Dark Room Processing! (Black and White).

For more of my experimentation for this project (and for future reference), I decided to join in on a Dark Room processing and printing induction.
I have the color workshop tomorrow actually.

To begin with, I`ve never actually used an analogue camera; one of those very old and chunky ones that you have to keep on pulling a lever on to wind the film around. Anyways, a very weird and awkward camera to use and I seriously don`t want to use that again.
Because I knew how bad I was going to be at taking pictures on the analogue camera, I also bought a small disposable camera from boots which took pictures in Black and White.

All I had to do with that was crack it open and use the film from inside.

The whole process takes a whole day to work on.
We started at 10am last Tuesday. (I`m only just getting round to writing about it).
 Aswell as never actually using an Analogue camera before, I`d never actually been into a dark room since we never had them at my school or at my sixth form; to be honest I just thought it would be something that didn`t really appeal to me.

At 10am, we used the light tight tanks and began to get our films ready for processing.
Me and my friend Mel where obviously the last two people to come out of our small preparation rooms; not because we where messing around, but because we both just couldn`t find our films and had no idea as to what we where doing in the dark.

When it came to cracking open our disposable cameras aswell... Parts flew everywhere, Mel electrocuted herself a few times on the battery that was inside and we dropped the film god knows how many times.

Now, I can`t actually remember the whole process behind developing these black and white photographs; all I know is that it`s completely different from the Color processing, which I am actually doing all day tomorrow.

I wouldn`t be able to excplain the process and then have readers go off and do it anyway, because you genuinly need all of the professional equipment and the dark rooms, the red lights, the light tight tanks and the chutes that you through the developed images down.
All I can say is that the whole processing part takes all morning, we where there about 10am till 1pm and then when the films where drying out we had lunch, came back at 2pm and then began to print the images.

I would happily do the Black and White Image again, they come out looking very dramatic and on some of them, confusing.

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Being Abstract!

If you`ve been looking at my work for a while, my blog or just my work in general.
Then you may of seen the work I used to produce back when I was at Sixth Form, I used to produce a lot of work that involved layering and repeated layers of paint and images.

I could go on and on with my layering work, I used to just keep on going until it got to the point that you could no longer even tell if it was Canvas or a wooden board that I was working on cause you could no longer see.
It used to get me told off a little bit though, for just keeping on building up those initial layers of paints. I used to spend a lot of time doing that and then not adding anything on top for my actual work.

I guess that`s kind of happening again right now.
Basically, I`m building up layers now with paints, dirt and plaster. Because of this, my lecturer loves the initial layering that I`m doing; but he hates the work that I`m adding on top of those layers. Which is making it extremely awkward for me at the moment.
I have one teacher that loves the little samples I created over Christmas, with the small pieces of manmade materials.
But then the other one hates it, so it really is awkward for me to create artwork that all of my lecturers love.

This was just a quick update to show you the abstract stuff i`ve been doing that Carl likes without all of the materials.
I`ve already uploaded them all onto Deviantart, but obviously not everyone follows me on every single account that I have.

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Collecting Materials!

For my newest project, if you haven`t read all of my other posts on here, is all about flytipping and human waste. I`m collecting all of my materials from the same area near a bunch of industrial factories that run in front of the nutbrook trail. Which is a nature trail, but also a popular place for flytippers since a lot of people don`t go down there due to the factories.

This particular area has been abandoned for years due to an old factory that was built there, and then knocked down. It still has the old rusted train tracks that are out of order and are completely safe to walk along for a good hour or so.
The area was overtaken by nature; wild flowers, tress, bushes, random plants growing inbetween lumps of concrete and metal.
But just lately the place was overtaken by flytippers and just left that way, there`s no point in the council paying to clear up an area that no one can see. So, they`re just leaving it all there and not really having a second thought about it. I kind of wish someone would clean up the area since the area would be absolutely amazing if they just cleared it so plants could begin to grow again.




But anyways, you`ve probably read about that before in previous posts that i`ve uploaded.

I began to collect materials over the christmas period, but over time i`ve ran out and today was actually my third time going back to get even more materials from that area.

I basically haven't been uploading any of my artwork so far since i`ve just been pumping out experimental work and i genuinely can`t keep up with everything i`m doing at the moment, and i`m seriously struggling to try and keep up with everything else i have on the side. So the blogs, redbubble, facebook page and even an Essay that I need to finish... Like, I haven`t even started a seriously important Essay which SERIOUSLY needs my attention right now!

