Saturday 18 December 2010

Website is coming along nicely :)

For a Technophobe such as myself the prospect of setting up my own website was a daunting one and im not ashamed to admit that my first reaction was to get someone else to do it- must have been my inner damsel in distress coming to the fore front. So i talked to a Graphic Designer friend and he agreed to do it for me and at first i was more than willing to let him. However i thought that it would be a much better idea to learn it myself, i found the prospect of creating a blog daunting and i managed to do that just fine so what was to stop me making a website? Well the fact that i'm an over clicker was a bit of a problem at first- you know the way your mum can't work the DVD player and just repeatedly hits the same button over and over to no avail? well i'm just like that! We've been having indexhibit lessons every tuesday with Michel Corker but the fact that ther's 20 in the class and everyone seems to be having the same problems setting it up- i wasn't learning much- so i turned to the same Graphic Designer friend who i wanted to palm the job off on in the first place and asked him to teach me, show me what to do but not do it for me and i have to admit that my earlier fears are now non existent! I'm finding it relatively easy, dare i say fun. However i haven't compleatly changed i now have the daunting task of picking work i actually like to put on it :/

Thursday 9 December 2010

The Exhibition Poster

This is the final A4 exhibition poster, i am very happy with it, working with Liam was very easy something  which i have not had before in a collaborative project and it got done so fast, just 3 days from brief-idea-design-making. The screen printing process has always seemed a bit of a daunting prospect before but working with someone who is so confident with the tecnique made me feel at ease and not only did we get the promotional posters done but i now feel confident with a new process.

Tuesday 7 December 2010

Running around like a headless chicken

Today was a bit of a hectic one and only my second day of trying to curate, the feedback and the very fact that we had asked people to re-submit work for this exhibition did not go down well, not at all. When i left uni last night at 9pm thinking that i'd had a good first day at this curation thing, having left at least a stack of 25 handwritten feedback forms and a poster telling people to come see me, the people who had gotten the feedback did not feel the same way. I had a groups of first and second years who where not happy, so i spent my morning trying to explain why the curation team had (i don't want to use the word rejected) felt the way they did and giving them advice as how to improve their work (something i felt that the third years would have not done for me when i was a first year) However i feel that positivity is the better way of getting problems solved. So the second half of my day was spent running between our studio and the Graphics studio trying to get the exhibition poster designed. One thing i learned about Graphic designer today - no matter what u ask them to do they have there own ideas! One of my first ideas was to have the A4 posters A4 sized - apparently this is a no no! and a Graphic designers cardinal sin- so that was that idea out of the window! Then he asked could he play around with the name - to which i said "sure give it ago"
to return an hour later to find out the posters now bore the title 210 x 297 - the standard A4 size- whilst i liked it - i didnt think most people would know the size of an A4 piece of paper and know what that meant on a poster "for chrissakes its an art college they should know" was the reply i got. If im honest i didnt think that most of my own class would know that so i used my vito. I didn't want to ask to much of liam as he was doing me a favor, the only things i wanted to be on the poster was an A4 sized space and the information i had given him, the rest was trial and error until we got a series of layouts that we both liked that i then i showed them to Dan and Paula and we all picked one to go with. So tomorrows job is to get it ready for screen printing and hopefully we will get in done in one day .

Monday 6 December 2010

A4 exhibition week

So it is finally here the week of prepertation and getting the studio ready to exhibit all of the submitted work. Todays task was a lot harder than expected the curation team which consisted of myself and fellow third year students Becky Elliot and Brad Hodgson had the delightful task of sorting thorough the work a task that was mammoth to say the least. Upon our initial inspection of the work it was apparent that not all of the work was of the standard we had expected and our day was spent separating the work we fell was 'up to scratch' and the work that wasn't, which is not a task that we took lightly. We  decided that we wanted to give everyone who's work we felt needed changing the chance to re-submit and my entire day was spent writing notes to those people on ways they could tweek or change their submissions. My goal was to encourage and help but it felt a much harder task given that all of the re-submissions were fellow students on the same course. We decided to leave each of the re-submission notes along with the work in each of the students pigeion holes with a note to come see a member of the curation team who would then have a one to one conversation with the aim that they could re-submit on wednesday. I left uni today feeling terrible this was not what i had expected

And wallah it's finished


And it only took 44 hours 41 minutes and 14 seconds i don't think i could have made that time up. Right now looking at it blue tacked onto my bedroom wall i feel the sense of accomplishment that i always feel when compleating a project especially when its 5 in the morning and i'm compleatly exhausted. I shall sleep tonight, well i'll sleep for roughly 3 hours until i have to get up again and go and hand it in. :( But at this moment in time i couldn't be any happier, It's done, i don't have to live with it anymore and it will be at least a week before i have to see it again! job done now its time for me to crawl in to bed and give my aching back and strained eyes a rest ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 

Wednesday 1 December 2010

Snow not the right context

As i have been procrastinating a lot lately about what to do with my frame, my tutors advice today was to just go out and do it- i.e take photographs of it in and around leeds. However its been snowing pretty heavily the past few days in leeds, and not only did i freeze my arse off all of the photographs look pretty much the same- like really bad christmas cards (what with the snow and the gold and all....) 








I am still at a loss of how i shall display or 'exhibit' the frame but at least i know i shall have to wait for the snow to melt.