Botany and Data Collection

After my first tutorial on Tuesday with Alex, I have spent the last week looking into Botany as a way of representing nature scientifically.

Botanical Drawing of Oak branch - www.lizzieharper.co.uk

I looked at botany books from the library to study how botanists drew, including their use of composition, media, language and subject matter. I produced a few drawings in response, looking at plants that were beneficial to humans, such as he crocus which is thought to contain a cancer cure. I realised that most botanists drew tonal drawings in pencil and then painted over their drawing, and left some areas in black and white to emphasise the area in colour which I felt worked well. I felt that the Cone flower drawing below was the most successful, as loved experimenting with watercolour on top of pencil, and I also thought that leaving some areas without paint worked well. I used the paint to emphasise the bits of the flower that I thought were most important

Cone Flower drawing inspired by Botany illustrations

This drawing also lead me to think about the anatomy of flowers, due to the cross section at the bottom right. I have found an amazing book in the library called The anatomy of Flowers which has massively inspired me. I am looking forward to getting the chance to explore this next week.

Anna Gillespie Sculpture made of Acorns

This week I was also inspired by Anna Gilespie after seeing one of her sculptures at Artzu. She uses materials that nature discards which seem meaningless. I decided to draw some of her subject matter, as well as taking this as an opportunity to collect my own ' scientific data' on my walk into University. I passed 3 beech trees and collected seeds from each, drawing their different colours and mapping them as I went. Although this seemed like a small task at the time I think the idea of representing data naturally has a lot of potential and I intend to develop this further as a result.

Sketchbook page about collecting Beech Seeds.

As well as drawing beech seeds, I decided to collect other materials discarded by nature and draw them in a botanical way, linking both elements to my work this week. I used different media and paper to experiment, and I thought that the different sycamore seeds on the black (below) worked particularly well, as it's striking and the colours stand out. The drawings below also represent how nature changes over time, as the Hosta leaf has started to decompose and the top sycamore was dried out, linking to the idea of representing data mentioned in my learning agreement.

Sketchbook page: Decomposing Hosta leaf (left) and Sycamore seed collection drawing

This idea of using time as a way of collecting data could be developed next week, along with looking further into the anatomy of flowers.

Responding to instructions

After doing work last week based on giving people instructions to respond to, I decided to respond to the work this week and see which aspects of the work I enjoyed most. One example is shown below. I also did some drawings of other aspects of the experiments that I liked.

Responded to above drawing with handmade string stamp and black acrylic paint. I love the textural and tonal qualities of the result.

Instructions

As development on my research about minimal artists and visiting the Do It exhibition, this week I decided to do a few tests using the idea behind a lot of Sol LeWitt's work: instructions.
For the first experiment I used 7 people including myself, and gave them the following instructions (an adaptation of Sol LeWitts instructions for drawing #118):

On a paper surface, 

Any size, shape or colour paper surface,

Using a hard pencil, 

place 20 points at random,

But these points must be evenly distributed over the surface.

All of the points should be connected by straight lines.

I hadn't seen the result of the drawing by the gallery before I did my experiment, but it is shown below.

 The results were really interesting, as only one looked like the result above, which is shown below..

Here are a few of the other results, which had very different qualities, some were joined like a dot to dot, and some lines connected just 2 dots.

After doing this experiment, I wanted to do another one but creating my own instructions to control the results a little bit more. They are shown below.

On a blank piece of paper, draw a square, 10cm by 10cm.
Draw a grid inside this of 25 squares, each 2cm by 2cm.
Fill each square with various lines, of any kind.

Here are some of my favourite results, because of tone and line quality.

As development from this, I need to decide what I am going to take from my findings, which might mean that I do more experiments or use the results I have to make more work and drawings.

Developing my ideas and visual research.

My work this week has been based on completing the targets that I set myself at the end of last weeks tutorial. Below are the targets, as well as how successful my response to them was.

Combine some digital/photographic ideas with my mark making.

This week, I wanted to use the techniques that I had used on my summer photos on scans on my own drawings and mark making. I tried this on one of my line drawings but I don't think it was as effective as my first attempt with my seal photo. 

(photo to come)

I didn't have time to do any more samples of a similar nature this week, but as my work develops I will continue to try out this method and see how I can manipulate the drawings I do.

Mixing ideas together 

I really enjoyed playing around with this target this week, and I would definitely like to merge more of my ideas together in the same way next week. Below are drawings representing this, where I combined the paintings of my fingers playing the piano, and my drawings based on the rhythm of the music.

I felt as though the example on the right was a more successful attempt because it looks less busy. The drawing on the left was done by drawing first and then playing with my fingers on top, but the right sample was done the opposite way around, so I drew around the finger prints, which I think looks simpler. A close up is shown below.

Play with the idea of repetition.
Use sentences and words to do with Phases to create art.

I felt that playing with repetition was very important this week because the track is made up of a 12 note sequence that is repeated over and over, so it is a big part of the piece which I haven't yet got across in my work. The piece I did to represent this was also based on a descriptive sentence, describing the piece of music: 'Creating rhythmic pulses that are surprising and uncharacteristic'. I tried to represent this by doing a drawing in 1 minute. I then repeated this, each time getting quicker and quicker (as the notes in the track are being played faster and faster). Eventually the last drawing was done in 3 seconds.

I then put these into photoshop to see if I could layer them up, again being inspired by the layering in the piece. I wasn't too happy with the results of my experiments because I feel that I dont have much experience on photoshop. However I feel like my most sucesful samples are shown below, which were where I tried to layer the drawings on top of each other.

I think my experiments became unsuccessful when I started to make them into patterns that could be used for digital prints. I think it was worthwhile doing them, as I always learn every time I go on photoshop, but I feel like with more experience, they could be stronger. 

