37 Description of Coursework

In dreams, the sky's the limit! This artwork, created using coloured tissue paper on traditional Thai lanterns, was made to remind viewers of the joy of childhood dreams. This joy is not as irrelevant in the stressful system of secondary school as it seems; rather, it is a joy that should, and does, remain in us. Lights inside the lanterns symbolize the flame that fuels our dreams. (These lanterns are, for now, earth-bound, but our dreams are not.)

32 In The Gallery...

Today my friends and I took a stroll around the art gallery during recess and took a minute by my lanterns. Credits to Fiona for helping me take these artistic shots with her phone. (The wonders of technology!)

with a 'dreamy' effect- how apt

the blue one's looking a little deflated*

*I suspected this to be because I didn't iron the blue and green lanterns, but another point my mother suggested is a lack of starch (from the glue), since the red lantern has considerably more/larger elements than the others, which feature mostly dreamcatchers which are drawn on with pen and hence require no glue.

And Then There Was Light. props to Mr Chang for helping me set up the light bulbs

30 Final Chapter of Coursework!

As I may have mentioned in the previous posts, I'm done with my coursework! :) Here are some photos of the end process, end results and my prep boards.

the last lantern, lying out on the table in the mac lab as i put final touches to it (ie feathers and gold foil).

one regret i have is not ironing the last two lanterns. i wasn't quite sure how to do it at home (and my mum kept asking me skeptically, 'IRONING a LANTERN?') and if it really made any difference but after i attached the rims i realized it was probably one of the key reasons my red lantern was the only one that didn't slump slightly. it stands better; now in the gallery my blue one's already a bit deflated.

note to future art enthusiasts: gold foil is VERY messy. i used tweezers at first, but it stuck to the tweezers too and now there's this huge clump of dried foil all around the tweezers. can be washed off fingers, though!

the following photos are how to attach the lantern rim (finishing steps!)

the original rims are attached to the lantern via glue. i bought extra lanterns. each lantern comes with only one rim whereas i adapted mine to have 2, so i cut rims out from the extra lanterns.

the original lantern has a square base at the top but i made mine thoroughly cylindrical, so i cut off the square excess.

attach the rim to the ends with bits of transparent tape. it's just a casual step before the actual glue so you can make sure everything stays in place.

attach super glue to the rim and then fold the paper in. press hard and hold to make sure the paper sticks right.

attach tape over the glued parts again just to be doubly/triply sure. (kiasu mah!)

i had to crawl inside the lantern for this one... reach your hands inside and paste little strips of tape down the middle of the lantern. it's helpful if you have someone at the other end holding it together. then go down it one more time with one long strip of tape.

attach a second rim to the other side.

taa-daa!

prep board 1/8
(top L-R, clockwise) my 'visual mindmap' of fairy tales and old stories; artist statement and inspirational lyric from In Dreams by Enya; pictures of lanterns from Thailand and China; Lola's Magic Ballet Shoes by Tracy Paul; Serenade (Darcey Bussell) by Gordon King; and a more wordy mindmap of ideas/themes associated with 'childhood dreams'.

*i forgot to take pictures of prep board 2/8! many apologies! in it i explored the idea of fairy tales and more ballet with Degas' ballerinas as inspiration... as well as watery paint that got too watery.

prep board 3/8
(top L-R, clockwise): dreamcatcher; Clemence Poesy with a butterfly; mash-up of Clemence and May Angels Lead You In (a Lookbook entry); a painting of a dancer with a dreamcatcher ribbon; references; a man held aloft/carried by birds.

prep board 4/8
(top L-R, clockwise): explanation of thought process; 'Day and Night' compositions using bird, star and castle motifts; song lyric compositions using girl and castle motifs, 'You Make My Dreams'- Hall & Oates and 'Moon River'- Audrey Hepburn; reference pictures of castles; 'What makes a set?' mindmap*; mash-up of ballet and fairy tales.

*since i chose to do a set of 3 lanterns, i had to have some common points or motifs throughout to identify them as a set, as part of a common project. i had different ideas, like same colour schemes... same materials (i chose coloured tissue paper in the end)... and same motifs, like birds/castles/girls/stars (i chose the first 3 in the end). i decided that an interesting way to do it, would be to have the same motifs but in rotation so each lantern would have a diff motif as its chief focus.

prep board 5/8
(top-bottom): a pastel rendering of a screenshot of Tangled; a line-art/pastel work with the girl motif, featuring stars and birds (inspired in part by MC Escher's Day and Night).

prep board 6/8
(top L-R, clockwise): line art on coloured tissue paper on tracing paper; coloured pencils exploring the idea of wings representing hidden potential; artist inspiration from Josephine Wall and MC Escher; a dreamcatcher cut out with feathers; line art paisley prints (inspired by the henna we did last year).

prep board 7/8
top-bottom: line art over blocks of coloured tissue paper, i later decided more exact tissue paper shapes would be better; my colour schemes and draft compositions. the first composition is underneath the flap, which is an experiment i did using coloured tissue paper on transparency (the kind we used to use for our projectors back in primary school... good old days) and watercolour paint on tracing paper for the background.

prep board 8/8
the final compositions, with lantern 101 (how to make a lantern; see pictures above), and a before-and-after shot of the lantern! the blank at the middle right is for a picture of the final works hanging in the gallery, which i haven't taken yet.

my 'babies', as i affectionately call them, hanging in the gallery on the first floor. lights have been installed in them already but i'm hoping to get yellow lights instead of white lights for a warmer glow. it's also more realistic since you normally have fuel cells/candles in the original lanterns!

