These are the pictures that I’ve developed since last post. We’ve moved on to using a 35mm lens film camera, which means I can now shoot 34 pictures and develop them together, rather than painstainkingly progress through the roll one picture at a time. The pictures are printed on is 8 by 10” resin coated paper.
The one above was shot at night- the exposure was longer than usual (a full second) and was handheld, which accounts for the blurriness.
One of the classes that I’m taking in my first semester of college is Intro to Black and White Photography. I was really worried about having to deal with the technical aspect of photography, but I’m finding it to be relatively easy to understand, and concepts of shutter speed, aperture, exposure and contrast are a lot clearer to me now.
The first two pictures are photograms, which are incredibly easy to make: in the darkroom, I placed a couple of objects under the enlarger’s light and on top of resin-coated paper. The light ‘tainted’ the resin black and left the object’s outlines white. The 1st picture is a leaf that I kind of punctured with my nails (I wanted to see how much detail I could get out of it), and the 2nd picture is a ‘composition’ of altoids and a random plastic wrapper.
Next are pinhole photographs, which I made with my own shoebox pinhole camera (which kind of looked like this one: 
http://www.andybrain.com/sciencelab/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/pinhole-camera.jpg )
It was a great way to understand how daylight reflects to imprint on film, and how shutter speed and exposure affect the photograph, but it was a little too manual for me: I had to stay put and not move the box for minutes at a time if I wanted a sharp image, and even then, I couldn’t control exterior factors like wind/clouds/people walking in front of me/people turning the lights on and off. The cool part was actually developing the film in the darkroom, because I got to experiment with the chemicals that ‘reveal’, wash and fix the image.
This one’s my favorite! The film moved inside the camera, which is probably why the edges are fuzzy. I like how the power lines create a spiral (sorry, a spillick).
I’v started working with a proper film camera, but I’ll save these pictures for the next post.
After having coped with the whole end-of-year franticness, I’ve decided to revive this blog a little. I haven’t been the most dedicated blogger, but this certainly does not imply that I’ve stopped working on art pieces, or that I’m no longer interested in the art world. In fact, being off school has given me more time to explore, and I’ve completed a laptop design cover -a surface I had never considered working on before, as well as another painting during that time. Pictures of both of these will soon be posted, and I’ll conclude for now with a couple of unrelated videos that I came across and liked (engaging in the multimedia, ain’t that fancy ?!?):
I have an exam next week to conclude my two years of IB Art. I’ll have to explain what my work consisted of, what my main themes were, and which artists inspired me the most. So far I’ve put everything together to prepare to be hung, and took a super quick picture:
This is my first retrospective 🙂 – and a new piece is coming up soon! -intaglio+watercolour+theme of mechanical vs. natural.
So here are some photos of what I’ve done since my last update. The former squares in the background ended up looking too ‘flat’ to me and did not convey the tension I had hoped to achieve, so I painted over them to create a grey background, and then added colours to the trees, keeping the diagonal lines to suggest industrialism and architecture (veeerry subtly though!). The focus is on the trees and the texture rather than on the conflict between man-made and organic matter, with the curvature of the frame literally drawing the viewer into the painting. The first picture was taken about 30 minutes before the second one- I added colours and texture on the trees in the interval. Still not done, but progressing…!
Haven’t posted in a while…:S
Here’s what I’ve done so far on the mega-painting. My intention here was to illustrate the conflict between industrialism-what is man-made and the natural/organic/flaura-and-fauna world. The grey geometric shapes in the background represent man-made stuff (abstractly), and the trees represent the natural world. I am far from being done, and I might even scratch it entirely (I have another idea that will represent this conflict more clearly).
sorry about the bad picture!
Completely unrelated, I’ve been discovering a bunch of artists lately, like Wilfred Lang:http://www.alessandros.net/artist/wilfred/wilfred-lang-art.htm
I particularly like his use of layering and blending in his skyline paintings.
I just made a huuuge canvas for my next piece. It is slightly concave (height 180cm, length 200 and width 170):
(With Ben for scale)
Originally, I was going to cover it in trees like I had done in ‘Blue’, but I’m not so sure anymore… I think I don’t want to ‘waste’ such a nice canvas on something I’ve done before. I’ve consequently been brainstorming in my workbook a lot:
I’ve become interested in the contrast between organic and man-made elements (see Peter Doig, I really like his paintings and his series that includes Le Corbusier’s buildings inspired me the most), so I’ve been looking architectural, more mathematical diagrams and their interactions with the ever-present trees.
I stumbled upon these two videos recently and thought they were really cool. I have been doing ‘safe’ work so far, in that I have not experimented to my full potential, and might try to take a step further, or just go down a completely different path sometime soon. I may not do graffiti art or anything as weird as is shown here, but both videos have definitely stirred something in me 🙂 Enjoy!
I still cannot decide whether the music adds or takes away from the videos…
— I do not own these videos- click to access them directly from Youtube.
This is the latest piece that I have done for my IB diploma art class. I kept to my theme of trees and landscape, and used a new technique that I have been experimenting with recently: it consists of thickly applying layers of paint (itself previously mixed with a thickener) on the canvas, and then dry-brushing with an old paintbrush on the bumps and crevices to highlight the texture created by the dry paint. I painted the background blue afterwards, with no texture, so that the trees stood out. I made the upper part lighter and the lower part darker because it lends more depth to the painting. My goal for this piece was to create a sort of landscape, without having to draw too many elements. I focused on the texture, rather than on the shape of the trees: indeed, I didn’t include the roots and most of the branches of the trees.
Remember the post on the sketches I did during my internship? Well here is the final product, now available in supermarkets in the Benelux region:
(see my old post at https://spillicks.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/internship/)
spillicks.wordpress.com 
