Thursday 15 April 2010

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This is the media product that I have chosen and which is the final piece drawing that I submitted for my A-level Art. The reasons that I have chosen this piece of drawing are because it can be visually-led with plenty of cues and art direction in order to emphasis the visual aspects of it.
‘Plants’ was the topic for this piece of work and there were both primary source and secondary source within this piece of drawing. I have also chosen an artist who is well-known in drawing flowers as a reference for my work. Furthermore, I have used different types of color media, such as color pencils, pastels and water colors etc….in order to provide a mixture of different drawing styles. In addition to that, as we can see from the photograph; I have used some dry flowers and leafs to surround the edges of my drawing in order to emphasis the topic of my work – plants.
My concept idea behind this piece of drawing was to simulate a visual view of our eyes when looking into a forest or garden; we would be able to see different types of plants and flowers. And it would be as beautiful and colorful as this picture. And last but not least, the dry flowers and leafs on the edges were used to emphasis the topic; and the main idea was to give a mixture of realistic and painting since the concept of the whole piece of drawing was to simulate a visual view of human eyes.

Wednesday 7 April 2010

1




This is just a simple photograph of the side view of a book. There are no special effects or any special photographic techniques applied to this photograph; however, the reason why I have chosen this image was because of the creative idea of the photographer.
As we can see above, the pages of the book have been split into two halves and bended inwards. Therefore if we look from the side, we will be able to see a heart shape.
By looking at this photography and understanding the concept behind it, I realised that it’s very important that sometimes we look, think or read things from different aspects in the media industry. And by doing that, we will be able to understand things more clearly and completely in order to generate more different ideas and creative concepts; therefore we might at the end get an unexpected result.

2




The oil painting above is a typical example of Pop Art. Pop Art is a 20th century art movement that utilized the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture. Pop Art developed in the late 1950’s as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and flourished in the 60’s and early 70’s.
It is not difficult to notice Pop Art images through our day life since we can easily find it on advertisements, magazines or comics. Furthermore, Pop Art favoured figural imagery and the reproduction of everyday objects, such as logos, soup cans, animals etc…. And most of the Pop Art images are simple and colourful; and sometimes artists apply different colours to different copies of the same images in order to make the paintings look more interesting and to catch people’s attention.

3




This photograph was taken by a camera with fish-eye lens. Fish-eye lens, in other words means a 180 degree wide-angle lens. And by taking photograph with this kind of lens, we will be able to capture everything above, below and around us and compacting them into a circular sphere shape. Therefore, subjects that we shooting on would be twisted and bended around the edges, stretch towards and away from the lens, and also converge their lines towards the center.

4




This photograph was taken in my housemate’s room. The reason why I have chosen this photograph was because of its colour; as you can see above it’s not just a normal black and white photo. This is one interesting function of my camera which allows me to take black and white photo and at the same time, apart from black and white, I can also choose one colour to be emphasized in order to stand out from the photograph.
Use the photograph above as an example, I have chosen red to be emphasized therefore everything which is red would be appeared in its actual colour (red) and all the rest would be in black and white.
In my opinion, I think this photography technique can be very useful as an advertising element. For example it can be used in a product advertisement on magazines in order to make the product stands out from the background.

5




This photograph was taken at my friend’s Japanese restaurant in York. There are different kinds of Japanese style decorations and these two lampshades are one of them. The reason why I took a photograph of these two lampshades was to make a comparison to my last image which shows about depth-of-field. And by taking this photograph I want to show that depth-of-field is not the only way of focusing an object since sometimes we might want to focus on more than one object. For example in this photo, objects we trying to focus might both in the foreground and also in the background. In this case, we need to use a smaller aperture since it allows more of the foreground and background fall within acceptable focus. In other words we can get a sharp image of both objects rather than focusing on one object and making the other object blur. And this is what we called extended depth-of-field.

6




This photograph was taken in my room which shows a foreground image of a teabag label and a background image of my laptop. As you can see the teabag label in front is in a sharp focus and the laptop at the back is blurred. And this is what we called depth-of-field.
Depth-of-field is the amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in a photograph. We can also define depth-of-field as the zone of sharpest focus in front of, behind, and around the subject on which when lens is focused on a specific subject.
Photograph above is a typical example of a photo with shallow depth-of-field control. (Only the main subject of interest is enhanced by throwing other elements out of focus)

7




This photograph was taken at the Mother Shipton’s Cave in Knaresborough. This interesting scene appeared at the half way of my journey. As you can see the photograph shows some moss plant growing on a pond; the reason why I found it interesting was because the way how they grew is similar to a world map.

8




This photograph was taken in Leeds city centre at mid-night with my Canon EOS 50D. I used the timer mode as well as the shutter-priority mode. And of course it was crucial that I had my camera connected to the tripod under the shutter-priority mode in order to prevent blur caused by camera shake.
Shutter-priority mode allows us to adjust the amount of time that the shutter curtains remains open and marks the beginning and end of the exposure. The longer it stays open, the more lights that enters, which allows us to shoot in much darker conditions than we might think are possible.
I set my camera to shutter-priority mode of 5sec in order to get the result of the photograph above. As I could remember where I took this photograph, it was much darker than what we can see from the photograph above. In addition, there was a combination of moving cars with my long exposure; it allows me to record light trails as shown above.

