Shauna the grinch

My Tumblr

2010-06-02T20:15:00.003+01:00

I have been neglecting my blogspot quite a bit lately, when I finish uni (2 days away!) I will resume blogging, it will be an even better blog!
Instead of larger posts which I do seem to always end up doing I have a Tumblr blog. I quickly post and re-blog all sorts of crap on that regularly, but it's often tv related (my true love), there are arty bits too though, check it out if you desire in the meantime :)

http://shaunaspace.tumblr.com/

Refraction Rainbow

2010-03-14T00:04:00.004Z

In my house, the light use to shine through the window, hit the mirror then produce a lovely mini rainbow on the wall. But now we have blinds I noticed it was slightly different pattern as the light was broken by the blind slats. It looked cool so I took some photos then played around with adjusting the blinds to change the rainbow.
Reminded me a bit of Star Trek: The Motion Picture Poster hehe.

Kangaroo Cards

2010-03-11T23:51:00.001Z

Here are some cards I made for a card sale at uni to raise money for our degree show. As Mothers Day was coming up I had the idea of cute mummy kangaroos and little joeys :)
I painted it with purple hair dye! haha! Was much brighter before i scanned it but I still think it still came out quite nice.

"Plump but not tasty"

2010-03-03T21:39:00.004Z

Last week I finally finished reading "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. The last chapter was called 'Goodbye', about extinction, it was very sad. Here are some extracts:

"A rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some 1,300 kilometers off the east coast of Madagascar. There some forgotten sailor or sailor's pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behaviour of human beings.
You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being - a species of organism that is capable of unraveling the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight, it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squarking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up.
What is known of the Dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family ... It was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak-tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, digs and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683, and most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again"

"The lovely Carolina parakeet. Emerald green, with a golden head, it was arguably the most striking and beautiful bird ever to live in North America - parrots don't usually venture so far north, as you may have noticed - and at its peak it existed in vast numbers, exceeded only by the passenger pigeon. But the Carolina parakeet was also considered a pest by farmers and easily hunted because it flocked tightly and had a peculiar habit of flying up at the sound of gunfire (as you would expect), but then returning almost at once to check on fallen comrades."

Those parakeets sound so sweet and cute :'( it made me cry reading about them. Poor green birds, the world would look so much nicer with them flying about the place. BASTARD HUMANS! Also imagine if there were still Dodos waddling about the place too, it would be so cool, poor defenseless creatures! So yes I was too sad to go to sleep after reading all that, I turned the TV on and watched an ep of Curb Your Enthusiasm, that distracted me and cheered me up enough to go to sleep.
I drew this in my visual diary to remind me of the day:

"Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers."

Our turn next. BRING ON THE TERMINATORS!

Black Eyed Peas - "Imma Be Rocking" music video

2010-03-03T01:10:00.006Z

Today I happened to catch a bit of Black Eyed Peas new video for "Imma Be Rocking That Body". It's a pretty damn awesome video! I wasn't feeling the tune at first but after watching the video again now and making screen caps, it's grown on me already. But nevermind the song, look at the video, metal plated armour-like outfits, crazy futuristic guns, dancing robots, metal masks! Great outfits and visuals :D, god damn i love that aesthetic. I want Fergies outfit! The robots are a bit like harvester terminators only less terminate-y haha. The video is dead long, it doesn't properly start til 1.45 incase you don't wanna watch it all.

Whilst we are on the subject.. their last video was also cool :)

Futuristic Clothes from the book 'Fear and Fashion'.

2010-02-22T21:04:00.007Z

I found an awesome book in the library a few weeks ago called "Fear and Fashion in the Cold War" by Jane Pavitt. It was just what I was looking for. It's full of photos of futuristic fashions, mainly made in the 1960s. I scanned some of the most interesting:

Frank Horvat, American man and woman in spacesuits. 1963: The kid makes me laugh, he looks like he just wants to get away from his 'weirdo' parents hehe!

Alice Edeling, tunic and boots in metallic fabric. the Netherlands, late 1960s:

Emilio Pucci, 'Space bubble' helmet for Braniff airlines, 1965: When I saw this I thought it was just some futuristic fashion shoot but no, the book says that this was actually worn by the air hostesses for a while (until they found it annoying)!! The idea was though that it would stop their hair from blowing all over the place when they got onto the run way, how cool is that!

