Tour de France evaluation

Tour de France evaluation.

At the start of this project I had visited two art exhibitions that where based around the tour de France. The first was the Civic in Barnsley and the Millennium museum in Sheffield. I took many photographs to use within my work, as well as browsing the internet for ideas and inspiration. I also took my own bike apart and used the parts I thought looked interesting to me and drew from observation. At the bike show in the Civic I really enjoyed seeing all the different shapes and colours of the bikes and all the drawings/paintings framed on the walls. In the Millennium museum in Sheffield I rather liked the tour de France countdown clock and all the yellow shirts hung down the hallways from the ceiling however it wasn’t as big and spectacular Is I had hoped it would be, it sempt to only be that hall way and the clock. For my artist research I chose Bleck Le Rat, Miki de Goodaboom and Alister Colley. I found that I really enjoyed looking at Alister Colley’s work as I likes his simplistic, cartoon feel he gave when drawing the Yorkshire country side, I loved this so much I used his style in some of my work, and used this style for my etching print. I found I used Bleck’s style on my development sheet with the gargoyle creating a silhouette just like Bleck’s work and also used Miki de Goodaboom’s style within my sketch book on one of my pages. The techniques I have used within this project aren’t very new to me as I have used them previously in my first year. however I did prove to myself that I have gotten better at some style prints such as Lino and Screen print, however some I found that they weren’t my cup of tea, such as Etching and Collagraph as I couldn’t get the hang of putting the right amount of ink on, etc. because these prints were relatively familiar I thought I would experiment with my prints. For example one of my Lino prints I decided to print onto black card with white ink, and for another I stuck tissue paper down onto white cartridge paper and printed with black ink which I thought gave a really nice and fresh look to my prints. I also experimented with different fabrics and colours for my screen prints, and printed on parcel paper for my etching. I feel I managed my time really well which I feel really proud of as it is one of the first projects I have stayed on track with despite a few difficulty’s with my sketch book at the start. I must at mite at the start and most of the way through I wasn’t interested in the Tour de France, however I did manage to find things that related to the project that I was interested in, I feel a lot more confident about getting a new project now because this one has shown and proven to me that there’s always something you can find that you can get interested in and work with. It has also build my confidence up as I know I can do an acceptable amount of work within the set time. I feel most of my prints went rather well however I do feel I struggled and perhaps tried again on my etching however I did like the effect of the sides as it was felt in the acid over the weekend by mistake.

This year is the first year I have managed to create and use my blog, I felt this was very useful to look over my techniques and point out more easily where I went wrong and when things went right. At first I found my blog confusing and thought I was going to do terrible but after a while I got the hang of it and found that it isn’t as difficult as I thought. However I have just thought to spruce things up on my blog and to help me a little I could video my self-doing the practical work and explaining it as well as giving a quick rundown in bullet points under the video.

At first I thought the task of filling a full sketch book was pointless and daunting however I did relies once I got back to college that it came in useful for ideas and refreshing my memory with things.