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!

29 Wish You Were Here

above is a photo manipulation i made on photoshop. i usually blend images together using the clone tool and use curves to try and make their colour schemes compatible if the originals were shot in different lighting (i usually do manips for film screenshots), but this time i decided to do something a little more jarring. so i took a photo from gabrielle angeline photography (her website is here), made it black and white, and cropped it in a very angular fashion... then i set it against a picture of a sunrise, which i got from google images and then put to high contrast.

i don't really like how the background turned out but you may be interested to know that this was inspired by the set of postcards currently hanging in front of the sinks in the mac lab. one of them reads: i wish you were here/ because that would make the rest of my day. i thought it was brilliantly creative and set the second line as the 'subtitle' of this photo when i posted it to tumblr.

unfortunately my personal computer crashed at the beginning of term 4 and took my photoshop down with it. i've been having withdrawal symptoms since, especially since i only just started rediscovering some of the better functions of photoshop and exploring with photo manipulations.

28 The Princess and the Pea

I'm not sure if it will work but clicking on the picture above should lead to the source.

I've finished my coursework! More pictures to come later but I'm immensely proud of how far I've come. In fact, I feel somewhat vulnerable with the lanterns hanging in the gallery already. I'm constantly scared strong wind or careless hands will tear the paper.

Above is The Princess and the Pea. I'm reminded again of how much I love fairy tales, and not just the obvious ones like Cinderella. When I was young my mother used to buy me all these illustrated books with obscure fairy tales with beautiful drawings. (Hence the wish to be a princess. I assumed all of them were born fantastically beautiful, just like that.) I can't remember them all now, but a fun fact: I found out one of my favourites was based on King Lear! Wow.

My personal computer broke down a few weeks back, bringing my Photoshop down with it. But I'm looking forward to using it again, perhaps in school, so I can post more artwork here. (Ah! non-coursework artwork! a rarity.)

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.

25 Posters

recently my mum suggested that I try out product design, and when I asked her what it was, she was like, "you know, you said you like Ikea... like, you know, chairs!" and I'm like, "CHAIRS??? Can you imagine CNY visits? 'What do you do, Grace?' 'I design chairs.'" And I was all laughing and stuff and couldn't take it seriously. but then now whenever i go out and see something and i'm like, "i love this! the design totally makes me want to buy it! it pops! it's so unique, so simple, so graphic!" and my mum wiggles her eyebrows and says slyly, "product... design..."

I would have been OK with it had she not suggested chairs as an initial example. Thanks, mum.

Anyway, aside from product photography/design I really like using photoshop to create posters and "magazine spreads", etc etc, which is what sparked off my idea of working in a magazine so I can write AND do this graphic thing at the same time. not to say i'm definite about wanting that as a career, but it's an idea.
---

first off, some posters I did for my cca's publicity at the sec 1 cca exhibition this year.

i edited the penguin books cover! i love this one

this was the original concept for all the subgroup posters; i wanted it to be kind of vintage and outlandish

---

then some notebook covers for some handmade notebooks my class was selling for funfair this year.

the words on the burnt slip say 'social butterfly'

---

sometimes i do moodboards on photoshop for the fun of it. i think of it as fake magazine spreads.

---

some publicity posters for my class's booth for funfair this year... just playing on people's fandoms, of course! our taylor swift and shinee ones got stolen off the walls- i don't know if i should take that as a compliment or not because we'd actually already 'choped' the posters amongst ourselves in class to keep after the funfair.

they're all basically the same layout but with different boxes and fonts. 

I also do the design for my cca's newsletter, INKED. you can check out all the spreads here! (shameless advertising)

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!