Giji Bakker, neck ornament shoulder piece aluminium, 1967:

Paco Robanne, "Everything is made of steel", 1968:

Gijs Bakker. Emmy Van Leersum and Tiny Leeuwenkamp. 1970:

Models in metal sheets from the film Qui etes-vous, Polly Maggoo, 1966:

Vaclav Cigler, Circle Framing Face, 1968:

Haus-Rucker Co (Laurids Ortner, Gunter Zamp Kelp and Klaus Pinter), Environment Transformers, 1968: This just looks so awesome and weird! I put it on the cover of my dissertation :D

Alan Fletcher Exhibition @ Cube

2010-02-13T11:35:00.000Z

Yes thats right Alan Fletcher..
Nooooo not ^that^ one (unfortunately)! I have actually been to see THE GOOD Alan Fletcher and his band play ^_^. He reached over into the crowd and I reached over and touched his hand. yeahhhhhhhhhhh. [In case you didn't know..Neighbours is one of my top 3 tv shows, the other two being Home & Away and STAR TREK!]

Anyway the exhibition was about the 2nd best Alan Fletcher - the graphic designer.
It was pretty good. You could take photos aslong as you didn't use flash, so the photos are pretty poor but you get the idea. Here are some of the pieces i found most interesting:

There was a series of these called 'This is a drawing' 2004. They just really interested me. I like that it's black and white, a line drawing, a pattern, confusing and the fact he says "Writing is you on paper". That very day i'd just posted a letter. Even though i don't like my handwriting but it doesn't matter because it's more personal however scratty my handwriting is. I did tryyyy to write neater. Ooh and look there's my reflection:

I like seeing inside artists sketchbooks, i like seeing personal and free things like this, it's good to know other designers do crazy scribble-y drawings too:
I really like this, so cool! -
This was interesting, really makes an impact. It said he was in NYC when 9/11 happened and purchased lots of postcards then later did this to them:

I like how unpolished this is, at first glance it looks like a kidlet could have done it, but it made me laugh. I like it being all muddled up with the colours and names, it's just random and cool :p:

a nosey at MOSI

2010-02-11T23:45:00.006Z

I visited MOSI (Museum Of Science and Industry) on Monday. I'd never been before, but had been meaning to go for a while. The first time I heard about it was in first year of uni, from a German girl visiting Manchester, she went and thought it was awesome!
I didn't look around it all, mainly just the Air and Space hall. There wasn't that much space stuff anyway. There is a Chinese space exhibit on at the moment on the upper balcony thing. I didn't like the crappy typography they had, and the fact i could see loadsa cellotape on all the banners :S. I took a few photos before my camera died ¬_¬.
Can't remember what it said this is..but it looks damn cool! I love how angular it is and the little rivet/bolt things! I makes me think of some sort of alien/futuristic bomb/weapon! I think it spins around (a bit like the Xindi superweapon but not as advanced) and shoots lasers and dematerializes people/aliens/cats/penguins.

Here's a crappy picture in bad lighting of some models of rockets, they were a bit crap and look like they would topple over if you stood on a floorboard too close, they didn't though:

THE BEST thing I saw, Enterprise NCC-1701-D model! I nearly missed it as well. Deffo brought a grin to my face! My trekkie friends said it's left over from the Star Trek exhibition they had there about 10-15 years ago! Wish they had that again now!

I also went in the mini planetarium they have in there for a show of the stars, £1.50 thats alright to say the rest of the place is free to get in. I sat next to a mannequin in a astronauts suit and he was perched on a wheely computer chair, a bit weird. He wouldn't survive very long in space though because his arm was hanging off...

The Unknown

2010-02-07T15:35:00.008Z

I've been getting kinda freaked out recently because soon it will be the end of uni and I have no idea what I'm gonna do. But It's ok because I just watched DS9 and listening to Sisko trying to explain human existence and linear time to the worm hole aliens made me feel better. If you look at it one way, not knowing what will happen is exciting.

"That may be the most important thing to understand about Humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day. And we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you with weapons or ideas, but to co-exist and learn."
- Commander Benjamin Sisko

Clip from the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, episode "Emissary Part 2".

"Day and night the same - blank. Precisely like death."

2010-01-24T18:54:00.008Z

For the last project I did, the brief I chose was the Don't Panic poster with the theme of 'Resistance'. I decided to look at resistance and time. The area of this I chose was memory. I had been inspired by a tv show I saw on BBC4 called 'Time' presented by Dr Michio Kaku. One segment of it was about a pianist called Clive Wearing, who for 25 years he has been suffering from anterograde amnesia. This is when new memories cannot be formed any more. Like in the film Memento, 50 First Dates, also what Archer had in the episode Twilight from season 3 of Star Trek Enterprise. Clive's is the worst case known, he can only remember things for about 30 seconds or less before forgetting again. Every time he sees his wife it's like its for the first time in years, it's really sad. Here's a clip of it:

For my poster i'd decided to draw Clive in profile then have a representation of his thoughts going through his head in a strip. As well as that I had the idea of having a sieve behind him (memory like a sieve), I thought it would represent him forgetting and look quite cool and sieves are a bit strange for on a poster. My first thought was a film strip for his memories, I added a quote his said on top:

"I've never seen anyone at all.
I've never heard a word until now.
I've never had a dream even,
Day and night the same - blank.
Precisely like death.
No thoughts at all.
Brain has been inactive."

