen as too complicated and instead using two or three colours was the maximum ideal, to keep a theme and not to create too much chaos for the viewer. Overall, the graphic design project really brought me out of my comfort zone and g...

The painting above is my final piece for the 3 day project. I chose oil painting because it is my favourite medium and I wanted to test out a new style of painting that I was shown by the tutor. Usually I would work with more of a subtle tone and method of applying the paint onto the paper. This time I worked with more colours that I could find from observing my face, layering up the textures to give quite a rough finish. The piece is unfinished but it was a really good practice and I am quite proud of it. My research really helped me to understand the concept of self-portraits, looking at the messages beneath the skin and how aspects such as colour and composition can be used to reflect this. I was especially inspired by Egon Schiele , as his self-portraits seem very honest and display a bold defiance against conventional norms of beauty. His work is quite moving and simultaneously unsettling to the viewer, which is why it draws one into his work. I was shown a new t...

Here are some developed photographs selected from my 20 negatives. Shooting, Developing & Enlarging The process of shooting, developing and enlarging these images took me a total of 2 1/2 days at college. The most exciting part of the process was probably when the enlarged photographs went into the developer chemicals and you caught your first glance of the enlarged image in the dark. At points waiting 2 minutes for the photograph to be ready took an agonisingly long time, but it was so worth it! However there were a few photographs that didn’t turn out how I would have liked them to once they were enlarged, and there was also one that had an obvious thumbprint on it which was a shame. Even so, I have learnt so much from this project, probably more than my year of AS Photography!   Overall I really, really enjoyed this project. I especially liked the freedom of being given a film camera with 20 shots and being let loose to adventure wherever we wanted for a good 3 ho...

I was not expecting to be sculpting a whale out of a bar of soap today, but here we are! In fact, I really enjoyed it! The texture was really nice to carve with a craft knife, however the bar of soap was quite flat so it restricted me in creating the roundness of the object I was observing. I feel as though I could have also created more depth around the features of the whale in order to make it more dramatic, but of course there was a limited amount of time to create the model. Above are the objects and materials I had to hand to create the model. I feel as though this process really helped my understanding of the toy I was observing, by recreating it in a 3D format. The whole project has already given me a lot more thought and consideration towards how toys are made and the simple, yet well thought-out structure. Here is the finished model within the time that we had to create it, although I still think it needs improvement I am please with the chosen object and...

Today I was introduced to 'ice drawing'; the art of drawing with coloured blocks of ice. We were asked to create various observations of the objects in front of us. This proved very interesting as the rough blocks of ice made a very scratchy sort of texture.  To make things even more interesting, I experimented with adding soft pastels over the ice drawing whilst still wet. This gave a wonderful pasty effect and is demonstrated in all three images shown. It also worked well for adding more colour depth and texture to the image using both wet and dry materials on the same surface. I think this method is really great for capturing that childhood-like essence of drawing, especially in this project as the main focus is on toys. However, I do believe that this technique could be interesting to use on portraits or structural sketching. It would be interesting to try this on coloured paper as well for a more dramatic effect.

Over the course of this project, I managed to come up with a lot of different designs that had the function of becoming flat pack, whilst also having the right design for self-assembly. I started my research from gathering research from online resources such as Pinterest. I put together a mood board and then began to imitate certain designs that I thought were quite interesting. I began sketching designs in order to gain some understanding of how they could be put together. I then used various materials to create a small-scale design. Card and cardboard was quite a good material for my designs as they are both lightweight but sturdy enough to hold their shape and provide function. Although I was quite skeptical about this project at first, it was a good exercise for me to think outside of 2D art and look at functional designs that could also be appealing to the eye. I had never designed furniture based products before so now I feel like I can look at flat-pack self-assembly based fur...