Now and Then

This weekend I am off to Cymru Contemporary Craft Fair in Betws y Coed, this week I have been making more plinths for the work to sit on.  Excited about going but we have an early start to get there as we are travelling all the way from here in Thornton in my friends car, packing that morning then trying to get there on time.

I went into Uni this last week to find out which supplier they user for there materials and the head of course had put up our newspaper article on the base room door which is now shared by the 3D Design Students, which is going to make everything a bit too tight for work space, I'm glad I have finished, though I miss having those steady days of working and easy access to kilns and glaze.

Recently as I have been drawing to develop some new work, I have found myself thinking of my old art school days. I only went to art school for a year, and dropped out after the first year as I was then old enough to be a mature student and had a good enough portfolio to move on to greener grass(or so I considered at the time).  I learnt a lot at art school but never  work out how to apply most of it to personal work.  I have two examples I did recently below as my old sketchbooks are in a bedding box under all my second year ceramics work.

This was an exercise we did on the first day in technical illustration we had to learn how to shade, we did shading like this on proper work later on but or course a bit more controlled using straight edges.  When I was in my second year of ceramics I was obsessed with textures and incised the clay with various textures but it never worked how I wanted it to. I also tried dripping slip, tearing pots in half and all sorts of things to create textures.

Our technician at UCLAN made some really nice textured pieces in porcelain, he would make a tall cylinder, dry it with a hot air gun apply a glip(part slip part glaze as he would put it) then stretch it out until it was a bowl.  They were really nice pieces and one of the very few things he marked as his own work.

This is a continuous line drawing, my life drawing tutor showed us these, he said he did them in art school and then used to calculate the length of the line.  He described it as taking a pencil for a walk, the pencil lines aren't supposed to ever cross or leave the page, back at school I did two or three myself in my A3 sketchbook, this one is only A4 so it would fit on my scanner and took me ages to do, I almost gave up half way through but decided to at stick at it.  I have used continuous line drawings when doing sketches of people on the bus, train  etc, which I need to do more of.

Generally I am unhappy with my level of drawing skills and have been spending a lot of time on it recently from drawing buildings, to people to anything I can when I am out and about with the little one.  My other passion asides  pottery is concept art for films, and games particullar the work of Erik Tiemens whose work is a real inspiritation behind my painterly style.  When I was at high school it was his work and that of Doug Chiang that I wanted to imitate but didn't do art and when off to University to study Chemistry which didn't challenge me how I wanted it to.

Pottery and drawing challenge me every day as I know I don't have the same natural talent for making things as I did for maths and science.