The film strip wasn't quite working out. I then came up with a great alternative! Musical note lines..i'm not a musical person at all, can't remember what they are called but you know the things, 5 horizontal lines the notes sit on. It was perfect! It fit in much better with the style of the poster which was simple line drawings. I studied what the different parts meant of the sheet music and decided to just use the horizontal lines, treble bass and the end thin and thick vertical lines to show the end of the 'song' or memory in this case. I then had the cool idea to repeat the end lines 2 more times along the horizontal lines to represent that memory being forgotten and totally at its end. I placed the quotes in a way which looked like strike through because Clive sometimes writes in a diary but forgets after he has written a line then crosses it out as he doesn't believe he has wrote it. It's all there in my poster.

I'm really pleased with it. It shows his brain resisting new memories and himself trying to resist forgetting. His memory is resisting normal time, to him it is as if he has been unconscious for years and in a way he has time travelled to the future, resisting the normal passage of time. This was the personal project, and it was personal because I too took on the theme of resistance and resisted my usual urges to crowd pages and make them really colourful, this time I tried being more minimal and simple.

Snow-woman

2010-01-12T20:16:00.002Z

I got back to Manchester yesterday and there was still loadsa snow in our backgarden so we went out and had a play. I stayed out longer though, 2 hours in fact, and built a snowoman :D

I was pleased how it turned out. In my head I had decided I wanted to make an Aenar just so I could put antenna on it but when i built the snow column tall enough and added shoulders and boobs it soon transformed and i decided to leave it sans head. It looks pretty freaky!
I recommend building a snowman for exercise, back and forth grabbing snow from all over the garden for 2 hours, i've bound to have burnt loadsa calories, awesome!

A Short History of my Christmas Holiday

2010-01-05T16:02:00.013Z

Bird feet and cat paw prints in the snow!

22nd December 2009: With flash.

With flash again..

Without flash.. 1am, the sky was peach and illuminated, it looked so eerie and cool! I think we are on Mars, thats the colour the sky is there! It was like day time! It went dark after about half an hour though when it stopped snowing.

My cat Simba is bonkers. I had my suitcase in that same place and he sat on it, then my backpack too! I think he likes that location near me on the computer :)

I have a very intelligent cat:

New Years Eve, I wasn't out partying, I stayed in..well not quite..I went out in the back garden at about 8.30 in my dressing gown with my telescope and gazed at the moon. It was so bright and full, and the sky was so clear. It was freezing, I couldn't feel my fingers! I tried to hold the camera still and take a photo, this was the best outta the bunch, better than my usual attempts of photos of the moon anyway:

Today. I bought this plastic squirrel in a set with a mini plastic racoon from home bargains years ago, I wanted to screw them to the mantel piece in the living room but my parents wouldn't let me, pffft! My Dad put them in the garden instead, and so here is poor Mr.Squirrel covered in snow :(

I thought it would look nice to hang christmas tree baubles on snowy branches outside and add some colour to the ubiquitous white:

I started reading a new book on the train from Manchester to back home. The book is "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. I'd been meaning to read it for a few years, I came across it in the charity shop a few months ago and ever since it's been in my book pile waiting for me to finish "In Search Of The Edge Of Time" by John Gribbin which took forever! I do like to read but it always seems to take me forever coz I read in bed and i'm always too tired so usually I manage about 5 pages then put it down and try and go to sleep. I've been trying to make more of an effort with this book and yesterday I came across some people who get through about 94 and 120 books per year! I really have to pick up the pace! So i've been trying even harder and read during the day instead of watching TV, and got through about 60 pages in the past 2 days, better than 10 in 2 days! I'm a third through the book now, it's really good. Next up after this book is "The Physics of Star Trek" which i'd wanted to read and finally found in a charity shop a few days ago for £1.99 :). Anyway back to the current book, I learn stuff every day from it, the other day I learnt what a Micron is, one thousandth of a millimetre (or equivalently one millionth of a metre or one thousand nanometres). There are lots of cool names for things, here's a paragraph I read last night:

"As physicists build bigger and more ambitious machines, they began to find or postulate particles or particle families seemingly without number: muons, pions, hyperons, mesons, K-mesons, Higg bosons, intermediate vector bosons, baryons, tachyons."