9




This photograph was taken during my holiday to Scotland. This is one of the photographs that I like the most according to its composition, colour and difficulties. Again, I used the timer mode, shutter-priority mode and the tripod. But this time I set the shutter speed to 8 seconds rather than 5 seconds since there were less lights and much darker. I also appreciated by the reflections on the river of both the buildings and the bridge.

10




This photograph was taken in Roundhay Park when I was walking my dog with my housemate, in which it shows my dog running on the field. The reason I choose this photograph is to make a comparison to the last two photographs. Again, I used the shutter-priority mode when taking this photograph; however, this time I set a much faster shutter speed of 1/100 second. Since a fast shutter speed allows me to freeze the subject that I am focusing on, therefore you can see my dog looks static even when he was running.

11




California born artist John Pugh paints large scale trompe l’oeil images. “Trompe l’oeil” means “trick the eye” in French, which is an illusionary art technique with a long history in Western art. The intention is to create an optical illusion, in that the viewer is given the impression that there is a three dimensional object or scene before them, not just a realistic image.
Since images are usually on the sides of buildings that reveal impossible dimensions to a flat wall. Therefore in my opinion, I think this painting technique could be very useful for advertising since it attracts people’s attention when they go pass them.

12




Joseph Mallord William Turner is one of the most famous and important English landscape painters of the Romantic era. The history painting above Dido Building Carthage or The Rise of The Carthaginian Empire; which Turner considered as one of his greatest work. Turner so loved this painting that he requested his body be wrapped in the canvas upon his death. He eventually thought better of that and donated this painting to the National Gallery in London.
Furthermore, Joseph Mallord William Turner has always been one of my favorite artists as well. I used his paintings as my references and sometimes I also applied his style of painting to my work during my study of A-level Art. I especially like the way how he paints since he was good at using an emotional drama of color in order to create an atmospheric effects, which led to dramatic canvasses rolling with waves and clouds.

13




Johnnie Scoutten is a designer and creative director who also paints and draws in a variety of media. He image shown above, for example, is one of a series of close-ups of cat faces done in pastel and, in particular, in colored pencil on drafting film.

14




Brooks Shane Salzwedel draws ephemeral landscape images in layers of graphite, tape and resin. His images are largely monochromatic but within their gray and black tones they have a style that are similar to Chinese or Japanese ink painting. Furthermore, his unusual approach of painting gives his images a delicate feeling of peaceful and mystery.

15




Juan Gallego is a Spanish painter. Most of his works are technically floral paintings. Gallego is especially good at painting close-ups of flowers forms that are convoluted, multi-layered and often have a wrinkled or withered appearance.
Juan Gallego is another one of my favorite artist. I have also chosen him as the artist for my study of A-level Art in which to get references and to generate ideas for my final piece. The main reason that I like him so much was because I am personally a big fan of photography and within Juan Gallego’s paintings; there are always different kinds of photographic techniques involved in it. Juan Gallego also uses photographs as references of his paintings which allowed him to play with the illusion of focus in areas of his canvasses; giving his works both depth-of-field and compositional structure. Therefore if we take a closer look at his painting, we can obviously see that most of the flowers are very detailed.

16




Vasily Surikov was probably the foremost history painter in Russia. He was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Surikov would spend months or years gathering background information, costuming details and biographical studies; and producing multiple preliminary sketches to create his large scale historical works. He also often painted the same scene in differing sizes, either as a preliminary or as a variation on a larger or smaller version. He also produced many individual portraits, landscapes and watercolors.

17




Daniel E. Greene is known as one of the most important portrait artists in the US. He has created portraits of numerous leaders in industry, government, academia, science, art, medicine and other areas.
Greene works in oil for many of his portraits, but in fact he is a master of using pastel. During my study of A-level Art, Daniel D. Greene was one of the first artists who took my attention due to the high quality of his portraits; and by looking through his portraits allowed me to learn in different aspects in order to improve my painting skill of using pastel for portraits. For example, by learning from his portraits I realized that it’s very important that to capture the expressions and the appearance of the subject in order to create a little nuances that a photograph could never duplicate. Furthermore, I learnt the way how he plays with lights and shadows in order to make my portraits look more realistic.

18




The Milkmaid, sometimes called The Kitchen Maid; is an oil canvas painting of a milkmaid, by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. However the exact year of the painting’s completion is unknown. This painting clearly shows a housemaid in a kitchen carefully pouring milk into a container on a table. Also on the table are various types of bread. And also a foot warmer on the floor behind her.

19





Luc Desmarchelier is an art dierctor at Sony Pictures Entertainment as well as a concept and visual development artist who has also done work for DreamWorks Animation and Universal Studios.
The reason why I like his paintings a lot is because of his great sense of place, season and time of day; when I look through his works, I could feel like I am reading the story his travel adventure instead of just pieces of paintings. Besides, most of his works are in pencil, sketches and watercolors which remind me of a minimal and relaxing feeling. Furthermore, as we can see from the painting above; it’s not quite similar to the reality and is not very rich in details; however he would rather use an easier and simple way to express.

20




Vincent's Bedroom in Arles is one of the artist's best known paintings. The striking colours, unusual perspective and familiar subject matter create a work that is not only among Van Gogh's most popular, but also one of his own personal favourites. There are five versions of this painting: three oil on canvas and two letter sketches. This specific painting, now in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, was the first of the three oils that Van Gogh produced. Furthermore, because Van Gogh was so pleased with the painting he described it at great length in letters to his family. In fact, Vincent describes this painting in no less than thirteen letters.