In-between my time in the studios, I also have a theory class that I attend once a week, and an artist talk. Then inbetween that, we have to document every little thing that we do in our journals, every Wednesday we have a new deadline for our theory work since we`re set a new task once a week, a presentation for our theory work and an Essay for our theory work. THEN, I have to go and collect the materials that I`m using for my project, which is about 45 minutes there and 45 minutes back and then you have to add the collection time on top of that.

SO, as you can tell, I`m actually pretty busy the majority of the time and I do find it hard to keep up with everything.

You`ll be able to find everything that I`m beginning to upload on Deviantart, There`s now a folder on there called University, Year 1, Semester 2. Pretty straight forward really, you should begin to find the majority of my experimental pieces on there.

I`m getting round to uploading everything I have so far, it`ll take me some time still.
This is basically just a post saying that, I`ve collected materials, i`m getting there with the studio work but it is taking me some time to getting round to uploading everything that I`ve done.

I will admit aswell, that my project is not hygienic at all and it is very dirty, so a lot of my pictures and my materials have a lot of dirt and mud on them... Which needs to be washed off quite badly.


I`ll be uploading images of all of my found objects in one image but in sets of squares, i`ve racked up over 200+ photos so i don`t want to upload them all one by one and take he absolute mick with it.



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The New Year!

(The images in the blog post are from over the Winter period, I`ll be uploading my studio work over the next few posts instead)!

Hello, once again I`ve let my poor time management get the best of me and I haven`t updated any of my blogs, deviantart, or redbubble since last year!

I`m finally getting back round to it all now, well I hope so; There`s a lot going on at University at the moment and it`s making it a bit difficult to get back around to everything I used to do in my spare time.
For example, all I managed to do over Christmas

was journal work and only a few small sample pieces of work that I pulled together for some inspiration.

In the last blog post that I uploaded, I did upload a few pictures of the wasteful items that I had begun to collect together, I managed to fill two large boxes with man made waste; and when I say man made, I don`t mean feaces, I mean things that have been fly tipped and thrown away in hope that no one will find what they`ve thrown

away. I`m rambling now.

SO, if I didn`t quite discuss my newest project fully yet.
I`ve decided to go down the route of recreating scenes/landscapes by using man made materials and organic materials that I`ve discovered. It`s quite an experimental project, but at the same time it`s going to be quite fun to get back into the habit of creating pastes and using them for creating textures and painting with crushed

seeds and plants.
The main reason I want a project that`s experimental and messy is purely because I went all summer without producing any large scale pieces of work, then when we got to University it was very prescribed and straight forward for us. Mainly because they needed us to attend all of the workshops, and go back to basics with drawings and small sculptures. So it was very, you have to experiment with this, and this and then we want you to attend this

workshop and afterwards you can do this.

So, this second semester is very strange compared to what we did during the last semester.
For starts, as soon as we got back we had our normal Monday meeting where they just go over what we`re doing for the week and they make sure we know what we`re going to do for the next week or so. We basically spent the first week just doing research to back

up our ideas and our plans for our project, and then on the Friday of that first week we had our class split in two and we basically had to talk about our project and present any work we had produced or any additional ideas that we had. Then the rest of the group had to ask questions and discuss your ideas with you, before Carl butts in and adds his thoughts and opinions and opens up an even bigger discussion with the class and you.

This ended up going on for 5 hours on the Friday, and another 6 hours on Monday since there where so many people to get around. Carl does like my idea and the plans that I have at the moment.
We`re actually three weeks into this semester you see, that`s just how behind I am on updating all of my blogs and social media accounts!!!

Altogether, he was okay with my initial concept of not knowing whatever the hell I was going to do..
Yeah, I just kind of babbled my way through my journal and my ideas since it was hard to explain where I got the idea from and what I had collected together; but I wasn`t quite sure as to what direction I wanted my work to go down so I was most probably just

confusing everyone in my group. A few people liked the fact that I`d been out and had collected source material to begin working with, and the fact that I`d already made sample pieces of work that I can then gain extra initial ideas from. But I think Carl wanted me to have a solid idea as to what I was going to be doing with these items and what direction I wanted to go in.

But seeing as we are three weeks into producing work within the
All of the pieces I`ve made vary in size and there are quite a few small pieces that I`ve just kind of produced in order to get some practice in. It`s an awkward topic I think, simply because I`m trying to stay in the guidelines of making work out of these man made materials.
studios, because now we`re just left to be independent, I have produced bigger pieces of work and have began to cover my walls in work that I`ve produced over the time I`ve spent inside of the

studios.

After looking at various artist though and the way that they work and produce their art work, I feel like I need to be more spontaneous with the way that I`m producing my pieces of work and I want them too feel like I`m using a variety of materials instead of just organic and wasteful items.