There are interesting and funny facts and stories about crazy scientists and such like this

"John Dalton was an exceptionally bright student - so very bright, indeed, that at the improbably youthful age of twelve he was put in charge of the local Quaker school. This perhaps says as much about the school as about Dalton's precocity, but perhaps not: we knew from his diaries that at about this time he was reading Newton's Principia - in the original Latin - and other works of a similarly challenging nature. At fifteen, still school mastering he took a job in the near by town of Kendal and a decade after that he moved to Manchester."

And we have a building at MMU named after him! Now I know all about who it was named after. There are a lot of scientists who ended up in Manchester from all over it seems, from reading this book. And this next guy is from the same place as me:

"Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts from corpses and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once, while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlour. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumed that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retreived the head and rushed out again."

This is funny/weird:

"Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of colour seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar."

He didn't find gold but instead found phosphorus.

I recommend the book anyway.

Posters of the Avant Garde Book

2009-11-29T22:08:00.010Z

I found a cool book in the library the other week called 'Jan Tschichold: Posters of the Avant Garde', it's FULL of posters, it's great! I love art books full of pictures :p! They are also very cool posters :) which is even better. I love this style, great structure, and simple yet lots going on too. Here are some of my faves from the book -

Jan Tschichold:

Max Burcharz - Tanz Festspiele (dance festival):

Jan Tschichold:

Theo Van Doesburg & Kurt Schwitters (I'd liked this image for ages):

I quickly took some photos of pages to remember them for inspiration, there were too many to scan in, so they aren't great quality but you get the idea, here are some more from the book that I liked:

'School Trip' to Liverpool Tate Art Gallery

2009-11-08T16:03:00.016Z

A week or 2 ago, a few of us from D&AD went on a 'school trip' to Liverpool to visit the Tate Art Gallery.
More photos of us lot in Liverpool

Yayoi Kusama - The Passing Winter, 2005. It was interesting to see another installation by her as i'd previously seen her 'Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees' (previous post). We weren't allowed to take photos in the Tate but I found images by someone else - Marshall Astor. It looked kinda weird and cool but not that impressive...

*UNTIL* I peered inside the box!! AMAZING! The box had mirrors on the inside as well and it just reflects everything and when you look into it you see your face multiple times and from different angles, it's so weird and awesome. It's like being in an infinate 'inbetween' kinda liminal space, with many directions and routes to take, doorways to alternate universes? I was just stood staring into it for ages and ages!

Something else it reminded me of was the part in The Beatles Film - The Yellow Submarine, which shows Mr Nowhere Man located in..'nowhere' I guess.

Another piece which I saw there and found interesting was Salvador Dali - Lobster Telephone, 1936.

I stumbled upon a piece and instantly recognised the artist it was by - Daniel Spoerri, it was called Prose Poems. I discovered this artists work last year and was interested in it. His work felt familiar to me because I have photographed tables from above at chance compositions. I like that everyday kinda thing which we take for granted, but it is usually ephemeral and then lost and replaced everyday, so it's interesting to capture it in an image. "Spoerri fixed or 'snared' objects found in chance positions on table tops or in drawers. These were hung vertically on a wall, like conventional pictures, and were intended to create visual discomfort in the viewer. In this work, the remains of a meal are preserved on a wooden board that the artist used as a table while living in a small room in a Paris hotel."

I really liked some photographs by Helen Chadwick, I can't really find many online only one, but it was a series of photographs of her 'Ego Geometria Sum' holding objects with her image on the objects, Heres one photo, and then i found some images of just the objects, I think they have an eerie and surreal quality about them, really nice though.

Victor Grippo - Energy of a Potato - 1972. This was quite weird and cool. You could see the potato discoloured where the probes had gone into it's skin and then where the potato had 'bled' and dripped onto the plinth. It was a real potato. poor thing. Cruelty against potatoes. I'm not guilty of killing potatos... nah i never eat chips or crisps.. honest .... not!

This was also cool.. by Gilbert & George - Happy, 1980.

It was nice to see some very well known pieces there too which i'd seen before but not in real life, like Jeff Koons - Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985, Marcel Duchamp - Fountain (replica), Antony Gormley - Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage, 1981, Mona Hatoum - Wheelchair, 1988, Bob and Roberta Smith - Make Art Not War, 1997, as well as some Cindy Sherman photographs 'Bus Riders', 1976.

I really enjoyed the Tate, I saw lots of things which I didn't expect to see there and found things to help with my Silence project :)

London Visit - Polka Dot trees in the breeze!

