April 2016

Blythswood to The Barras

I decided that the map that I painted on the studio wall needed to be created in 3D, so I started planning.

I ended up deciding to create a folded representation of the map of Glasgow City Centre in MDF. I cut out four 6ft MDF panels with a jigsaw, leaving only the roads and the river.

The final structure was painted black, and won two awards at the Craftex 2016 exhibition!

March 2016

Sandblasting and Projection

Our exhibition at The Old Hairdressers went very well.
This is a shot of my piece: It's was created with sandblasted glass and a video of a print press button. The colours changed subtly through a whole spectrum over about two minutes

February 2016

Maps!!

Our new module, entitled "Appropriation" set us off on a trail to find something existing and to make it our own. I chose maps and started to draw & paint the map of Glasgow City Centre on the studio wall....

I decided not to draw all the streets and to leave it unfinished in places and unlabelled. It became an abstract.

January 2016

Prints of the Print Press buttons

The culmination of Creative Processes 1 was a set of prints created in various ways:

1. Acetone prints: 

Laser prints reverse printed, then placed face down onto watercolour paper. Acetone is the painted over the back of the print and the image transferred by rubbing through the paper

2: Acrylic Transfer: 

Again a reverse laser print is used, and the print and receiving acrylic sheet are coated in acrylic medium. Once the medium is dry the paper is soaked and rubbed off, leaving the image on the acrylic plate.

3. Sticky back transfer

Not sure if this is an official way of doing a transfer, as I found it by experimenting! Sticky backed plastic is firmly attached to a laser print, and the paper soaked and rubbed off. The image remains stuck to the plastic. I coated the sticky side in a few coats of acrylic medium to produce a clear plastic image.

December 2015

Print Press Buttons

With the college moving next year to a brand new building, a "Super Campus", our Creative Processes brief required us to look at this transition, and to respond to it in an artistic way.

I struggled with this one initially, but eventually homed in on our current building's history. The building was formerly the "College of Building and Printing" which was opened in the 1960s. It now stands as a Listed building and this listing includes several of the original print presses.

I chose to look at these print presses as a possible subject as two of them are not being taken over to the new building. They could be migrated artistically!

The presses had several buttons which started various processes or performed actions within the press. These buttons were labelled with symbols, which to the untrained eye were a little like hieroglyphics.

Some modified pictures below...

November 2015

"It's a Braw Bricht Moonlicht Nicht The Nicht"

Our next brief was "The Stranger". I looked for inspiration in my past, when I might have felt like a stranger myself. This took me back to my family's move to Scotland in 1972. I arrived in Scotland at the age of 12 years old and felt very much like a stranger in a foreign land. I was already a shy kid and being plunged in to a small local community in the middle of Ayrshire was, to say the least, a shock to the system. My then Blackpool accent was something to be mimicked at school, and I became very concious that I was an outsider.  And then there was the issue of the dialect in this part of Scotland (Darvel / Newmilns), which was (and I guess still is) fairly broad even though the major towns of Kilmarnock and Ayr were not far away.

"It's a Braw Bricht Moonlicht Nicht The Nicht" was a phrase that the locals tried to get me to repeat. I was a shy 12 year old English kid, and it was obviously a bit of fun for them, and I don't think they meant any malice in the request. However the result was that it just made me feel even more alienated, self-conscious, and that I didn't fit in.

Anyway, to cut a long story short my artwork for this brief emerged as a protest poster in a Russian Constructivist style.

Detail from the artwork.

The work is constructed from 3 colours of card, which is layered to achieve an almost 3D look