What is a Book?

Paula Steere.
http://www.paulabooks.co.uk/4436.html

I started to look for some artists who worked with books, handmade ones in particular, and came across this website. It appears her favourite thing to do is make tiny photo albums from scratch. Alomst like scrap booking, she appears to be using these books as a way of documenting her own experiences in life.

I love this kinda stuff anyway.

Oh, and she was part of an exhibition in Leeds last year... maybe she'll come back..

Typo-gateaux (erm, winner? oh yes.)

Haha.
This is going to be the smuggest entry yet so brace yourselves. Even after a whole day of hungover bookbinding, I still went home to slave away in the kitchen. Me, Will and Ollie decided to make a..wait for it..

a 'Mince Pi'

Not my idea I will admit, but I damn well pulled it off. Haha told you it was going to be smug.

Yes, if it wasn't for my glorious pastry making skills, I doubt we'd be the proud winners of a tin of alphabetty spaghetti. Anyway, we nearly died from exhaustion making this pie, I think it's only right you should all see what we went through... Yes, I admit, it was nearly a team effort. Hehe.

Cutting mat and scalpel for precision Pi cutting.

Will doin his bit... well done Will...

Nice clean hands there Ollie..

Ta daaa!
x

Book Binding Workshop. (Part of 'What is a book?')

What an experience. Despite a killer hangover (the horrible shaky kind) I still managed to produce something I was proud of! I've always had a big interest in book binding, and I've tried my hand at it a few times so I already knew the basics, but I've never made something so professional looking in my whole life.

Well I think you get the idea now, and even though everyone made a book just as well as I did, possibly even better, I'm still really proud of it. Easily the best thing I've learnt since I got here!

Ahem, Pictures!

Bit of fancy photography there, using my new found photography skills.
Magic glowy pages.. Oooo

shexy, yah?
And, it colour co-ordinates with my room. Thats proper design for ya.

Oh, and I think my first response to that question 'What is a book?' has to be...

'hand made'

Free Breakfast Friday

I'll start from the top shall I?

The photos your about to witness are the results of our latest brief, a research project for which we were split into groups. My group was made up of myself, Will, Kate Fenton and Dan (but he was ill for most of it!)

We finally decided our theme was to be based on 'lateness', or more specifically, why there's so much of it in our class. This theme stemmed from Will's previous research on maps, which lead to 'routes to college', which lead to 'why people can't make it in on time'.

Anyway, a mammoth research gathering session and a lot of surveys later, we found the best way to lure people into college earlier would be to put on a free breakfast - tea/coffee and toast being the cheapest option hehe.

So Friday morning came round, and I dragged myself into college before everyone else to set up, and of course, take photos of our work ("in the public domain" as the brief states).

And first through the door...

... well done David :)

What a winner..

Thumbs up for tea!

All in all, I thought it went well! worth getting up earlier anyway. However, there wasn't a register taken that day! So we were left guessing as to whether our free breakfast actually helped encourage some of the late comers to be a bit more punctual. But I'm guessing it didn't hah.

Though the free breakfast was the main event, the results of it left us with another question...

"Would you pay £1 a week a for a free breakfast everyday?"

It's funny how we never really reached the end of this research brief, each new inquiry brought with it new questions and directions. I think I'm finally beginning to learn how to use research in a way that will aid my work, instead of doing the work and then bullshitting the research to make myself look good haha.

Oh the good old A level days..

Yeah, I'm please with what we learnt and I can honestly say I had fun with this one.

An adventure in Manchester...

Well, not so much an adventure... more of a long, tiring day out. Well worth it though.
The exhibition featured work by the artist Emory Douglas, whos work reflects the hardships and achievements of the Black Panther Party. I was really ill on the day, so I probably didnt get as much from the trip as I would have liked but heres a selection of photos that are worth a look anyway!

Visual...

...Synecdoches

The main example of this, or the most obvious one for me, is found in newspapers and political magazines etc... I'm finding it hard to explain what I mean in words, so bring on the pictures!

How horribly American... and it's a rubbish example, but I couldn't find any older references (the old ones require abit of disecting usually).
So the meaning we take from this is that the baby wrapped in the American flag is a replacement for the American people. Or at least thats what I take from it anyway. The people of America are being replaced with a representative? Yeah?

The type of thing I was looking for though are the old, politically fuelled propaganda cartoons you usually find in newspapers. Actually a good example of one was the image we went through in our critical studies class, CS2 did anyway, don't know about the rest of you? The image with uncle Sam and the eagle and things... I supposed these would all be 'visual synedoches' for America?