2009-11-07T23:27:00.006Z

I've been meaning to do a post about this for ages but never got around to it... anyway I visited London at the end of August and here are a few pics I took walking along the South Bank to the Tate Modern.
I think i'd be quite happy if i was reincarnated as a carousel horse. Carousels are awesome, they are so colourful and exciting! I'm too much of a wimp for rollercoasters so going on a carousel is about as adventurous as I get in terms of rides! So much fun! But on this occasion I didn't have a go, too much of a rip off :/

Yayoi Kusama - Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees, 2009. I found this installation quite interesting, I later read more about the artist, she was born in 1929 and "all of her work shares an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation".

Some weird hedge furnature installation kinda thing.

More furnature! But this time in the form of a sand sculpture :)

Tate Modern, I had never been before and I'd always thought the outside of the building looked so cool, it was formally Bankside power station. I really enjoyed approaching the building and seeing it up close and taking photos. Even though it looks quite different, it somehow reminds me of gigantic Egyptian pyramids and that type of thing. Inside the space is sooooo vast, it's amazing and kinda scary! Nowadays most space is cram packed, but on the lower levels of the Tate Modern there is a massive space, it has a very industrial feel, I felt like I was in a cargo bay on a spaceship or something! We got lost and by this time we didn't have much time to look around at the actual art work, only one floor, but it was cool enough just to see the building, I really enjoyed it.

Here's a few more photos I took there: http://www.flickr.com/photos/grinchy/sets/72157622631637969/

'Le Scaphandre et le Papillon' Film Review

2009-10-20T23:55:00.000+01:00

Today in our Kino4 screen club we watched 'Le Scaphandre et le Papillon' (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) from 2007, directed by Julian Schnabel, who is also an artist. Interesting title, interesting and sad story. It is based on the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of French Elle Magazine, and also a journalist and author.

The film is from Bauby's perspective and starts by him waking up from a three week long coma, and trying to reply to the doctors but realizing they can't hear him.. he has had a massive stroke at only the age of 42. He is suffering from a rare condition called 'Locked-In Syndrome', he is aware but cannot respond or move, he is almost completely paralyzed, all he can move is his left eye. The condition has been described as "the closest thing to being buried alive".

The way this film is shot makes you feel as though you are Bauby and empathise with him even more than if it was shot in a regular way. It makes you confront the issue of strokes and other similar things which a lot of people try to forget about and ignore even if it happens to someone close to them become a shell of themselves, because it's so horrible and you don't like to see someone familiar yet...not.
Because he can't really move his head sometimes you can't see the actors in the scene's head, only their middle if they are stood up etc, just as he would if they weren't in his line of sight. There is a horrible scene where they sew up his right eye so it doesn't get infected because it isn't working properly and you see the needle coming and going through the skin and the light glowing through the skin and then stitches then darkness. It really is horrible, he is shouting and pleading for them not to do it but of course they can't hear him. It would be so frustrating.

At first he is angry at his whole situation, as most people would probably be. The speech therapist thinks she can help him and tries to help him communicate through blinking. One blink for yes, and two for no. They then expand on this and she recites the alphabet in order of frequency the letters come up in the French language, as she goes through them she watches his eye, when there is a letter he wants he blinks as she says it, then they go through it again and again until he has communicated a whole word/sentence. It's pretty amazing. At first though he doesn't want to and all he has to say is "I want to die". After this though he starts to come to terms with his condition and says

Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.

He starts accepting visitors and installs a phone with a speaker. He gets in touch with his book publisher (with the help of his speech therapist)and confirms he is still going to get it finished and asks for an assistant to who he can communicate his memoirs to. It is a very lengthy process which i'm sure would seem like an impossible task, but he manages it, and 10 days after his book was published Bauby died. Communicating his memoirs everyday gave him something to do and stopped him going crazy, and before that he didn't really have the will to live, so when he had managed to tell his story and see his 'dream realised' in a way maybe he hadn't got quite as much will to live. It's strange how people sometimes seem to be able to hold on until just after an important event until they slip away, I guess it's just human will power, it's amazing though.

This film made me wanna jump around and appreciate mobility, patience, expression and communication. I thought it was a really good and interesting film even if it was quite confronting and emotional.

Onomatopoeia bubble painting response

2009-10-17T16:52:00.007+01:00

Here is my response for Onomatopoeia:

I decided to play with bubbles like in primary school to create the image. You are meant to use paint powder but I didn't have any so I just squirted lots of paint into a bottle and added some warm water and shook it up then poured it into anything big enough...I ended up using a big frying pan, a wok, and a mixing bowl! Then I added some washing up liquid to make the bubbles stay for longer and a bit more water.

