Art and Design

The images below show some of my art work from the second year of my A Level from 2010-11.

During April last year I took a day trip to London where I made a variety of rough sketches using pen and a notebook. I then added watercolor to complete them. I found capturing a moving subject difficult at first and realized that I had to work quickly and only capture what was necessary using a few lines and markings for detailed areas.

I really enjoy working quite freely and in particular love working in acrylics and oil pastels.

Inspiration from my travels

So Far on my gap year I have travelled through Thailand and Australia. I have seen and experienced different lifestyles and cultures and been inspired by lots of what  I have seen. The pictures below show an art exhibition in Bondi, Australia called "Sculpture By The Sea". 

I witnessed a variety of sculptures and artwork, each piece inspiring me in different ways.

This piece in particular fascinated me. The subject, the setting, and the way the sculpture has been placed interests me and provides an opportunity to suggest different meanings and messages behind it. It keeps the audience guessing and wondering what the story behind the artwork is. This reminds me of Theatre. Every theatrical performance creates different meanings and subconscious messages which helps ignite emotions in an audience.

This interesting sculpture reminds me of the play the Crucible.   The cut away design is similar to my set design for the play and suggests that were are looking beyond an exterior to discover something new. I love the simplistic use of the logs and the earthy browns on the soft sand.

Hairspray set design

In 2009 I designed and painted all of the set and props for my schools production of Hairspray. After watching a professional production of Hairspray in the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, and working closely with the Director I came up with a fun, symbolic design which was used throughout the show.

 

Painting the set

The set in progress

.........

The set complete.

These photos show what my set looked like under lighting. I worked very closely with a professional lighting designer during the show who complimented me hugely on my design. He taught me the importance of considering lighting at all times when designing a set. As my design had to be used throughout the show and for all scenes in the production I decided to not use heavy blocks of colour so that the set could be transformed using lighting.

Here are some of the props that I designed and painted for the production.

This is a photo from the production during a performance. The giant hairspray can that I designed, painted, and helped construct is in sight in the background.

After the production I made paintings, drawings and my own interpretations from photos of the production concentrating on the main characters.

The crucible

For my exam in the second year of my Drama(Set Design)A-Level I had to design and construct two sets. One of these was for my groups chosen play The Crucible. The scene that my group picked was set in the Proctors Household, and the time was 1962. My design had to be naturalistic so I researched the era and started to gather my ideas together.

 

I then made lots of sketches and constructed a ground plan for my design.

The next step for me was to construct a scaled model of my design in order to get a better picture of my design and to start to bring my design to life. As you can see from the photograph in the bottom left corner as my model starts to come together, it still looks quite symbolic and not naturalistic, this is when i did more research into houses of the time and my model started to become more naturalistic.

I transformed a little room in school into a workroom where I could collect all my thoughts and ideas. This is a picture of the room with my model and ideas in progress.

After my model was complete I ordered the necessary materials and with the help of my schools woodwork technician  started to construct my set.

I used two different colours and used a rag to create the dabbled effect on the set.

I worked closely with my group to help make my set as naturalistic as possible. I had to work with the lighting and sound technicians closely to ensure that their designs worked with mine and so that thier lights and speakers could not be seen. For example I built my fireplace around two of his birdies and he used gels to suggest the warmth and fire. He then altered the strength of the lights to make it look like the fire was flickering. This made the fireplace look very naturalistic.

Deviset set model

My second A-Level exam piece was a devised piece which was bases on a chosen picture. The under-lying story was based on a violinist killed his wife and child in a car accident whilst drink driving. This piece had to be the opposite of The Crucible (naturalistic) so my set had to be very minimalistic and symbolic. I looked at various Antonin Artaud techniques and chose  traverse stage to allow a sensory experience for our audience.

I looked at having a smashed up car bumper and front of a car at one end of the stage but decided that this was too obvious and only wanted to give the audience subtle suggestions of the accident.

I decided that skid marks were much more subtle and could be quite striking as they could also look like a pattern. I also thought they would be perfect for the masking in the room, as I chose a traverse stage and the audience were facing two bare walls.

I made some simple drawings of the stage on Google sketch up to start to put my ideas together. I originally decided of a clinical theme which would connote a hospital so bright white with splashes of hospital green. I was going to have a green carpet down the center of the traverse stage which would eventually be lifted up to reveal a road and the scene of the car crash. I changed my mind after deciding that I wanted a more striking colour scheme of Black white and grey with splashes of red. The red would suggest blood.

 

 

I Then created lots of sketches and ground plans and played around with my ideas before creating a scaled model.