The Life and Times of an artist in training

Los Angeles sure looks beautiful from 10,000 feet in the air -- a kaleidoscopic circuit board of a city. Photographer Vincent Laforet has taken aerial photos over several major American cities, including New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas. This... stunning

As a single woman, photographer Suzanne Heintz found herself increasingly under pressure to hurry up and get married and have kids. She didn't like this pressure to conform. So she decided to fight back in an unusual and humorous way, taking a series of garish photographs of herself posed with mannequins, meant to represent her non-existent husband and child. Check it out! this is serious work we artists do ;) , can you imagine her airplane bills :/

some good quality examples of more traditional graffiti 

Short film i did for uni, composing images of me ACR work , please play as loud as possible

The recent set of pieces i made last week havn’t turned out that good. The ‘A’ turned out ok but the ‘C’ cracked at one point and the ‘R’ cracked in a few places, even after applying very strong 2 part epoxy resin in copious amounts and giving it a couple of days to dry the the pieces still cracked when i tried to wall mount them. I’ve had to lay them on the floor which isn’t what i wanted. I think the main problem was the mix was too dry and the tool room where i rested them was facing the sun for 2 hot days and the Victorian heating was on full blast, which dried the cement out far too fast, there where cracks appearing an hour after pouring.

I decided on a 6″ wide wooden frame with a slant to give the the image more substance, a 2″ frame would have been far to thin. I was going to go to B&Q however my old building boss took me to a local builders yard where i saved half the cost.  I ordered the wood cut to a strict 6′ and 4′ size (with a few spare cutoff pieces)  so it’d would be easier to place around the image,,,however this was a major booboo as i didn’t take into consideration the fact that the edge of the rame would cut into the head on both images... So i ended up having to cut the smaller 4′ lengths in half then add a 2′ section. this solved the problem of the image being cut, however it means there are 2 joins in each section as you can see in the above images, even after repeated sanding and filling  you can still see the join, i’ve also had to screw the whole main frame to a series of battens on the back, also i’ve added flat corner  brackets to the back of the 45 degree angled cuts.

Pouring the plaster mix into the mould, which i tried making with loose boards held together by clay...resulting in an unfortunate incident where as i was making the next cast the wall fell away a few mintues after these images were taken, resulting in me and a large section of floor getting covered in plaster. So from now on i’ll be fixing the frames using small screws and a hand drill. Also, why oh why is there never enough in just one bucket of plaster mix ?? always i have to mix another small quantity to pour on top. Either i need bigger builders buckets or to make smaller moulds. Above you can also seeing the resulting concrete pours drying in the sun in the tool room.

I drew the basic shape to scale from the preliminary tags i’d made and here you can see me laying the basic blocks of clay, after this part i’l constantly fill and scrape and smooth the clay adding slices of different thickness of clay to raise the levels, also i like to use rather a lot of water (well quite a few drippings) at the end stage to ‘polish’ the clay off.

I’m carrying on making a few more concrete forms before assesment, and i’ve decided to try casting separate letters with varying heights involved within the structure. With all the new pieces i’v got on the go i approximate i’ll need a couple of big bags of builders sand, and a large bag of stones from the pet store, also i’m going to try putting different food colouring in the water which i mix with.. Like most of the pieces i’ve made so far these will have metal bolts sticking out of the back so i can drill holes in my partition walls and mount them. 

 I’ve taken the clay out of the plaster and am really pleased with how its turned out, no air bubbles, Ok, the tubes of clay need picking out with a toothpick buy hey..beggers can’t be choosers.  It’ll also mean i’ll have to now, when pouring the concrete, make a fine grout like mix for the small holes and instantly pour on a mix with aggregate  stones in, but thats for another day.   

I really enjoyed making this piece, i wanted to build up the somewhat traditional colour inner shapes that grafitti artists use in their work., it’ll cause problems when i’m trying to 1/ tale they clay out of the mould and 2/ when i’m pouring the cement into the plaster mould. it’ll have to be quiet a wet mix followed by the same mix allowed to thicken somewhat.  

Whilst reflecting on the last couple of ACR’s i realised the shape of the characters wasn’t right, there was no real style or flow and they seemed stretched out, so i decided to go back to basics and work off an actual marker tag, when you write with your hand and a good pen, marker or brush you can feel the letter form under you, where as trying to draw the shape of say the letter ‘s’ by defining the single lines or even with the edge of a 6″ ruler doesn’t give you the true shape, i always feel its better to write the form with a chisel marker then enlarge it, this gives you the ‘true’ thickness of the letters construction.  The next set of pics up wil show the clay development.l

Coming to the end of the taping stage and if you look at the middle image you can see where the square tape has been stuck down over the curved lines, these will need back painting in with white acrylic which is a tricky prospect, as the surface is bumpy under the tape the ‘in’s and out’s’ will show black and make it look uneven, there’s also a fair few square centimeters to fill in.