Presentation Boards

Photography Brief - on hold

As part of my skill set brief one of the briefs was to spend a day in photography learning about the equipment and how to take effective product shots.
I wanted to learn:

How to set up the lighting and flash
What kind of backdrops for suitable for different products
Good ways to photograph flat prints
How to achieve a birdseye angle and still have control over it
Using different lenses and macro shots

I had signed up to spend the whole day down in the studio's and take a range of work with me. However, due to the college being shut because of the snow the day has been cancelled and can't be rescheduled until after Christmas. Hopefully this means I will be able to attend to the session then instead.

LED Brief - on hold

Spent a day last week preparing the files for the wooden and LED mock up of the butterfly effect diagram. Here is the file for the cnc machine, it shows where all the 3mm holes need to be cut through. These holes are where each of the LED's would go, above this would be a print of the design onto tracing paper. This means that different colours will have light shining through them.









Using binary and a clock this is how the circuit would work for the LEDs. Apparently this could run off a battery.

Unfortunately due to the snow the parts are not going to be available for delivery in time to complete this for deadline. Also the cost of the parts are quite high, bearing in mind we're working with 200+ LEDs so for the time being it's not feasible.

Although I'm not able to actually produce this before deadline I think it's still been an interesting process. I've managed to have discussions with Roger who specialises in lighting and learnt a lot about circuitry and how projects like this could work. It's also made me think more about the kind of materials that can be used and I think made me more keen to collaborate with someone either on the 3D course or interior architecture so I can learn from them. I still plan on doing this brief after Christmas since the whole point of me doing it was to do something practical, and currently I've learnt about how to do it and prepared for it and the only thing I haven't achieved are the practical skills.

Butterfly Effect Product

I thought it would be quite good to think about how to produce the butterfly effect diagram would be produced in real life and went down to speak to the guys in furniture. I wanted to produce a test piece which involved lights and acrylic just to give myself some idea about the materials. However after discussing this we decided it would be a good idea to produce the entire diagram, I explained what I wanted with lights etc and we've worked out the way to do it so now it's just a matter of ordering parts so we can begin to make it. Unfortunately the files I've been working on need to be exported etc and so I'll upload that this week to show what preparation is needed for the CNC machine.

I'm going to produce the product at the same size of the poster, so it's still a scaled down version of what the exhibition piece might look like but I don't think it's feasible at this point to try and produce it to scale. The plan is to cut 3mm holes in some wood at each point where there is an event or arrow these will then have LED's behind them which will be programmed to turn on for 1 second one after the other. This way it will show the passing of time and display the order of the film correctly. I'm going to print the poster out onto tracing paper and lay this over the top of the wood so that the light will show through the colour.

newsl spreads

Screen Printing Photographs

Some photographs of the screen printing, showing different stocks and colours.



















Some photographs of the screen printing I did. I've tried to include full shots aswell as close ups to show the detail of the print. It was quite hard to photograph the tracing paper though.

Newsletter

The newsletter brief for the college was a live pitch. I used this as a one-day type and layout brief to try and improve my skills and work with a large amount of copy. I like the first two pages of this but that's it. Some elements are interesting but I think I should've produced it on a larger scale so that I could explore more with the use of space.

I found screen printing to be a mixture of frustration and excitement. Mainly frustration at the troubles I had. Here I thought it would be useful to show the mistakes/problems I encountered as well as some things I thought I would try out.

Here I tried adding more than one colour ink onto the screen to product some sort of gradient/flashes of colour. I tried this with about 3 different colours. The more prints I did from the same ink, the more the colours blended together and gave an even gradient, however I quite like the more abrupt insert of colour.

This was one of my biggest problems, it came from not flooding the screen properly. My artwork was a3 and I exposed it onto a screen just slightly larger than a3. What I should have done was to expose it onto an a2 screen to ensure I had enough room to manoeuvre the squeegee; this would have made it much easier to flood the ink.

As well as the flooding problem, my screen also got blocked and dried out which made it difficult to push ink through and so the screen had to be rewashed a few times. To prevent this from happening so frequently I need to make sure I turn off the vacuum on the bed in between prints.

Screen Printing

I decided to use reading week as a chance to finally try some screen printing. Other than the scheduled workshops and a collaborative brief in first year I haven't explored screen printing during this degree. It's a method of printing I really enjoyed in my last college and I regret not doing any sooner, but at the same time the briefs I have worked on haven't seemed to call for it. Over the summer I produced this illustration for a friend, it was a very time consuming project but I enjoyed spending the time image making. I thought that this would be an appropriate piece of work to use for the screen printing.

Due to the fine lines of the drawing it was very difficult to get a good quality print of the image. I also experienced a lot of problems to do with flooding and the screen becoming blocked. When I finally resolved these problems I tested how the image worked on several different stocks, 3 different colours and gradients. I found that tracing paper and newsprint took the image a lot better than stock with more grain such as the cartridge paper. Better prints came from pulling the ink through twice, but none of the prints I have are as detailed as the drawing since the screen itself was not perfect.