Maha's University Blog

Brief

The best way to learn from great painters is to have a conversation with them. The best way to do this is to sit with their paintings and draw them. By this I mean intensively look and record your observations on paper, mark down what you see, unveil and feel with your hand eye, nervous system and imagination. You shall spend the day at the National Gallery using drawing to peel back the surfaces of paintings as you might peel back the layers of an onion to see and understand deeper levels, rhythms, tonal relationships, interlocking abstract shapes, the “music” of the image. You might recognise this from your experiences in sessions last term. The more you draw the more you peel back and the more you see and understand. To quote the painter Patrick Heron – to see the “abstract music of interacting colour (and) form’’.

By the end of the session you will have:

A Series of images in response to the National Gallery

An understanding of how the paintings work

A understanding of the worth of ”copying”

Increased confidence in drawing

An insight in how you might directly use some of the ideas you see in your own work

What I took away from this 

The Brief:

A one day workshop introduction to Unity. You shall explore Unity by creating a virtual gallery space to show off your drawings, your own personal digital Tate!

In groups of 2 (with maybe an odd group of 3) you shall:

Explore the Unity interface to understand layout and definitions that help you navigate the space

Create an environment with basic elements

Take a look at lighting and colour

Import files (images) to place in the space

Learn how to move around the space as you would in a first-person game

Save and Export for later editing if required

Don’t be concerned with either the seeming complexity of the software (as it is only an intro) nor the fact you are in small groups, with introductions to software such as this 2 brains can be better than one.

About Unity:

You will now look at Unity. Unity is primarily known as a game engine. It allows for building and design of 2D and 3D game experiences or worlds, with which you can define parameters or rules that allow you to interact with the objects in the world in various ways (or more simply make a game). It can also link to creating content for VR experiences in hardware such as Oculus Rift. With the merging of design, animation, film language, games design and future tech such as VR; Unity is a great point at which many of these ideas converge.

My Opinion

I had no idea that a game engine could do so many things. This game engine, can be used to make animation, and could be used to film a scene (because there is a virtual camera) and it can it be also used to create a virtual world and can be used to make explore through a world that I have designed. Also you can Make mazes and stuff. I found this workshop really useful and I really would love to do this again. to continue to learn about unity. 

My game

The Brief:

In Pairs, create a sequence of animation (about 30 seconds long) that explores the use of lip-synchronisation in animation based on interviews from the Museum of Croydon.

Your characters don’t necessarily have to be human (or any other mammal/animal for that matter) – in principle they just need to have "facial features" and "mouths" (preferably lips, teeth and tongues - but not necessarily). Hands and/or limbs are also very helpful to strengthen dramatic effects by emphasising gestures and should be seriously considered.

Your timings are taken from your breakdown of the original soundtrack.

Skills Sets: Finding Your Natural Scale

The Brief 

•Warm up drawings

•Instigate a continuous expanding image ‘’that grows’’ through the session

•Breaking away from traditional perspective

•Building images over time

•Adjusting images as new possibilities present themselves

•Discovery of warped space through the process of looking and        responding

•to use mistakes, movement of people and changing of light (as sun moves across the day) to find and develop new ways of observational image making

What I learnt in this class:

I adored this class. I found it so interesting to see everyones work and the way that there are so many different ways of seeing and interpreting the world around us. Mainly, I learnt the fact that there is no one way to correctly make art. There is no ‘correct’ perspective and actually you can create depth in lots of different ways that are personal to each and every person that attempts it. 

What I want to take forward:

Our Word:

Our Word: TARSUST

tarsust (noun)

pronounciation: ‘tah- suh-st’

Definition: the dusty sediment that falls from burnt toast

In use: ‘I only changed my sheets yesterday and I’ve got Tarsust in them already!’

Friday Tutorial 30th November

During this tutorial we discussed the nature of our word ‘Tarsust’ which means the noun of the crumby parts that come off of burnt toast. The sound of the word or even the physical sound of scraping burnt bits off toast could be even more informative than the visual. I realized at this point that we could even try to incorporate the smell of the burnt toast. The smell of the burnt toast is so distinctive that I feel that people would understand what we were trying to communicate almost immediately with those two elements. We discussed maybe using the idea of burnt bits on a speaker to see how they move and how they jump. We feel that it would be a really strong idea because it shows the nature of the noun ‘Tarsust’ really feels. It also plays with the idea that is naturally in texture is very bitty and almost sandy. Made of small particles. We felt that the bouncing sound would be really clever because it shows this. We also made a couple of storyboards communicating our more basic and simple storyboards.