Metaphor...

Lovely! I'm not even sure if this is relevant, but the blog I stole it from is pretty interesting...

http://www.artraj.com/blog/redpres01.htm

The image says "having unprotected sex is like having sex with a potentially deadly arachnid"
whether that makes at a metaphor or a similie I'm unsure of. Either way it's got to be relevant huh.

pretty gruesome image too, I love it.



Metonym...

" A metonym is a symbolic image used to make reference to something with a more literal meaning. "

a good example of this the cross and its links with the church or christianity.


This lead me to wonder whether colours can be visual metonyms? Red representing stop or anger. Our interpretations of colour change depending on our origins, emotions and experiences, which would be true to any metonym surely? The same as any metonym, it would depend on individual interpretation...hmmm.

The Clover

Typically representative of Ireland,
or luck, which again is associated with the Irish.
Also, back to the colour thing, it's green... which is the colour associated with luck.

So which came first? Is the clover lucky because it's green? Or is green lucky because it's the colour of clover?

Yeah I've gone off on a tangent now so I'm going to shut up, and update this when I find something of interest.

The one and only.... Moustache Font

hello, hello.
And welcome to part two of Liam's font.

I used hand crafted miniture moustaches to create the concept below, so far so good yah?





Oh it gets better, well actualy... it gets worse, because the brief specifies that we trace the finished font onto an A1 sheet, and personally, I feel the only reason this font even works is because it's photographed. But I'm going to ignore that for the time being.

Moving on..

* Will finish this post when I have the relevant photo's, soz guys. *

Liam's Font.

So this is the second disgracefully late post, my apologies once again. This is the last part of the "Alphabet Soup" project, we had a fair amount of time to produce a final piece aswell. Naturally mine we completed two weeks after the deadline date.. ahem.

Anyway the brief involved us being paired off, and in our pairs we had to conduct a sort of mini interview, and really get to know the each other. We each came up with 10 words to describe our partner and went away to construct a font based on these words, or the personality of that person.


...You following this? Yeah i thought it was weird too.

I got paired with moustache fetish Liam, and since all his personality traits were completely contradictive, I decided to create a typeface based on his unhealthy addiction to facial hair... haha sorry Liam.


I started by exploring my favourite font, god knows why I picked my favourite, surely Liam's would've been more appropriate... but never mind.
Yeah so i messed around with Century Gothic abit, then I went off on a tangent to do with his almost split personality traits and came up with what you see below.


What I've done here is split the font in two, half with serifs half without, and I know it looks awful but it's the concept that counts right?
Anyway I much prefer the moustache idea :)

Print...

is shit.

I appreciated that its important to know where things came from, so I'll try and do this with good grace :) yeahhh.
Oh. I also appreciate how out of date this is, ahem... so when I say we did print, i mean we did print like, the best part of a month ago.
Aaanyway, So we did print, which for me was pretty grueling. Just the fact that its so.. unspontanious, for want of a better word, just ruins it. Mono printing was okay, but screen printing?! We spent most the morning preparing stuff, 5 minutes printing, then we had an hour and a half break whilst it dried, during which i was cohersed into spending a ridiculous amount of money on a coat i didn't need, only to come back, to do some more preparation, for 5 minutes printing, and then a bollocking, and then the rest on the afternoon cleaning shit. Sorry but i just don't understand why people find this so appealing. Argh.

That said, it was interesting to see what all the fuss was about, i just don't want to do it again in a hurry.

So i suppose you want pictures now? :)

MONO PRINTING:







These are all the results of the boards i was printing off though, not the actual finished things. I didnt get any good pictures of them. I'll maybe upload some later, should I actually get round to taking some. heh. Yeah i used the crazy hybrid 'Y' that I made during the last project as a stencil. I think it looks really good, but i got so bored with the same one on every print, also the broke every 10 mintues cause they were so damn flimsy... Which, as you can probably guess, only infuriated my already growing dislike of the whole print process. Whay. hah.











SCREEN PRINTING: (joy.)

Cleaning..

Oh look, more cleaning.

No way, not more cleaning?

Yeah, I know these are pretty much all the same picture,
but there was alot of cleaning.
Just wanted to make that absolutely clear.


So first we printed in just cyan, and then printed on top of it in magenta. the images were pretty much the same except for some adjustments we made in pen and tipex, allowing the different colours to show through on the print :)

I was'nt too impressed with mine,
but these ones were all pretty cool. i think the one at the bottom is Martin's.
well done Martin :|
(don't ask me why its upside down)