Thursday, 24 March 2016

Plastic Fusion! (With a heatgun!)

The First set Of Samples I Made!
Although a while back, I had promised some sort of scanning in session where I upload loooooads of my work... I haven`t actually done that much flat work compared to my last project where a lot of drawing was involved. This time I`m focusing on a lot of other slightly different materials compared to my last project, and I`m quite enjoying it so far.

(I also really need to catch up on my uploads right now, I`ve got two weeks of and start my new job next week so I`m going to be extremely busy from now on)!


So my newest project is about the decay of nature and what humans do to effect the planet, however, since it`s been such a broad topic with lots of areas that I can explore within it, the teachers and I have decided to cut it down to just the Decay of Nature. There`s too much I can do with a project like that and there Isn`t enough time to try out every last technique I know on all of these different mediums, if I had more time then I think my project would be a lot more interesting and unique compared to what everyone else is doing right now... I chose the nature theme first as I has my sketchbook ready with my theme inside of it since Christmas time, now three other people are doing something that`s based around nature and decay, which is more than slightly annoying as this is my last project at sixth form and I wanted it to be something different to what everyone else was going to choose. Hopefully, The final outcomes will be completely different and you might not even be able to tell that we`re all basing it around decay.


I have gotten quite a few drawings done, that you might of also seen in one of my previous posts, but I`ve been mainly working with recycling materials and working with melting objects so that`s been something new and quite fun for me to be working with.
I`ve been collecting a lot of items from here and there lately, we`ve just had the bathroom completely re-done with two showers fitted, new super bright lighting and a new toilet, along with all of that we also had it completely re-tiled with porcelain tiles which are super heavy and super sharp when you smash them. My mum and the guy who did the tiles saved me a bunch of scraps instead of just throwing them away and I haven`t gotten round to using them yet actually, I`ve been focusing on the plastic that much that I haven`t had time for the other bits I`ve been collecting up recently.

One of the main things that I really want to do is just try my best to recycle everything I have on my desk at the moment, even old bits of tissues and wipes that I`ve used to clean up are coming in handy as an added texture in the backgrounds of my work and hopefully I can keep on using little bits like that to create more un-usual stuff!
At the moment, I`m pretty big on the plastics, as you can see from this update. I`ve been collecting plastic bags and wallets for a while trying t get enough for loads of samples for my work, and I`ve also been trying to collect dead flowers, sticks and leaves for fusion work. Last time I did plastic fusion work, I used the heat press instead; It`s a big clamp with a metal plate that can heat up to about 300 degrees and it squashes everything in-between plastic, like a sandwich wrapped up in plastic really.
It`s quite strange really...

From this, I would also not recommend using a heat gun on dead flowers in a room with no windows open. I was doing it for a while and the smell was getting stronger and stronger and there was smoke coming out of the stem of the flower and I panicked quite a bit.
Even though I did these almost two weeks ago as my first set of preparation work, the smell of the flowers is disgusting and you can smell it when you walk past the box on my desk that has them in, luckily the smell has died down a bit now but I did get one of my friends to smell it on purpose just to see if it was that gross... His reaction told me it was gross.
Some of the ones I`ve done are very basic and just have twigs sandwiched in-between them, but they do work very nicely within mixed media work. I`ve been suing them for a lot of collage bits at the moment and I`m kind of stuck with what to do with the rest that I haven`t used. I was going to cut into canvas` and glue them to the back so they come through the front... If that makes any sense at all? I like them at the moment, I`ve also done a bit more photography work on flowers and nice looking shiz since I don`t want it all to be based on dying stuff, I`ve even uploaded one of them onto Redbubble and it looks adorable! Mainly just photos of the decaying ones at the moment actually, the ones of the living flowers are a bit iffy at the moment so I don`t want to use them yet.

It`s such an easy process to do, but it`s quite fun to see the way that the materials react, like the dead flowers stems started bubbling and popping halfway through the melting and the petals started to curl outwards instead so they look like they`ve just opened up for the first time; they also go a golden brown or caramel colour when you start to melt the plastic around them. But then when you melt around them when they`re alive, they just go straight to dark brown and snap if your rough with them.
I love the crispy look once they`ve cooled down, just try not to do what I did, and that`s pick it up straight away and burn your hand. The ones that I`ve used so far have also been dipped in wax and a bit of ink so they blend in with all of the mixed media work I`m doing.
I have been really busy lately, so I ended up putting my blogging to one side for a while whilst I just got some other stuff out of the way. I`ll be back on all of my social media accounts now, and I`ll be updating on here over the next two weeks whilst I try to catch up with all of my updates; so you can all go back to sending your questions into the facebook page!









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