Sound Work from St.Werburghs Church!

For the past week, the first year Fine Art group had to work in a 850 year old church that had no heating or lighting inside whatsoever.

Within this week, we where all put into groups, and our teacher Caroline made it pretty easy by just leaving us with the people we sat down with when we went to our first lecture with her. So I was luckily with Liam, Richard, Alicia and Sophie; all of whom I get along with really well and we all worked really well in a group together.

To begin with we had to book loads of equipment out of the Equipment Centre; now if there are any damages to the items we borrow then we can be fined up till £2500 each, and if anything is a day over due, you can be charged up to £30 per day.

We where struggling with booking out equipment, we had quite a few problems actually... For starts, everything was already booked out. I managed to get out the MacBook, but no projector. And we`d already began to work on stuff with the projector. So no projector, but we managed to book out some lighting. When I picked up the lights on Tuesday, the lights I wanted had apparently broken so I couldn`t have them; instead of the flood lights, yes a floodlight, so they gave me red heads 8000. When we got them back to the church, we where given a set of three but just one was too bright for the room and we had to take them back on the same day.

The only items we had no problems with was the MacBook and the speakers.

We spent Monday starting the basic editing, and then the Tuesday was more about setting up our spaces and testing out what we`d made the day before.
Friday we had our final presentations, where we had to play our work in front of the whole class. It was seriously weird to have everyone in our year stood in a tiny dark room with no lighting whatsoever. We just had our sound work playing really, really loudly to try and portray what it was we wanted.

Our work was supposed to portray what it`s like for a blind person to go about everyday life. Which is why we wanted to use a tiny bit of lighting either with projections or large lighting within the room. We read books on blind people and read things online about what blind people can see, that`s if they have a little bit of sight left.
Because the original lights had broken, and the others where way too bright to even use. Me and Liam devised a little plan to try and use the flash on our cameras, which we had struggled to time right cause we both randomly tried to use our flashes at different random times.

It was seriously hard to do, I`d never even worked with sound before, and at Sixth form, we never even worked in groups and everything we did was individual stuff.
This was a seriously tough week... I also messed up quite a bit by going out Thursday night and hen not getting any sleep whatsoever back at Davids flat. I still managed to make it in, only just though. I was seriously sick after going out, but I crawled back in about 10am to help my group. I gave them everything so they could get on with the presentations, I felt like I would of just vomited everywhere if I got up and went in on time, it was horrible.

I`m happy I managed to get in, my lecturer said she would of been disappointed because of the amount of work we`ve been putting into what we`ve been doing.
I would of been pretty disappointed in myself to be honest, we`ve all worked our arsses off this week and that Church is a lovely place, but horrible to work in. It was hard, and I feel like everyone else`s work was better than ours in the end. Ugh, I`m never working with sound again... It was sooo frustrating to do.

I`m not sure if I can upload the sound file, it would be really cool if I could though; the recordings in it are taken  from our everyday lives, conversations and activities in the studios. So everything we did was our own work, and it took us a long time to collect all of that together in time for this week.

I`ll see if I can upload the sound work, if I can`t... Then I`m sorry!!




CLICK HERE FOR THE AUDIO OF THIS PROJECT!



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Wood Work! (light box)

The inside when complete looked better than the outside!

In our last week of induction work within a bunch of workshops that we`ll probably never go into again... we had to work with wood or metal.

According to everyone else who had already done this workshop, it was apparently boring as hell so I already wasn`t looking forward to what we where going to have to produce during the week. The idea was that we all start off by making something seriously simple, which was just the frame for a box... That was it, make a frame for a box and then work within it with materials of your choice.

So, because I`m not a fan of woodwork or metal work and everyone else is, I decided to go straight with wood and get on with it. No faffing around, well I thought so until I got a different idea. Within our work, we still had to work with one of the objects that we bought in at the beginning of the year; so if we all go back to the last update and remember; mine was three phones.

But that didn`t mean I was going to create a phone out of wood... no, no, no way was I going to spend a week creating that. The only thing was with my idea, two other people had already done similar things with their boxes and I didn`t want it to seem like I had copied or was going for something simple.

With my work, I wanted to create a lightbox. A box with lights in, seriously that simple. But, it was too simple so I came up with something a little bit different.
The box I was made only had two small wooden frames to keep it together, two sides of normal wood and then four sides of wood with holes all over them. Inside the box I was going to put my screen prints onto plastic and then the lights... If that even makes any sense. This meant that when you look through the holes, you can see the keyboard screen print because of the lights.