Kaylie came in the kitchen and wondered what on earth I was 'cooking' as seen as i was stood by the cooker stirring BLUE liquid with a spatula in a frying pan. She though I was making a bomb or something! I'm not a mad scientist haha!
Then all you need to do is get a straw and blow into it in the liquid..just don't drink it by accident! Or put the wrong end of the straw in your mouth.. eugh I did that.

Once you blow the bubbles, quickly grab paper and lay it on top but don't touch the liquid only the bubbles, they will pop and leave a print on the paper, then let it dry :)

I made loads, this is only about half, I tried overlapping 2 colours as well. I did try yellow too but it didn't work very well.

When blowing bubbles my face got a bit splashed.. I had red paint dots on my nose and cheeks and blue ones on my chin hehe! It was a lot of fun though :)

'Strange days and some flowers' exhibition

2009-07-30T21:14:00.008+01:00

Today Sarah visited Lancaster and we checked out some exhibitions.
The newly refirbished Storey Gallery had the exhibition 'Strange Days and Some Flowers'.

Around the installations and paintings, there was another installation by Graham Hudson, made from 'steel tubes and clip structure' aka scaffolding! It was pretty cool actually. As we walked around, the composition kept changing, with all the different squares and rectangles it reminded me of Piet Mondrians paintings. It also gave nice backgrounds for the other installations.

There were some really nice pictures by Dan Baldwin. I liked how bright and chaotic they were and the use of mixed media. This one was my favourite.
Dan Baldwin - Love in the garden, 2008.

Dan Baldwin - We End Up Meat, 2008. This had a knife stuck to it.

Dan Baldwin - We All Start With Pure Heart, 2008.

Dan Baldwin - Halloween, 2008. close up of it.

Don Brown - Yoko XVII, 2006. This looked like a sheet over a statue but the sheet shape was the statue, it was like a scary ghost! but cool.

Don Brown - Yoko XXI, 2008. This looked really nice white with shadows, and against the white background too.

Jock Mooney - Discontinued, 2009. This was another of my favourites in this exhibition, it was even cooler close up, with all the detail of all the figurines, so bright and random!

John Stark - The Apiary, 2008. This painting was beautiful close up, especially the clouds.

Laura Ford - Boystory 1, 2001. There were a few of these, they were a bit scary, this was my fave of them though.

Next we went to The Book Room, which is a little independant book shop with art on the walls. The current exhibition was "Manchester 89 - 92", by Richard Davis. "A collection of portraits taken in that city during the years between 1989 - 1992 & involves Musicians, Comedians, Poets & Writers. The following are all featured in this exhibition: Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Lemn Sissay, John Thomson, Caroline Aherne, Linda Smith, New Order, John Hegley, Frank Sidebottom, Jon Ronson, Dave Gorman, John Cooper Clarke."

It was hard to take photos in there because it was dark and also the photos had glass infront. They were mainly in black and white, but some were brightly coloured. This one came out ok:

The shop also had a really cool ceiling covered with book pages, it looked so cool:

I had a nice day and really enjoyed the 'Strange Days and Some Flowers' exhibition, there are some exhibitions i visit and think hmm yeah it was ok and there were some good bits but i really enjoyed this whole exhibition. Also it had a cool title. just like this blog entry does now :)

Nice M&S Cod packaging

2009-07-29T15:15:00.007+01:00

I went to M&S to get some cod, when I opened the packet and took the fish out I was pleasently surprised by the packaging, on the back of the label on the bottom which shows through the clear packet behind the fish it had newspaper print design on it! So cute! Like in a real chip shop.. well a retro one now because they aren't allowed to use it anymore because of ink.
I thought it was a nice idea for fish packaging anyway.

RAW DEAL! Arnie film!

2009-07-26T15:00:00.000+01:00

I was very excited yesterday to notice there was gonna be a Schwarzenegger film on that night which I hadn't seen - woo! I'm a fan of action films, Jean-Claude Van Damme is my fave, I have a big stack of his dvds, then my next fav is Arnie, I don't actually own any of his films though.

Anyway this film on last night was called "Raw Deal" from 1986 (HA! 80's ones are the funniest!). "It's the story of an FBI agent who wants to get revenge against a Mafia organization, and sends a former FBI agent (now small-town sherriff) played by Schwarzenegger to destroy the organization from the inside."

The poster is pretty cool, i like the
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
in the background fading towards the bottom.

It actually wasn't as good as i'd hoped..:( It did have cool 80's action movie music, and a few lame/awesome Arnie one liners (e.g Don't drink and bake) but it had the potential to be funnier. The fighting scenes were ok but there could have been more of them, there were quite a lot of guns, sometimes when there are gun fights i just start day dreaming, they usually bore me, i much prefer plain old fighting. I got a bit of a feeling of de ja vu because he wears a leather jacket and is quite unanimated like the Terminator..