Tuesday 4th December

I was really unwell today but my group made a box folder with lots of tests that we made today. My group updated me and said that they went through some of the videos and tests we made and said we need to just refine them and make them nice and concise. We need to think about how to communicate each element of our work carefully and try to not make the word too obvious to guess.

Our Idea Progress & development 

We want to use toast to some how communicate our idea of tarsust. We wanted to physically burn the toast to either use the tarsust dust themselves or use the toast or both to communicate. We are also planning on burning toast physically in the room on the day of the crit so people are having to use all of their senses. 

Context and Referencing

Bruno Munari

Bruno Munari was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity. The post-World-War II period is marked as height of Munari’s creativity as he experimented with several art forms employing ingenious ideas. His early experiments altered the stereotypical graphic designing and typography.  Later he developed book-objects, transforming children’s books into attractive learning instruments. His books feature textured, tactile surfaces and cut-outs to make it easier for children to learn about tactile sense and color via kinesthetic learning.

In his book Alla faccia, Bruno Munari creates countless faces through different types of 'signs’. Each is different, yet they are all recognisable, demonstrating how a single concept can be infinitely expressed. I find the way that Bruno Munari thinks of wording and language as more than just a last minute thought is very interesting as he really considers texts and communication ideas. For example, underneath I have picked an example where It is almost like a puzzle to be able to understand what all the faces mean . Each and every face is expressive and communicates in a way that is clear and concise.

Something else that Bruno Munari is Speak Italian: The Fine Art of the Gesture (UK; public library) — a charming, quirky, minimalist guide to Italians’ expressive nonverbal communication originally published in 1958 as a supplement to the Italian dictionary, inspired by The Ancients’ Mimic Through the Neapolitan Gestures, the first collection of gestures made by Canon Andrea de Jorio in 1832. Unlike the hefty and sparsely illustrated 380-page original tome, however, Munari’s pocket-sized version features frugally descriptive text and ample, elegant black-and-white photographs of hand-gestures for everything from mundane activities like reading and writing to emotive expressions of praise and criticism. He said ‘We have collected a good many gestures, leaving aside vulgar ones, in order to give an idea of their meaning to foreigners visiting Italy and as a supplement to an Italian dictionary.’

This is such a gorgeous idea and concept because it’s personal to italian hand gestures and considers communication in a way that a lot of people do naturally when they speak but without even realising it. It is very relatable to me as I know I use hand gestures a lot

Pdf for project:

Crit Friday 7th Decemeber 

During todays crit, we presented our video and our pdf. In the pdf we showed our research and development and how we chose how we wanted to communicate our word paired with how we wanted to communicate the definition of our word. Some of the notable feedback was: 

Some things were highlighted during the crit. For example, whether it was necessary to have all of the different elements to our piece. For example, we wanted to burn the toast in the room to create the smell as well as the sound and imagery we paired it with in the video. The reason we wanted to have the smell of burning toast was to add an almost second tier impact. This would have been effective as we felt that it would give the suggestion of the noun we were trying to communicate even before the video. In this way I would stand by the decision of having smells and textures as a part of our presentation. We also got the feedback to perhaps incorporate a tune that creates more of a narrative, if we decide to take the definition down a slightly different route. 

What would you do with more time?

This workshop was called umm..errr...ahh and was about how to convert words into my visual representations or depictions. It was a very interesting workshop that I really enjoyed as I found that it made me realise that there are simple ways to avoid having an art block even if it is just to act out a word. I made notes about how we converted each word we’ve been given for example over excited was seen as the colour yellow and the sound effect was eeeee. I shall attach images below of some examples of ways we communicated these words such as  overexcited, disappointed, moving from left to right etc.. I will also show some photos of examples we were given to refer to  before the brief.

Friday Tutorial 30th November