It did make my piece a bit more interesting, considering everyone else was literally just making a normal box. I can`t really say much about the process, I had to use a series of machines that had circular blades to cut out the holes, a bandsaw to cut the sides of the box and then having to go back to the screen printing studios to add the prints.
The only thing I can really say is that all of the wood for the frames was attached together with a drill and screws, then the sides managed to stay in place with simple nails and a hammer. There isn`t really anything to talk about, I must of gone for the most simple idea I could of possibly come up with on the spot.

Oh well, I still managed to impress my lecturer Dennis; I think if I went for anything more "creative" then I wouldn`t of really enjoyed the week and I might of given up so much sooner than I did. I even got that bored that I took the Wednesday off really, I did no work for the wood project but a lot of work for a sound project that`s coming up... yes, another project.

I`m beginning to think the projects are seriously never ending during your first year, it`s hard and complicated to get your head around the timetables. We`ve done a plain induction week to the course, a whole week of drawing, a week of working with paper, a week with wire, a week with photoshop, a week combining two of those elements. Then from there, we moved onto a week of clay and plaster, a week of screen printing and a week of woodwork. Then we have a week of working with sound, and then three weeks to combine wood, printing or clay work.

It`s honestly confusing me...

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Printing Work!

So then, Last week we had to begin another three weeks of induction work. Last week, if you saw the update, then we had to take part in a clay and plaster workshop that quite frankly took a long time to finish off.

This week, we gladly got to work on printing; but we only actually got around to doing one form of printing because we had to go to Oxford... yes, Oxford, I should of updated about that like last Wednesday, but I was exhausted and never got round to actually doing it. so that`ll be coming soon.


We only managed to get round to making some screen prints, a very basic form of printing that involves one screen with the same image on it; you repeatedly drag a mixture of paint and binder through the screen and it then prints on to the paper or material underneath.

You coat a silk screen (what they used to be called but apparently the ones at university are made out of cotton), with printing emulsion. The emulsion is this horrible thick gloopy stuff that you coat the screen in, it also doesn`t feel nice when you get it on your hands.

After the screen has been coated, we use this weird heated cupboard that dries everything a lot quicker for us. You leave it in there and start this whole process when you have an image, don`t ever leave it in there when you aren`t prepared to put the image on; the screen just bakes and then the emulsion that you coated on there just crumbles off.

The image then needs to be put on a UV ray box, then get the screen and place it face down onto the box; but you can`t let the screen be in the light for so long, because then it just exposes itself after a while. The machine that we have at university has to be on a setting of 130 seconds of exposure if you have your image on a piece of plain white paper, or, 30 if the image is on acetate.

Once it`s been quickly adjusted and is ready to go; you pull down the lid which is basically thick black fabric that let`s no light out of the Ray box and no light in. Ensure that it`s clamped down properly and then press the vaccum button; this just helps make sure that nothing else will obscure the picture in anyway. It`s quite fun to watch and do now, before I didn`t trust myself even touching the machine, simply because it`s that big and make some horrible noises after a while.



 The only step that you have to do after that is go through to the blaster rooms, and blast off the emulsion that you put on the screen; the only parts that should come off are, the areas where your image has come through when you exposed the screen to it. Just keep on spraying until you feel like it`s all come through. You can then just keep on printing as many times as you want, with as many different colours as you want. To remove the screen you have to use a special mix of chemicals that eat away at the emulsion on the screen; I can`t remember the exact name for the chemicals, but you simply leave it on for a few minutes and then use a proper jet washer to blast off the rest of it. If you`ve mixed the right amount of chemicals or if you`ve left it on long enough, then it`ll come off really easily with some blasting.



If you remember, a while ago I began to use a horrible old Blackberry phone with ridiculously small buttons; this was one of the images that I kept on printing, and was the first image that I`ve put on screen at university. I did put another one on eventually, but that one was used for mainly colour experimentation.

I began with some simple prints, Black with some blobs of purples and blues; which blended in nicely wit the black. after that, I worked on some coloured prints, but then printed black back over the top of them; This made the prints look like they where echoing, like the top layer was actually the shadow. Then a lot of the others where over laps of Cyan, Blue and Yellow paints; the exact colours which are used to create images on phones and newspapers.


This whole process was really fun, and everything at Derby University to do with printing is free to use to any students; as long as they`ve had the proper inductions for the machines in there.

There`s clamps to keep the screens in place, so you can lift up the screen, change the paper and keep on printing! Some of them are now on Deviantart, I won`t be putting them all on facebook, I usually just upload photography on there now.

Keep checking for more updates!

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