Monday 3 August 2009

Summer so far..

There has been a distinct lack of activity on here for a good couple of months now, so I suppose I better let those of you who care know what I've been up to. The first month of summer was taken up with a lot of drinking, moving house, working and saving money (for that all important Mac purchase) as well as just enjoying the few days of sunny weather! Nothing much happened for a while, and my house was having some major building work done to it, so there wasn't really much to do except sit and wait for the builders to leave every day. After about as much of that as I could handle, I decided to go back to the town I call home for a couple of weeks (which is where I am now) ...Grimsby that is.

This is where things start to get marginally interesting! My 'rents planned a trip to Chester, around the town and to the zoo, and when we got there I automatically found my brain switched back on again, and I was noticing interesting bits of type, colours, patterns and whatever else caught my attention. After about 2 months of vegetating, I felt flicker of inspiration once again. Hurrah.

Anyway, I went round the town, and round the zoo, photographing all the bits and pieces that I found interesting! Some things I collected, some things I photographed as a reference to draw from later and some things were just for fun.. But each photograph lead to another idea, or starting point that would hopefully inspire the summer project, and actually get it moving.

The ideas I've had for the summer project are a little confused still... I have decided that I want the 'set' aspect of the books to drive the project, so when I get back to college in September I have a professional looking series of books, and not a couple of sketch books that have no relevance to each other, filled with a lot of useless shite... Remember last years summer project? Hah. I won't make that mistake again.

Well, have a look at the photos anyway, hopefully you'll be able to see where I'm coming from!





Above:
These were the things that first caught my attention, and got me thinking..
I'm not entirely sure as to their purpose, but they were embedded in the pavement
all around Chester town centre, some kind of tour route I imagine. They looked pretty cool though, especially when they were in little clusters..

unfortunately I started to record them a little too late in the day, and I only managed to
get a few before we didn't find any more.
I arranged the ones I did record though in grids above, categorising the colour, direction and other aspects of each photo. A good exercise to get me back into the swing of things,
I might do more to it later.



Below:
Monitor Lizard.
The skin on this thing is amazing, looks like something from space invaders.
Pixel skin... cool.






Below:
Okapi.
The most bizarre animal I've seen in a long time,
only discovered in recent years, it has the arse end of a zebra, and the front end of a horse/donkey crossbreed. And it's this that I was interested in, it looks like a bizarre Photoshop cut and paste job,
not to mention a professional airbrushing afterwards. Hah, I love it.



*MORE TO COME, WAITING ON PHOTOS*

Sunday 2 August 2009

CHECK MY OTHER BLOG...

...to see what I got upto at the end of the first year, and I'll post my digital folio up there aswell soon.