University Campus Suffolk

#16

I’ve finished the plan for my next digital piece, taking inspiration from Grimm’s tale ‘Jorinde and Joringel’, depicting an old castle surrounded by a forest.

Admittedly the castle in my image is more inspired from one in a photo I took in France a few years ago, but it fits nicely with the surroundings so I see no harm in it.

Hoping to get this piece finished in the next week or so and then move onto the next digital piece so that I have at least four done in time for the deadline at the start of June.

I have also started to draw out some images in my sketchbook of some of the horrors shown in Grimm’s “The Boy who went forth to learn Fear”.

#15

Looked at a few more artists:

Katharine Pyle

Works are largely made up of black outline illustrations to accompany her stories and poetry. She creates highly detailed pieces to reflect the stories she tells and centres much of her work around her love of animals but also works with traditional faerie figures.

Her work has an almost Beatrix Potter-ish feel to it with the way she sometimes depicts anthropomorphic animals.

Her book, “Tales of Folk and Fairies”: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25913/25913-h/25913-h.htm

For me it seems as if Pyle sees folklore in an almost playful manner from the way that she depicts it. Her works have a contrasting feeling of fun to them as opposed to mine which have an underlying morbid story to them. I felt it best to find an artist who had worked this way to show the direction that my work could have taken.

Past exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum: http://www.delart.org/exhibitions/katharinepyle_folkfaires

W. Heath Robinson and Jean De Bosschère

Both artists have depicted demonic images, however they show them in such a way that the evil is being pushed back and beaten down, repelled by the “good” forced that are shown, be that light, or music, etc.

I wanted to include these two as they are the first artists I’ve seen while doing this to depict demons using such bright colours. They are usually shown in dark and ‘disgusting’ colours that point more towards death, but in these works they are just as bright as the other figures.

#14

After my tablet was fixed I was finally able to finish working on my candles picture.

At last I can forget about drawing that many candles! My suffering is over!

#13

The last few months have seen a series of technical errors for me. Not exactly ideal seeing as my work depends heavily on technology working in order to actually make my work. But, as is the way with life, my graphics tablet broke and I was unable to produce any digital work for a while, which, as you can imagine, led to a downward spiral of panic on my part. Then, just as I managed to get a new tablet and start working properly again, my printer/scanner broke, leading to (you guessed it) more panic!

Problems have now been resolved, thanks to some begging to the parents, thank goodness, but it has meant that I have fallen behind on things again (ARGH!)

Right! Onto my work:

I have finished my few pieces of work centring on the nixie faeries, though admittedly the painting I did out of my sketchbook isn’t how I would have like it to turn out – the composition isn’t ideal and I haven’t gotten the foreshortening quite right, but we’re too close to the deadline now for me to have time to fix it unless I get the rest of my work done first.

This piece has caused me particular agro as I was advised not to draw figures for this project anymore, however, I like drawing figures and don’t really want to stop – especially since a large amount of what I am looking at within folklore and fairy tales centres heavily on people and creatures that very much look human. Granted ‘pretty’ isn’t ideal for nightmare images, but the whole point of nixie beauty is deception.

What I also got from this talk with my tutor was to experiment with how my work is going to be displayed more – whether digital screens or projection would be better. I’ve since looked into it and using screens would be impossible without incurring massive costs – I really can’t afford it – and I have tried projecting some of my work and while I think that the impact is good, because they have been stretched so big, some of the finer details are lost. Personally I still think that printouts work better but mounting them on white instead of black might prove to be a better option (but I haven’t tried it yet because of the aforementioned printer problems).

I’m starting to have problems trusting technology.

Something I have decided on, though, is to display my sketchbook paintings in a book alongside my digital work, along with the text from the stories that accompany them.