27 August Updates

Below is a sheet of paper onto which I planned out my colour scheme using the colours I already own- given that the packet of tissue paper comes with a myriad of colours, it's easier to have a visual representation of exactly which blue, or which pink, to use. Also, some very basic sketches of the inside structure of the lantern which I then planned to build and use-- I'll be adapting these later when I finish my lanterns.

 Below are my original sketches for the 3 compositions. I have since edited the bird once to make the birds bigger, and also added dreamcatchers as an element instead of butterflies (final composition all the way below). I'm still working on the girl composition but I plan for it to include dreamcatchers as well.

a completed swallow! I'm really proud of them.

One special thing I'm trying to do, is come up with original dreamcatcher patterns that relate to the lantern. For the bird one above the dreamcatcher's actually made out of five-pointed curvy stars, if you noticed! and for the girl composition I am trying to come up with one based on tiara designs-- I found a book in the school library on the set/costume designing behind the film Lord of the Rings, and I'm now fascinated by patterns.

26 Coursework Updates!

pasting the background!

right side up- what I pasted this Monday

I more or less finished pasting the last of my tissue paper composition on the front on Monday-- so that's two castles and a couple of strange bright pink clouds! Today's Thursday and I just pasted bright red on the back of the lantern (what will be the inside when it's circular).
What I didn't expect was that though the red is bright, it's darker and less obvious from the front- at least, when dried, I think! Besides the fact that I will definitely need more red to cover the full lantern (the area covered in the first picture is all I can for now due to limited amount of red tissue paper!), I probably need to try layering the background as well for a more vibrant colour-- so a trip to Art Friend is definitely in the works soon. I'm thinking of leaving it till the National Day long weekend when I have more time to make a trip-- until then I'll do more layering for the front, and either decorate it or start on the second one. Probably the former.

24 Rise of The Lantern

I have finally started work on Lantern #1!! A lot of practical scheming later (about wooden frames to put into the lantern... and what position to hang it in while pasting... etc etc) Mrs Tan suggested actually cutting out the lantern by the rims using a penknife and cutting along the seams so I get some kind of 2D lantern which can be laid totally flat. A good way to explain it would be like a cube, when it's unfolded and becomes those shapes you see in Math problems... 

I originally bought these long wooden sticks (they're very thin and flexible) from Daiso, 10 in a pack for $2... and I bought 5 packs... turns out they're not the balsa wood that Mrs Tan suggested but by taping three in a stick like so I think it should be reasonably strong, strong enough to maintain the optimal blowsiness of the lantern even when there's no wind. I 'ope!

So I made 7 sticks of 3-thin-sticks-stuck-together...

And after some gymnastics with the lantern trying to see how to fit the wooden sticks in we decided to cut it out by the rim. It felt like cutting away my baby, but there you go.

cutting along the seams...

I mixed Elmer's school glue (below) with a lot of water to create a diluted paste to paste my rice/tissue paper on with since the paper is so thin.

I used rice paper from my test lantern (one of them got torn so it became the 'test lantern') to test the glue mixture because I really don't have a formula for the percentages of water to glue in the mix! I cut off a scrap of yellow tissue paper and it stuck pretty well so I did OK the first time :)

the paint brush i used actually had red paint residue left over so the glue was like white strawberry jam, with red speckles.

first starting...

the day 1 finished state! so that's the first castle about 75% complete. there's still the second castle, the clouds, the background, then perhaps mini dreamweavers and poem lines/song lyrics to pen in, along with the details. oh! and the background, of course!

credits to jun hui for the use of her camera! 

21 A Day of Measurements

I've been rather busy being lazy this holiday, not just with my other homework but with Art! so finally today i settled to do some minor (really minor) sketching and measuring and at least taking my lantern out for a breather. Like psychologically prepping myself for actually working on it, I guess, which I will try to do tomorrow since I have more time. 

coloured tissue paper on transparency sheet (the kind you use for projectors)

This is what I did when I went to school during the first week of the holidays for Art. It took me nearly 4 hours of on-off (mostly 'on') work to finish this, and I discovered that glue and handicrafts aren't for people with fat fingers... That's one pro for a large lantern, I guess!

I measured the lantern by placing it on my bed and blowing the fan right in the middle of it so it would poof up as totally as you can get. (I wonder how I'm going to prevent it from crumpling in on display... and should I hang it upside down from the wires or the proper side up as originally planned? Practical aspects, but important nonetheless.) -- my father just suggested using chopsticks or rattan sticks to stiffen the insides of the lanterns so that they won't implode. Brilliant!

(can you believe how wide the lantern is? that's how tall I was in primary school, I think. around p3-4. Oh my!)

so I made a proportionate sketch measuring 28 x 14 cm, exactly five times smaller than the actual lantern so it's easier for me to mark out where everything goes. Even art has scientific aspects...

measuring the little bits and sticking on colourful post-its.

this is the gradation/toning of colours using tissue paper on the work I previously posted.

I used watercolour paint on white tissue paper as the background, blending dark blue, light blue and white to (hopefully) create an ombre effect. I liked the streakiness of it and thought it would make a brilliant dress, but as a sky, it turned out to be too dark...

the paper kind of lost its translucency,

and some of the castle parts got lost in the vibrancy of the background. Although this kind of reminded me of the little mermaid.

it's not so transparent even when you hold it up to the light, as compared to

the transparency sheet alone, sans background.

the inside of my lantern... it has a circular wooden hoop and thin wires for putting fuel, and a kind of squarish end. it's hellish to fold!

roughly blown up, this's how it looks.

here's to more days of slugging ahead!