Blog 8

My final Design

Today I finished my final 3D project. I had to do it out of school hours like most people, because this last week we are only really working on the sketchbooks, and i didn't finish my final design last week. It was very hard putting together the photos on the sculpture (which in my case was a cube mounted on a pole). This was because of several reasons...

An image from google I used for inspiration

Firstly I wasn't sure on what my final design was going to be. I had in my head that it would be my photos mounted onto some 3D shape (probably a cube or rectangle). I also thought about making this idea more abstract by putting different 3d shapes together to make a more interesting object to stick my photos to.  After thinking about it a bit more I thought I could make a design like the image above only with only three or four cubes. Even with this amount of cubes I would not have enough space to fill up all the faces with photos. I thought to combat this I could have some of the faces either pure white or with shiny silver paper stuck onto the sides. I thought by doing this it might make the sculpture more interesting and different. But in the end I decided against this idea because I thought it was too complex and that a plain cube would work better.


For this though I had to make the all of my six final images exactly square. This would off been very difficult if I hadn't of had the adobe photoshop 30 day trial on my mac at home. Some of them were easy to make square. I just used the set the box selection tool to fixed ratio and then cropped the images to a square. But some off them were harder than this because they were already quite close in so if I cropped them any more I would lose parts of the photo I needed. This is were photoshop can in useful. I used the clone tool to digitally make up more of the image on the side I need to make the image square.

Original Image

All the area on the left (in red) is cloned from parts of the real image (blue)

 I also used photoshop to move the basketball down so that it looks like its actually spinning on my finger tip, instead of me throwing it up about an inch above my finger which is what the actual photo is of (because I can't actually spin a basket ball on my finger) I also added some motion blur to the basketball so it looks its spinning more. I think these adjustments really improve the photo and make it more obvious that it is about me controlling the ball on one finger. I don't feel guilty that I used photoshop to make it look like I can do something that I actually can't because a lot of fine art photography is heavily edited and can be misleading.

So with all the photos now squares I needed to print them again. This proved to be difficult though because when I tried in a shop they could not print in squares. So I decided to buy some printing paper but this failed two because it kept getting jammed in the printed. In the end I decided to just print them on normal card. This way I could make them exactly the right size on a word document. Although I couldn't print them on glossy photographic paper I made sure the colour print cartridge was full and that the settings were set to maximum quality.

After I printed them out I had to make A box to present them on. I thought about three different ideas for this. First I though about simply drawing a net on a large piece of card. But this would be fairly hard to do and more importantly the box would be quite flimsy and probably wouldn't survive the bumpy taxi ride to Coleridge. To get a more secure box I thought about sticking the photos onto a rubik's cube but then decided against this because it was too small.

My final idea, and the one that I stuck with, was to use an existing box and modify it to make a cube. This was difficult though because in order to make it a perfect cube I would have to cut it in two twice. But I thought it was still the best idea.

This is the box I used. As you can see the height width and length
are all different sizes. This mean't I had to cut it in half then put one half of the boxes in side the other so I can shorten the length of the box.

sellotaping the box back together  

Measuring the box to make sure it is a close to a regular cube as possible

The box with paper hinges in it 

After making the box I thought I would put on some paper hinges on the sides and corners so that if the photos tough on the sides there is white there instead of red and grey with writing on it. This was very time consuming but I thing it was worth it.

After this I was ready to stick the photos onto the six sides. This was very fiddly because at the start I tried doing it using only a tiny amount of sellotape so it didn't look to shabby. But it then started  peeling off and I realised it wouldn't be strong enough. I then put some more stronger sellotape on so it held better, but still tried to do it as carefully as possible. Because of this just sticking the photos on to the sides took two and a half hours.

I was fairly happy with the cube. It might of been better if I could of glued them on so you couldn't see any sellotape  but at least with my cube it wouldn't of stuck on properly.

I then thought of a way to massively improve my project. My idea was to put some sort of a pole or stick through the bottom corner so it would be appear to be balancing on a stick. This would not only make by project more interesting and make it possible to see the bottom picture (that would have be facing the ground) but it would also represent control because the cube would controlled on the pole.

I was very pleased with this idea but it would be hard to make it. I the end I used a skewer to hold it up. I put it through one of the corners
and the the other side I stabbed into a potato. Its seems like a stupid idea it we needed something at the bottom that would be heavy, so that it would stay upright, and also some thing we could put a skewer into. I cut the bottom of the potato off to create a steady base. Finally I put it inside a a white box, I made out of white card, so the potato was hidden.

I am quite proud of my final project because i think it represents control and is interesting and different.

Blog 7

One of Rankin's images

Today I mainly did my research report. I research into Louise Bourgeois and did also did a lot of research into Rankin. I did a page on him and what he did. I found out he does a lot of fashion photography and portraits of famous people. But he also does a lot of fine art photography and has a lot of quite disturbing images which provoke responses of shock and confusion.

I then did a page on my responses. Out of the ones I looked at I found them all quite unsettling and slightly disturbing.

I also had a chat with my teacher on where I was with my final project. I told him I was planning to stick the printed out photos on a cube or rectangle. I thought i might make it more abstract by making the shapes irregular and by adding smaller cubes coming out from the sides.

I brought in some shiny silver paper as well to make a mirror type effect on some off the faces. I think this could work quite well because it will go with the minimalistic theme which I doing and will make my piece or art more interesting and different.

I got my Photos printed out but I didn't start making my final piece today because I was hoping at least five off the seven photos I've got could be printed on A4 but unfortunately only one could because the school didn't have enough ink. So the rest of them were six to a sheet which is too small for my current idea.

At home I will either have to adjust my idea or crop and resize them and then print them myself at a shop.