My favourite scene was in the last half hour of the film, he went to some quarry and rode around in his car shooting loadsssssssa people, to the sound track of Rolling Stones - Satisfaction! HA! Pretty random and awesome. I found a clip of it, skip to about 0.45. Before that it's just him packing his guns and putting his jacket on, so ye if you wanna see his bulging muscles watch from the start:

Whilst writing this entry i'm half watching the 1988 film "My step mother is an alien" on ch5. the Alien has a hat like Guinan! Deffo must have been the fashion in space in the late 1980s.

NORTH EARTH! Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art - Edinburgh day trip

2009-07-12T01:00:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago(i've been too lazy to blog, i started this post weeks ago and didn't finish..til now) i went on a day trip to Edinburgh! I had never been to Scotland before, we got free tickets so that was pretty cool. I was excited at the fact that it was the most Northerly place i'd been on Earth, so i kept referring to it as North Earth, it's a pretty cool name, i think it will catch on. I felt higher up the Earth whilst there, amazing huh.

I was surprised when i got there at how it looked, it wasn't what i expected, i don't know what exactly i was expecting, maybe something along the lines of Scotland in the film Doomsday? haha! There was lots of nice decorative architecture and statues, it reminded me of somewhere like Germany/Switzerland etc although i haven't been to either of those. The castle was cool, it was on top of a big rocky hill, it looked very dramatic, like in films with evil whoever living in it and terrorizing the whole city.
I took quite a lot of photos of lots of random things, here are a few, and there are more on my flickr:

Whilst there i visited the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
When we walked into the gallery the first sculpture we were greeted with was MASSIVE, it was called 'Vulcan'!! but as in the Roman god of fire not as in the green blooded aliens..tsk. It was taller than 2 floors, it looked like a big tin man kinda thing.. but not, and definitely no sign of pointy ears haha.
You weren't allowed to take photos in there but i jotted down some pieces i found interesting, i've found images of them online:

Paolozzi - Vulcan, 1999:

Edith Rimmington - The Decoy, 1948: This seemed interesting, strange and delicate.

Magritte - La Representation, 1937: I thought this was really unusual and liked that the frame followed the image's shape.

F.E McWilliam - Kneeling Woman, 1947. I thought this was just cool and uncanny.

John Bellany - Lapdog, 1973: Again.. just a bit weird and interesting and i like the brush strokes.

Francesca Woodman - Untitled 1975 - 1980: I've seen some of her work before and liked it so it was interesting to see it in a gallery, i liked these pieced which she had given to her boyfriend and had notes on them.

Vija Celmins - Night Sky #19, 1998: This artist had very delicate woodcuts, and the ones of stars and space attracted me at first, they were very nice up close especially.

Vija Celmins - Ocean Surface Woodcut, 1992:

Damien Hirst - Away From The Flock, 1994: This was cool to look at close up, to see the tics in its fur and its fur sticking out as if floating in space.

I'm glad i visited the gallery but there have been lots more galleries/exhibitions i've enjoyed much more than this one.

Can robots be artists?

2009-06-05T15:20:00.000+01:00

I went to see Terminator Salvation on Wednesday, I REALLY enjoyed it. It was very loud, had loads of explosions, and machines EVERYWHERE! Very exciting ALL the way through, and quite scary, It was only a 12a but.. I am a total wimp. Terminators just scare me..it's the future!

(Incase you have been asleep for the past 25 years, the concept of the Terminator films is that in the near future super computers will have become so intelligent they no longer need humans and will be able to self create and manufacture themselves etc. In Terminator the supercomputer which started it all was built by Skynet, when it became self-aware, humans got scared at its power and tryed to shut it down and failed. The machines started a war against all humans to try and eliminate them to protect it's existance. It began creating super strong autonomous robot soldiers - Terminators.)

There are quite a lot of scenes within Skynet base which is cool because it was all designed soley by machines [YES I KNOW IT'S NOT REAL] well actually designed by art directors/set directors or whoever of the film but anyway it got me thinking. If machines did take over the world, what would architecture and design be like? This is what the art/set directors would of had to think about, it interests me too.
You would think the machines would go for pure functionality and maximum efficiency, that sounds logical right. There were scenes in the 'Terminator factory' assembly line areas which look probably right, kinda dark and dirty etc. I like that there are wires kinda hanging down and no 'Warning! Hard hats and goggles must be worn in this area' signs etc haha.

And even though its quite simple and probably meant to be all just for function it all looks really cool. I often wanna make things far too complicated, maybe I should take some tips, simplicity. Thats what everyone always says isn't it 'back to basics'.