You`ll hopefully get what I mean within the next few updates that I post, I need to get back round to showing all of the work that I`ve produced and anymore ideas that I have.
Watch this space! I`m finally getting round to blogging again!


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Thinking About My New Project; Photography Session!

It`s five days till Christmas now...And I`ve genuinely been pretty bored, I get bored when there`s nothing for me to do that stimulates my brain and keeps me busy.

Seeing as we`ve been given a rather generous 5 weeks off of University and I`ve already been given the next module that I`ll be work on. So over Christmas, we`ve got to think about what we`re going to do and what we`re going to base our next module on.

I`ve thought about it quite a bit.
I think I might be going back to my year 13 roots, where I worked with meting plastic, setting work on fire and just being a messy person, who got told off quite a bit for being too messy... Seeing as I`m in a University environment, I thought that right now would be an amazing time to go back to trying out my messy ways.I have to admit though, I was seriously stumped for ideas so I`m also going back to my year 13 project, which was all about The Decay Of Nature; I want to do the same project but have another take on the subject.

To begin our module, we have to think of just two words as our starting point; the first word has to be the form of work, so that for me will be Mixed Media. Then the second word it the content; so for me I`m going with something like waste/human waste.

Instead of focusing more on the nature side of this project, and how we dump our man made waste and destroy the environment worldwide.
I`m making this project a lot closer to home, to begin with, I`ve been photographing the nutbrook trail which is a very common place for nearby fly-tippers. To begin with, it was actually pretty clear down there; usually there`s a lot of waste left near the quitter areas of the trail and it`s quite disgusting to see.

Seeing as it was quite clear down there, I decided to go and take my photography somewhere else.
A place that I go quite a bit actually to work on some small photography bits, It`s hidden through a fence that leads you behind the nutbrook trail.If you`ve seen this blog before, then you`ll know that a long time ago I used a lot of different images of the train tracks that are down there. However, I didn`t want to focus on the tracks at all this time, Instead I went the opposite way and ended walking around amongst a lot of bushes and trees.

It was quite sad in away, amongst the, now dead, bushes, there was so much cr*p just scattered around.
There used to be a huge factory down there, like an extremely long time ago; so they knocked it down and left the train tracks there. Because it`s private land, and it`s quite a large area of land, no one is ever down there and there are no longer security who go around and see if anyone is down there.
So people go through the fence, walk around for ten minutes and then just dump a bag of cr*p wherever they feel like.

Even though the land is abandoned, it did have a large factory and there is quite a bit of rubble left over from when they knocked it down; but that doesn`t mean that anyone can go down there and dump a load of cr*p from their back garden.

So anyways, I took about 156 photos when I was down there, and I must of been down there with David for almost 2 hours. The weather wasn`t too bad, just a bit chilly, but it was rather muddy down there and I might of got my boots seriously covered in mud... They may need a good clean.

Along with the 156 photos that I took on my Canon camera, I took two large carrier bags down with me. During mine and Davids walk, and after photographing some of the waste, I filled one with plants, dead leaves, twigs and sticks; these are just for crushing down and using as base materials for my work. Then in the other carrier bag, after I`d photographed the waste, I simply picked it up and popped it into the bag if it looked clean enough to go in there. a lot of it only had a bit of mud on that was easily dusted off, so I just filled the bag until it was too heavy for me to carry around... Then it was handed over to David since he is a whole lot stronger than me.

I managed to pick up quite a bit of waste whilst I was done there which I think is really good for my first walk; old wires, parts of computers, plastic sheets, plastic piping, etc.
I will need to start working wit these at some point though seeing as they are both just sat in bags in my room waiting to be used, and the bags where very large and they are taking up a lot of room on my desk... I also picked up a bag yesterday and I hadn`t realized that something I picked up must of been wet, so I had to clean up a little puddle of extremely dirty water that the bag had been sat on for some time.

So overall, I think I have things planned out for over the holidays; It`s just some old wood that I now have to source. My  journal is up to date; I`ve been to two gallery exhibitions within Derby, the Teamlab exhibition at the Quad and the Derby Museum Retro TV show exhibition. The only work I can see doing in there now is probably some small sampled of mixed media work and probably all of the photography that I completed during this session.

That`s it for this update!
Updates will probably slow down now over Christmas since I won`t be producing that much art work from now on... Perhaps some small little bits that probably have nothing to do with this project, and maybe a few little bits that lead up to more planning for the next project; but I`m afraid they`ll now slow down for a little bit now...
HAVE A GOOD CHRISTMAS!!!



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