After completing the task, it made me realise that I wanted to play with repetition, and use sentences to inspire my work more often: especially because repetition is such an important part in the piece of music.

Look into transferring the track on to an App that can turn the sound into waves

I bought an App called Audacity this week, and I loved looking into the results that it produced. When zooming into the details, it was interesting to see the different tones and the linear qualities of the sound waves. 

After examining the results I tried to represent them using gouache.

I also tried to take a more stylised approach, using the triangles as well as the line drawing on the right which I thought was really effective.

Investigate minimal artists

This was the last target this week, and the results are shown in the post above.

Representing music visually.

This week I feel as though I have really pushed myself and explored lots of different ways to represent Piano Phase visually.

As the different layers of music in the piece are being manipulated, I decided to start off this week by replicating this quality with some of my summer photos. For example, slowly twisting the layers or gradually making the photo bigger (like the piece gets faster). I love the results of these, especially the twisting that I created with the photo of Seals.

After listening to the music so many times, I realised that my ears were getting tired, and lazy: they couldn't be bothered to pay attention to all the notes for 18 minutes solid. My ears naturally picked out certain notes, sequences and beats so I tried to replicate what I could hear by listening to the piece and mark making whatever my ears heard. I like the result especially the light and shade created by different  sounds, and the spontaneous mark making.

I decided to take my research in another direction by learning how to play the 12 note sequence of notes on the piano. It is this sequence that is repeated over and over so I decided to do the same. I played the sequence with my fingers dipped in black paint on different pieces of tracing paper and turned them around and layered them up. I also represented the shapes in my results by painting different shades of grey in gouache.

I was really interested by the results, as I have never used a technique like this before. I decided to pick a colour palette, inspired by my summer work, to use for this sample, in an attempt to take my findings one step further. I represented the pattern created by my fingers, and then listened to the music and made marks on top of the pattern created. I really like the result, and I think I like it because of the processes that I used to get to it. I liked mixing different ideas that I had gathered throughout my research and adding in some colour as well.

I took all of the work that I had done so far to my first group tutorial and it was a really productive session that I gained lots of ideas from. Most of the feedback was more ideas about how to develop my work further. Below are some of the points mentioned, which I intend to investigate further during this coming week:

• Combine some digital/photographic ideas with my mark making. One example that came to mind was scanning in some of my work and manipulating it in the same way that I did with my photos.
• Mixing ideas together (even if they may not work... just try it out). For example, combining the linear qualities of my pen drawings with the spontaneous paintings that I did last week.
• Play with the idea of repetition more. I could draw the same thing more than once in different conditions, and possibly layer these on top of each other?
• Use sentences and words to do with Phases to create art, to give myself some more inspiration. I can then mix these with the above tasks.
• Look into transferring the track on to an App that can turn the sound into waves that might give me some interesting visual results
• Investigate minimalist artists

Hopefully these targets will help me to develop my work and give me some more food for thought for the rest of my project. 

This weeks findings.

After receiving my brief this week I have started to experiment with some different ideas that I have had, inspired by 'Piano Phase'. Below are some of the results.

I started off by simply looking at the sheet music. As Phases is made up of different layers that become distorted I tried to replicate this effect by tracing different elements in the sheet music and rearranging them in a different way, to create a new, distorted image.

I then used Peggy Gyulai as my inspiration, by listening to Piano Phase, and picking up different medias and letting the music tell my hands what to do.

I used both hands for these experiments, and even used my fingers in paint to add more character. I like the layering effect, and I feel that the chaotic feel of the music comes across well in some of the samples.

I decided to take this idea further, by creating more of these samples on a bigger scale. I started to struggle to decide which colours to use so I used the colour scheme from my seal photos from summer as well as the music to inspire these spontaneous drawings.

I thought the 3D effect of the gouache worked really well and I enjoyed letting myself loose, and becoming inspired by the music without any idea about what I am going to paint or draw. The results always vary and surprise me. 

Experimenting with Milk

After seeing someone use this method on Pinterest I was excited to try it out. I painted the following images in milk, let it dry and then ironed it to reveal this brownish image. I liked how uneven the colour was, as it made the work look aged, and the depth of colour was random and unplanned on my part. I also enjoyed painting blind, as I couldn't see what I was painting which made my work look a bit looser.

I used imagery from my holiday, using the beach huts, stones, and shells as my inspiration for my experimentation.

Alyn Carlson

Alyn Carlson is an artist and designer, who uses a lot of different medias when making art. Quite a large proportion of her work consists of bold, colourful oil paintings, but what inspires me most is her watercolour and sketchbook work.

I love the way that she injects colour, texture and meaning into these loose watercolours. As stated on her blog, she is “Always in search of the line, font, pattern, seed, flavor, musical note to be placed at the right time in the right place.”

These are some examples of her drawings, which she created in her Moleskin Sketchbook using fineliner. She states that she does this as a daily practice and that her drawings are never planned; she puts pen to paper and lets her pen do the work. She is therefore surprised daily by the results. 

These are the results when she started to add watercolour to her daily doodles. She uses minimal colours, which adds to the effect of her drawings. I admire how loose and free her drawings are, and I am going to experiment with these aspects in my work ,as quite often I create neat pieces without this much character and fluidity. Another reason why I love her work so much is that I can see a clear link to surface design, which is an area of textiles that I am passionate about.

After being inspired by Alyn’s work, I decided to do a page in my sketchbook based on her style. I really enjoyed doodling on my page with a pen; I hadn’t realised that I haven’t doodled on a big scale before which I really enjoyed. However when adding the colour I didn’t like my work so much. I think I didn’t narrow my palette enough and I also think I applied too much colour, so I would like to have another go and see if I could improve my last attempt.