Rambling About

Paper Cutting

That’s right, another new medium/ technique that I’m enjoying right now. It’s going to take a while for me to stop experimenting! I’m really pleased with

the outcome of my owls, they aren’t as intricate as a lot of paper cuts you can find, but as my first attempts I am pretty pleased with their outcome.  I’ve always enjoyed creating drawings and paintings through  shapes formed buy lighting and patterns.  Paper cuts seem an excellent way to bring these drawings a new dimension.

I have brought my new found enthusiasm to my job within my local libraries.  Every summer we participate in the Summer Reading Challenge, a scheme that encourages children to read during the summer holidays.  As part of this we hold various literacy based events and activities within the libraries.  This year I am more involved than ever before as I shall be designing and holding one event each week over the summer holiday period.  Creating children’s activities is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job in the libraries and I have already begun to prepare.

This year the theme of the Summer Reading Challenge is Creepy House.  In order to create maximum interest myself and a colleague are holding a stall at a local primary school fair in a months time.  In order to advertise the creepy house activities on offer in the libraries this summer I have begun creating paper sculptures for the display on our stall. Below is a prototype made from a page in my sketch book.

As you can see the windows are blank, this is because I am going to fill them with various creatures!  Below is the final model so far, I still have a few creatures left to go as well as a scary tree.

I will upload the finished house as soon as it is finished.  As ever you can see more of my work along with information on media, titles etc in my gallery section.

Sketching and Scanning

So I’ve been enjoying the chance to do some sketching over the past week and will be doing more over this weekend before I start my new job at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, North London.  I have recently been concentrating on pencil sketches after enjoying the style of Brett Helquist’s illustrations in Lemony Snicket’s a series of unfortunate events.

I have encountered some problems however with scanning in my images, and would appreciate any advice that people could give me.  I’ve been scanning the pencil drawings directly into photoshop elements so as to have more control of the final image but I’m find it hard to make the digital image look enought like the original.  Currently I am resorting to editing the images using the tools available in photoshop but this tends to make the lines look black and less like pencil (seen in the portrait here as compared to the puppy or the caterpillar).  In the portrait shown here I’ve also used the fade correction option when scanning, somehting that seems a bit hit and miss.  Any advice?

All images copyright Rosemary Marchant 2013, for titles and more images see ‘gallery’.

Illustration?

If you have read any of my blog before then you will know that recently I’ve been struggling with my art practice, resulting in, well, nothing.

I work in a library, often with children, and my mother is a children’s writer ( See her latest childrens book here) as a result I am constantly surrounded by children’s books.  I’ve always loved illustration and at one point during my foundation I nearly chose to take my love and interest to degree level.  I was called away from this by the lure of a fine art degree in Brighton.  Now I am starting to question this decision.

I have begun to create illustrations of animals, people and a peculiar monster concieved by my friend, an aspiring writer.  And for the first time in  a long time I am enjoying and like what I am creating.  I’ve realised that it’s been a long time since I have really liked anything that I have produced.  At the moment my drawings are largely experiemental, me trying to work out what I like to do and considering what style of illustration suits me.  Not cartoons apparently!  please see my gallery for more drawings.

Ramblings of an art intern #4

It’s been a while since I have written a blog entry.  The main reason for this was that I was unhappy in my internship and did not want to write something that ended up as an angry rant that I later regretted.

I have now left my internship in an art gallery, having found paid part time employment with my local libraries.  I discovered that I found working for free to be incredibly hard for me to do, particularly when working in a high-pressured environment.  I think that the problem for me was that nobody I was working appeared to be enjoying themselves, and for me that was the whole reason to go into a career in the art world, because its something I enjoy and surely the people around me would be enjoying it too.  I’ve never thought that people would ever go into a career in the arts unless it was something that they were passionate about.

Perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, or perhaps the pressure of getting the ever-changing exhibition and numerous events to work on time was saping the enjoyment out of the very small team who work at the gallery.  It’s possible that they are simply trying to do too much with too few people. 

However, since the start of the new year the pressure disappated somewhat.  This meant that my last month at the gallery was ultimately very plesant, I felt I was a useful and needed member of the team which made me feel less like I was wasting my time working for free when I could be earning (though not within an arts environment).

In the end I left the gallery earlier than planned both because of starting a new job and the death of my Grandfather, which complicated things somewhat.  And I am very happy that I did leave then.  I don’t feel that I was learning anything new by that point, I’d observed so much about how a non-profit space functions and learnt so much so quickly that it all fizzled out by the end.  I was also glad of leaving early as four new interns were recruited shortly before, meaning there were simply not enough tasks to go around.  A gallery can have too many interns!

In a few months I may feel differently about being an intern.  And I do want to gain more experience in galleries.  What I do know now is how much of my time I am willing to give to unpaid experiences and how much more work I need to do in order to get the most from these experiences.

Ramblings of an art intern #3

I have now reached the half way point of my internship!  The last few weeks have been pretty hectic as we race to get everything sorted for the next movement of the exhibition before the christmas break. The nature of the exhibition means that we are installing a room at a time so that the ‘Second Movement’ slowly transforms into the ‘third movement’, this process begins next week.

For me this has meant sourcing some works and writing and researching captions for all of the works in the exhibition.  I’ve found writing the captions more challenging than I had expected.  My writing style is very different from the style the gallery wishes for its captions and it has taken a while for me to get used to what they want.

As I will finish my internship at the end of February I have begun the search for what comes next.  I have been debating recently as to whether I can afford to do more unpaid work and have concluded that I cannot.  I want to have more time to work on my practice, which I have done very little of recently.  In order to have more time, I need a paid position.  I’d also like to be able to move out of my parents home.  And so the hunt begins!