Related artists and links

Alfons Schillings

Alfons Schillings spin art
google search alfons schilling

Mark Chadwick

Mark Chadwick oil and spin paintings
http://www.markchadwick.co.uk/

Tim Hemington

http://www.timhemington.co.uk/
http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/intro1.shtm

You tube videos:

Spray Paint space art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj8xtk42D1s
March 2013 preview spray paint art secrets
Space art pastel green nebula

preparing for my final idea

Now i am ready to start thinking about my canvases that I want to make so now I need to collect my bed sheets that I will need to place over the frame. I have decided i want to make 2 canvases in total. I have decided how big they are going to be, they will be 125cm x 125cm. I will need to make sure my bed sheets are cotton. I have asked Andy the technician in the workshop if he could kindly help me put the frames together. Once I had my frames I could then attach my sheets to both of them. Using some stretching tools and a staple gun I stretched the sheets over the frames this would then give me two canvases to work on. I am going to use batik dyes to get that same effect as before, I am really excited to get started!

I have finally finished painting my canvases with batik dye. I used a small selection of batik dyes and some bleach, 2 big brushes and some water to complete my paintings. I am going to do both of my paintings in the same way.



 



Here is a close up of the painting you can see how vibrant it becomes on such a large scale it looks fantastic however when it starts to dry it will fade a little bit. I did also try adding some rock salt into it while it was wet. It could turn out really nice.


Next I am going to start making my stencils so that I can paint on some spaceships using PVA and that will be really interesting.

 

Using my model spaceships I am now going to use a projector to cast the shapes of the shadows they create onto a piece of card and then I can draw around the shadow and that will give me a stencil that I can cut out later on. I repeated this process until I had lots of different stencils to work with.

 

 

 

I can now cut out the shapes from the card and this will give me my stencils.

 

 

Model spaceships

To continue with my theme of space I wanted to start building some model space ships. Taking inspiration from my favourite science fiction shows and movies such as Star wars, Star Trek and Prometheus, I wanted to design my own spaceships. I looked on the internet at images of spaceships and I chose ones that I was familiar with and ones that i had not seen before.
Google images of spaceships
http://www.startrek.com/
http://www.startrek.com/galleries
http://starwars.com/
Prometheus film review


Using the images I had found on the internet I thought that I should collect some materials to work with from the workshop such as wood and mdf and use some scrap pieces that other students no longer needed and build them. I thought that this would make them more interesting and more random.

I did also cut some pieces to shape using the band saw.
So once I had found some interesting shapes to work with I started to build them straight away.                        

As you can see they are starting to take shape, ive have been putting them together using PVA glue and then afterwards I will sand off all the sharp edges using my sandpaper. I have finished one of them and when they are all finished I will prime them with emulsion so later I can paint them.

 

 

I have given them a thin coat of emulsion and leaving them to dry, then I will give them another coat so they have two coats of emulsion and they will be ready to go. I have decided to spin paint them using poster paints, I have chosen prussian blue, black and also I have combined some purple drawing ink. They have turned out really well, I believe they were successful. It was however difficult to cover the entire model with paint so there are a few white patches but I don't mind.

 

 



So now that they are dry and finished I'm having a look at what they look like against a colourful background. I have placed the ship on top of a canvas that I had made earlier in the project where i was experimenting with the batik dyes.

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

I'm thinking about what to do with them now maybe placing them in front of a canvas like this one is the next stage. So now I need to decide what I need to make next. I also think that a larger canvas is definitely needed and then maybe I could hang them in some way.

 

Spin art on ceramic bathroom tiles

I have already experimented with spin art on clay and paper so using what i had learned from doing those, I decided i would try this again but this time i could try using ordinary bathroom tiles. This was a good idea and they were suitable to work on because bathroom tiles have a nice smooth surface already.

I was to use e-ware glazes on these rather than slips because they are really thin and would fly across the surface of my tiles. I had a big box of tiles and they were really cheap so they were perfect to work on. 

I decided to work on just two tiles to begin with to see what happens. I chose a selection of coloured glazes such as bronze, black magic, turquoise and light blue. I would start off with putting on the darkest colour first and then the lightest colours over the top, I found that was the best way to get the best results.
Using the same method as before i squirted the glazes onto the tile.

 

 

This is what they looked like before going into the kiln. Andy the technician has told me that he's not sure how well they will fire in the kiln so we will just have to hope for the best.

 

I have done another set just in case the others don't survive.

 

These are my final set and this time i have changed the colours i have used and I think that they have been the most successful.

 

 

 



Painting

I'm going to try a different way of painting. I can try using some batik dyes and spread the dye across the paper by blowing it around with a straw. This will give me a completely different effect.

I'm blowing the dyes around to get them to blend and spread together, I'm also adding some bleach to take out some of the colour. I found that the bleach creates lighter shades of colours and makes the dye more interesting.

 

 

 

 

I also found that the colours had to be built up in layers to achieve a really good pattern. The next thing i did was add washing up liquid to the dye and mixed it together in the pot and then it would become soapy and then i made a bubble blower out of some wire and then dipped it in the pot and blew a really big bubble onto the page. The bubble turned into a nice planet like shape and left a really nice blob on the paper. I was already familiar with this because I had already tried doing this before. I also found that it only works best with dark coloured dyes.

Spin art

My next idea was to try some spin art, which i researched on the internet and i found a selection of artists who have experimented with this way of painting.

Here are a few artists and links:

annick gendron biography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_art

Damien hirsts website

alfons schilling

Walter robinson

 

Taking inspiration from these artists and their spin paintings I decided to give it a try myself, it seemed really interesting to me. I decided to use the spinning wheel in our ceramics room to try and get a similair effect.

 

My first attempts were done on small pieces of paper, i used poster paint and added water to it so that it was very liquid and would fly around on the paper. To drop the paint onto the paper I used what are called slip trailers and sucked up the paints out of the jugs I had put them in. I can then squeeze them and the paint will come out in a controled way.

 

I thought that my first efforts were really good and they turned out better than i had expected them to be. The good thing about using the wheel is that it has a pedal so i can adjust the speed and control the speed to get different effects. I'm now going to think about using other materials and try different paints.

 

experiments on fabric

I started experimenting with fabrics and batik dyes. I chose a few pieces of fabric and then decided that i would have a go with the batik dyes. I thought that maybe they could turn out quite interesting because of the texture of the fabric. When i started putting on the dye the fabric immediately started to soak it up, so when i put more colours on the dyes started to run together covering the whole piece of fabric. I thought it was actually nice the way it had blended together. Eventually the colours were too much so i tried to bleach out some of the colours using household bleach and adding a bit of water to it. I then started dropping the bleach on and also i tried pouring and splashing it on to create different effects.

So this was another one i did straight after and i did the same thing again but using different colours. I dropped the dyes on and then i tried drawing into the fabric with the bleach to make my own shapes and patterns. It didn't work that well because the bleach had actually burnt out most of the colour showing the white fabric through again. I couldn't control how far the bleach spreads across the fabric.

This was done on a different type of fabric, the texture of the material was smoother and much more thinner and silkier. This one had a different effect when i put the dyes on because the material didn't soak them up, instead they just fell through the material. The dye did run and blend together leaving a big mess and didn't really leave achieve the effect i was looking for. The bleach didn't really work too well when i put it on last it just didn't take to the material.

I'm going to have to experiment now with other materials and paints.