As well as the assembly line, there were also scenes in more bright areas of Skynet base such as:

I realise why visuals of 'the future' in films/TV don't usually veer too much off the idea we are use to because we don't know what it will really be like and so they stick to the norm so we recognise it and the art/set directors will have been aware of this and playing to this such as bright, clean, clinical looking, futuristic rooms. But would robots and machines 'care' about paint on the walls etc like in these images?

You would think machines would find chrome wall plating fine or whatever, why waste time and energy with paint and wall coverings afterall, so it's more aesthetically pleasing? The machines became self aware, what else did they become are of, beauty?

Maybe painted walls have other advantages, stop the glare of just chrome walls? keep the place a bit warmer? White/grey wall covering makes the place a bit brighter so the machines can view things more efficiently? Those are the only logical reasons I can come up with off the top of my head.
White/grey walls and fixtures may not seem very adventurous but still the colour is a decision which had to be made. Maybe it was just at the top of the list of colour options? ha! Maybe i'm looking into this too deeply. No i'm not, details matter.
Maybe white/grey pigment is easiest to get hold of/create? It may be easier for them to recycle metal and just melt things down, things wouldn't be perfect and white then though. I think the whole place would be really patchy coloured looking, all sorts of colours!

But of course this all could have been built before the machines took over and the design decisions were made by humans.. doubtful though.

Can the machines understand design and make aesthetic decisions? They would have access to so much information from all over, the internet etc, so sure they can study design I suppose and maybe try and follow design rules just like if you programme something and give it instructions and certain perameters to work within but I don't think they could actually be creative.
Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is an android and creates art, anyone can, but his decisions in art are based on his study of a long history of art from lots of cultures.
They could maybe think through endless possibilities of design decisions but how could they judge what is aesthetically best.
How can humans actually? No one is right, it's all relative to different peoples opinions. There is no right and wrong, or is there? Some say it's a science, maybe it can be learnt by robots.

It still may be hard for them to apply their design knowledge to new situations, I think they would struggle, I don't think Skynet base would look so nice. They may try and create Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen-bots but will fail. Maybe they will capture designers and keep them as slaves in a cage. We joke that designers are the last thing people need in a recession but we may be the only valuable thing to machines in the future, so hey designers that may be our fate, slaves for robots...

Once the machines had reached their objective to wipe out all humans, then what would they do? Take up watercolours like retired people do when they have more time on their hands. It is possible!

If i hang upside down, will my nails grow faster?

2009-02-21T17:34:00.000Z

I was just about to complain at my (self-induced) short nails, and tell myself to stop biting them, then i thought this up.

It is a gross thing nail biting, i have a green post-it note on my wall saying

SHAUNA, STOP BITING YOUR NAILS!!! x

from me, its stuck on the wall behind my laptop (amongst the many many colourful post-it notes stuck in that area) so i see it everyday, and hopefully i will subconsciously get the message. It's been there months. It's not worked. YET.
So this is the new plan, hanging upside down in caves.. or anywhere. The caves part is just for dramatic visual effect, stalag tights and bats are more interesting than lampshades. Well the lampshades in this house anyway. which i think are all plain and made from paper and are torn.

Squashed Mystery Rodent

2009-02-20T05:50:00.000Z

I was on the way to uni and the bus stopped in traffic, out of the window i noticed a squashed mystery rodent (i hope it was a rodent and not a cat, i don't think it was a cat, it really was squashed out of all recognition), it made me sad anyway. And i thought about it for the rest of the day, as it was on my mind, and as a mark of respect for the mystery rodent, i made this picture.

It's not macabre, (well if it is, thats just life) its like a gravestone, to mark the memory of this mystery rodent.
I have no idea what the rodent looked like, but it possibly looked like the rodent ghost i have drawn floating to rodent heaven. Yes i am aware it looks a bit like a duck billed platypus without a bill. And no it's not a peanut with arms, legs and teeth.

R.I.P Squashed Mystery Rodent :'(

Dirty little secret...

2009-02-12T16:15:00.000Z

Q U E S T I O N M A R K S .

I really like question marks, they are aesthetically pleasing to me. It is a shame they get ignored so much. Yes people write and/or type them but they are rarely talked of! They are like a dirty little secret.
I know in some places when people are saying something that is a question and would have a question mark at the end if it were written down, their voice goes higher at the end, but it's just not good enough.
I sometimes say the say then say the question mark at the end, it's much nicer :)
such as, What do you think about this matter question mark.

:)

?

p.s oh yes the same applies to exclamation marks too! see, i almost forgot it then, this is what happens, poor question and exclamation marks, i bet they cry at night. Same with some other punctuation, but i don't care as much about them, coz i'm mean like that!