Week Two

Havent really achieved a lot this week. Have still been pretty sick and haven’t really had much motivation to go into school really. However I have found that I have done a lot more work so far while ive been here than I ever would have done in Dunedin, because I don’t have as many other commitments here, so I am free to do schoolwork whenever I want to. I find that my most productive hours are at night…so I have been staying up late and sleeping in. I have found that having a computer at home is great, I have been able to research heaps of cool artists and stuff, that I could never be bothered doing last year. I have thought a lot more about concepts, than I did last year, and have been doing a lot of brainstorming and figuring out how ideas link which is pretty good for me I think, because I hate the whole conceptual part of art. But I feel like I have achieved a lot in that. A lot of my ideas seem to overlap and seem to branch out of the project I started last year that explored ethnicity and identity. Im heading towards this idea of movement, and freedom in movement, both in the physical and in the spiritual. I have done a lot of drawing as well, which I didn’t really do much of last year. Just gathering together some images which i could use. I aim to keep that up, because I think its really useful for me to have my own drawn images instead of always just using photographs etc or doing drawings at the last minute. This week I started playing with some images on the computer.

I have found the computer program photostitch really fun and have played around a lot with merging images together. Some are of my friends in the skatepark, and the others merge those blurry photos of my flatmates running and leaping about…and I started merging some with birds. I think its really effective, and I have created some pretty wacky and surreal images which im pretty pleased with. Some are below. The rest I will store on a CD, because its easier and cheaper than printing out every image and sticking it in my workbook, especially if im not going to use it. I think these images will be good to use for my photopolymer experiments.

Ive also downloaded photoshop, which I think is a good move, because everything is based around photoshop at the school it seems. I don’t really know how to use it, but I aim to start playing around with it next week.

I went into school briefly this week to use the computers to print out some images, boy was that a mission. All the computers are apple macs which im not used to, and theyre in dutch so I had to get a lot of help from the computer technician 'Ramone' who is probably sick of me asking him questions.