Flower making

With Mr Peacock, we also made 'flowers' out of newspaper, magazine and thin strips of cardboard, all recycled. This is how we did it.

1. Place five or six sheets of newspaper onto a table in a rectangular shape. Then roll them all up into a long tube, starting at the bottom corner. 
2. Next, stand the tube up, resting on a chair legs. Attach using some thin thread, and chop off the ends to make them even. 
3. Take a page of a magazine and cut into it horizontally, at different thickness's and lengths for effect. 
4. Next, glue at the top of the page using a Pritt stick. Then stick it around the tube at any point.  
5. Repeat this process several times, at different places on the tube, until you feel satisfied! 
6. Then use a pencil to roll up the strips of cardboard, and fit into the top of the tube. Repeat this four or five times. Create a small 'collar' using a very thin strip of cardboard to fit around the too of the tube. Secure with masking tape.

Unfortunately, I could not find any example pictures of this work. 

Bottle slumping mould: Clay demonstration

In our lesson on Friday 8th October, Mr Peacock showed us how to make Bottle slumping moulds, out of air dry clay. This is how we did it.

Equipment

• Clay mat
• Rolling pin
• Knife (that you don't mind getting dirty!)
• Fork (again that you don't mind getting dirty!)
• Beaker full of water

Materials

• Air dry clay (make sure that it is in a plastic sort of state)

Method

1. On the mat, flatten out the lump of clay with the palm of your hand. As you are doing this, repeatedly turn it over until until it is approximately even in thickness. 
2. If you need to, use a rolling pin to make it completely smooth. You want a fairly long; with the width around half of the length; slab of around 1 cm thick. 
3. Trim the edges with the knife to make a fairly even and neat edge. 
4. Place the bottle that you will be using for the Bottle slump onto the table, and with the left over clay, mould into two 'squishes' to hold the bottle still whilst you are moulding. Place one 'squish' on one side of the bottle and the other on the opposite side. 
5. Carefully place the clay slab over the bottle, and mould over it.Experiment with different shapes of the base- for example, you could make it wavy to end up with a wavy glass bottle! 
6. Using the fork, cross hatch in 4 different places on the back of the clay mould (they should in the formation of corners of a square).
7. With some more clay, make four balls and place them onto the cross hatched areas. To make the balls stay, brush them with the water, making clay 'slip' (which is the form of clay glue!)
8. Leave the mould for approximately a week, allowing it to go bone dry. 
9. Place it into a kiln with the bottle, following the instructions on my 'Bottle slumps' post.
10. Reuse as many times as you like!

Here are some photos of some moulds that people have made.

Relief Form

In this piece of work, completed over 1 lesson (plus homework and catch up lesson), we had to create our own version of 'Relief Form' artwork. To start with, we were provided with a strip of a magazine and a (lot!) of paper-clips. We then had to roll up and wrap around different pages of the magazine and paper-clip them together. Finally, we had to gradually remove the paper-clips and swap to Pritt stick. This was quite a simple idea- it wasn't a particularly difficult piece of work; it just took a lot of thinking to get the different shapes created. Here are some photos of my work (However not yet completely stuck with Pritt stick)

Front view

Top view

Side view

There are some book artists who also use this style of art in their work repertoire, including Cara Barer. She also uses book and magazine strips to make different shapes. Of her work, one of the things that I think of first is 'Relaxation'. I think this because of the 'swirliness' and 'flowingness' of the work.Here are some examples.
I think her art is a lot better than mine; they are quite similar in the way that she has also used a book in a circle, like me. However, I like the way that hers don't seem to be very supported- mine really are very supported. I also like the background of them- I adds a lot of contrast to the colours.

I like this one because it is so simple,
yet is very interesting. 

I like this one because of the colour-
it has clearly been made out of a
phone book. 

3D Projecting form

This weeks (and last weeks) work was 'sculpting' objects, 'coming out of' books. This is how I did mine.

1. I got given an old book by my teacher Miss Gardiner, and looked through it to decide what I was going  to do with mine. I got given Five fall into adventure by Enid Blyton, and so I thought that it might be a good idea to literally have five (people), falling into a hole.

2. To start it off, I began rolling little tubes of newspaper and little balls and stuck them together. This worked, but it didn't look very effective. So, I made a litteral stick man template out of card, and then drew round it 15 times, on a sheet of thick, corrrugated cradboard, and also 10 times onto a piece of newspaper.

3. I then cut them all out, and then began sticking them all together (with PVA glue) , going Card, newspaper, card, etc. In each person, there is a total of 3 cardboard shapes and 2 newspaper shapes.

4. Next, I did papier mache with small, ripped pieces of previous pages in the book, all over the men.

5. After this, I stuck five sets of five pages together with Pritt stick, and on each one, drew a circle, getting smaller as I went down the book. I then cut each one out using a craft knife, and around each hole, again I used small strips of the pages to make the sides stronger. I ended up with 5 holes, to look like one hole, just with different layers to it.  

6. Finally, I stuck the people down with small strips of masking tape, and covered the masking tape over, in the same way as I had done prevoiusly with paper and PVA glue.

I'm quite pleased with my final outcome. I think that the hole worked well, and the people look fairly effective at different distances away from the hole. However, If I did a similar one again, I would work on the accuracy of the five standing up. You can still see the glue holding them on, and in the end, on several, there must be about five layers of glue! I would also be more careful with the delicate pages- unfortunately, I managed to tear a couple of the corners.

Here are some photos of my finished piece (sorry- there are quite a few!!)
PLEASE NOTE: MY DAD TOOK THESE PHOTOGRAPHS!

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a particular artist that this kind of work relates to. I did find 'Words Create Worlds'- however I could not find who the work is made by. Here are some examples. I like the way that they have only used book pages- no other materials used (I used Cardboard inside the people to make them stronger) I also like the way that they have positioned the book- the colour of the book cover looks very effective. Unfortunately, I only had a paper back book- I could not position it in this way.