I want to do something different!

With art work, I like originality or things which are used less often than others so people don't just look at it and be like "That looks good...but I've seen something like that before".
I want a different reaction like they haven't seen it before.
Not just the final outcome of the piece of art but the process I went through to get to it.

As you can see I have a mod-rock mask on my face. This was rather than me being sat there getting all claustrophobic as my friend mod-rocked my face for her project.
I created a blind painting which I loved.
I'm thinking about using other materials to paint on and even using other media, other than paint...fabrics maybe. I thought about fabrics because blind people use touch as a way of seeing so fabrics with different textures would be brilliant!

Playing around with the idea of using the blind-painting technique

I've been playing with the idea of using blind-painting.
I've been thinking about what I could possibly do with the blind paintings afterwards
and Photoshop seemed like a good idea. I've also taken a picture of the piece of wood I used to put the paint on in the first place. I used this as a background for my painting, just distorted it a bit which made it look a lot more interesting.
I just used X Men as the writing on the poster because I've looked a lot at them and this seems to be a large group of people.
I like how colourful this is. Reminds me of David Batchelor and his use of vivid colours which I have looked into a lot before. This is only a mock up of what a final piece could look like until my work progresses further.
I would obviously do this a lot neater if it was for my actual final piece.

Looking at ways of presenting my work

I visited the cinema and took loads of photos of different ways posters for films are displayed.
I took photos from both outside, on the walls and the windows and inside. Inside the lobby area, the place where you pay and the corridors towards the screens.

I like this one best because its very simple but can be used to create a journey/progress and can be just spread across a wall.

Blind Painting

I couldn't just sit there and do nothing whilst Anna mod-rocked my face.
So I decided to do some blind painting!
I intended for it to look like a photo of a group, like a group gathered for a film poster.
Posing and all.
I liked the concept because as the media like the idea of ticking boxes rather than creativity. This throws 'ticking boxes' out the window because you can't see exactly what you're doing.
I couldn't be a perfectionist.
I liked the final outcome of this.
The energy shown in it is great and draws people in.

I think I could use this idea within my final piece because I could design what a poster should look like without the stereotypes, then blindfold myself and try and paint it. Dont even have to use paint. Could use fabrics and things like that. Maybe after trying to paint or make the poster blind folded many times. I could scan the outcomes into Photoshop and make a poster out of it!

The idea of ticking boxes and stereotypes will be totally thrown out the window and will just be a piece of art which will draw in the attention of the people because it looks good not because it ticks boxes.
As for the stereotypes I've been looking at in my work; with gender, you can't see whether the figures are male or female. With sexuality, you can't see what sexuality they are or how attractive they are because they are just lines. And finally with race, you can't see what colour the people are because they are multicoloured and silhouetted so theres no racism.
I want to continue with this idea of getting rid of all these stereotypes and making the poster into a piece of art work.

Race and what is perceived as an 'ordinary family'

 Whenever the media mentions an ordinary family or shows a film or tv series about an ordinary family, they are almost always white.
For example in the fantasy genre, the two programs I looked at both had all white american families classed as 'ordinary'.
What if the families were Black or of a different race to causasian?
What effect would it have on the viewers?
I did some little tests on this by changing the race of the families in No Ordinary Family and The Incredibles.
I got mixed reactions.
Better reactions from the incredibles poster because its of better quality.
Some people were shocked, some smiled and some people questioned as to why they were black

Lil photography session

Jon said go home and relax and get my head in gear for tomorrow.
So I went to Rother Valley.
I randomly took photos and came up with these.
They relate to how I was looking at silhouettes and how I wanted to give them more life!
Simply taking photos with the sun in the background made my mate in the foreground look very shadowed. I like this effect very much!





However according to the weather man, the weather wont continue to be this nice so I will have to look into artificial lighting instead! Damn!

I like how the figure isn't fully silhouetted out. This gives me chance to still have some of the human qualities that are stereotyped like gender, race and sexuality.
I can still show these but they wont be the main focus as they can't be seen as well. The main focus will be the figure itself and what its doing.

Thinking back to Dada...

Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The name 'Dada' was reputedly arrived at during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse.

An example of Dada art work is L.H.O.O.Q. to the right. It shows a famous piece of art work (Mona Lisa) defaced/vandalised.

This made me think of defacing/vandalising an image of someone as another way of taking the mess out of stereotypes. I don't have to just stick to caricatures, though this is something I'm interested in.

Another response to artists

I quickly threw this together using the general shape that Maciej Mizer uses in a lot of his work.
Of course this could use a lot of work but its just me playing around with it and trying to come up with a final idea for my piece of artwork.