Yesterday we learned about the making of print and how prints are made. We made our own prints with black ink, some positive and some negative, creating images of shells, fruits and patterns. Everyone in our class enjoyed this lesson including me. We were a little confused as to how this method is included in creative media but nevertheless we still enjoyed it!!!
My first print was of a shell that I drew and made 2 prints from (image shown on right). I like the shape of the shell when it came out but I think it would have worked better if I made the drawing darker. This way the shell would have looked stronger against the light background. However, I was still pleased that my first print worked, and I was able to write about it.
My second prints were created from a drawing of a dried-out tomato that I drew from a still life image. I printed two copy's of this image, one positive, one negative (shown on right). I prefer the negative one on the far right because the image looks more eye-catching against the darkness of the background. I would have put more detail into the drawing if I had more time, this would have given the image a bolder effect, but I was more pleased with the way these prints came out because I think they are more eye-catching and detailed than the shell one.
In the second half of the lesson we worked with Alex on the computers and found out how to follow people on our blogs as well as more info about our blogs in general. I think everyone has befitted from these lessons and I hope we have the change to try printing again!
Hello all
Today in our lesson we made sun prints!! We started by choosing some objects like shells, twigs, chains and lots of natural objects and drawing them on plain paper. After spending ages trying to get the outlines correct, we placed our objects onto sun print paper, placed them in the sun and waited. After about half an hour of waiting we took them inside and saw that the paper had faint outlines of the objects we placed on them. It worked!
Yesterday we split up into groups of around 8, us being in group 2. Then we went down to the print room after group 1 and were told how to make intaglio prints. Our task for homework was to scratch onto a plastic rectangle, so that we could use them in this lesson. I decided to scratch an image of a horse with a dotty background because I thought the tone of the horse would come out well through intaglio print.
Using our scratched plastic images, we put them down onto clean newspaper sheets and left them while we went to the sink and soaked white paper. Then we half-dried the sheets by putting blocks over them to make them damp. This means the sheets would be softer and thicker for printing. Once our sheets were damp enough for printing, we went back to our plastic rectangle sheets and used leather dampers to apply black ink over them, so the image we scratched onto them was now invisible.
Once our plastic sheets were covered with black ink we gathered two cloth sheets and scrunched them together to make a ball the same size as the dampers. Then, using the cloth ball we smudged away the ink from the plastic sheet so that the only ink left, was the ink within the lines we had scratched. To make sure there was no ink left on the surface that wasn't within the lines we also used a small piece of newspaper to wipe away any ink on the surface. Knowing our plastic sheets were clean on the inked side, we used another cloth to wipe over the other side to make it cleaner, only this cloth had chemicals in it make it clean.Finally we used a roller machine to print our scratched designs onto the damp white paper we made. I rolled the side wheel to make the horse design go through the machine and came out with an intaglio print (picture shown above). I was pleased with the way mine turned out, because the depth of the tones in the image came out nice and dark against the light background. The accidental smudge in the corners of this image even look like an added effect to the print so I was quite pleased with it, although I wasn't aware the image would come out as a mirror image so if I could change it I would have scratched the horse facing the different direction so it would have come out facing the right way!!!
Homework 29/09/10
Social Networking Article
Facebook overtakes....
Everyone knows the famous social network site Facebook has practically taken over the world, what with the amount of users larger than America.... But is Facebook for better or worse? Many people- mostly teenagers- have Facebook either on their computers or on their mobiles. It's quite often you see a 16 year old walking in the street, glued to their phone- or more specifically- glued to Facebook. It's clear enough that many people are becoming addicted to the site's constant message responses and people's troubled life stories. Surely this is turning our world into a social network program rather than a free planet. If our society continues to type away our life's, this could mean the end of face-to-face chats and be re-placed by constant computer madness.
Only just getting Facebook myself, I can understand how people become addicted to this website, but nevertheless we should remember that meeting friends in person is more socially beneficial. Socializing should be spending time with your mates face-to-face, not starting at a screen before of you. However, there are clear benefits from Facebook as well as other social sites. Image this... Your phone is broken, your friends live far away and you've completely forgotten to tell them that tomorrow nights party is canceled due to tiredness.... Facebook the answer? Well duh! These websites may be addicting our teenage children, but problems like these make Facebook a solution to some of our every-day disasters....
Dr Alex Krotoski from the 'Homo Interneticus' video commented, '...few of us pause to wonder what its doing to us.' This makes us question whether the internet in general is pulling us in to its amazing new talents, and not just social networks. With the internet developing day by day, maybe its the web designers and internet workers who need to take a step back. Steve Wozniak from the this video also quoted, 'Is it gonna bring us a different style of life or a different style of communication? That's the question, I don't have the answer,' proving to us that these social network-partically Facebook- are completely unknown whether we get a better life from them.....or whether they really are just communication sites.
Article by Kelly Jordan :-)
