week 2 (16/9/24 - 22/9/24)

The second week of school is where everything starts, no more induction materials to go through, only work.

 

On Monday, I started off the day with Lareen where we went through different finishing seams that are/ can be used for making garments. We went through seams like the open and closed seams, flat-fell seam, and the French seam along with surging and alternatives to surging like zig-zag stitches and various more 'decorative' stitches. I did find it difficult to sew right on the edge of the fabric for this task, but more practice will allow me to get better and more accurate. The French seam was a bi tricky since it was my first time ever doing one, but I think it turned out fairly good. The flat fell seam was easier than the French seam because I had already done it multiple times before during my time in GCSEs, but I think it turned out crooked. My main issue was the speed of the machine because it went very fast with little to no pressure on the foot peddle.

The second lesson of the day is my study period where I worked on annotating and evaluating my seams for my folder. After this was my photography class in which we practiced creating photograms in the dark room with interesting unnatural objects. This was interesting because you can create many different patterns and organise your objects in different ways along with using the enlarger at different apertures and times to achieve different effects on the photographic paper. This was a fun experience, and some turned out better than others. My favourite outcome was when I kept moving my hand and the object, I was using each time the light was exposed (for 3 seconds) so you get a layered effect even if some parts aren't as light because the light hasn't been blocked as much as other attempts at using the photographic paper.

 

Tuesday was another full day for me, the first lesson I had was Stretch where we had a look at the competition, we would be making a piece of work for which was 'Poster For'. This lesson consisted of doing some research on previous winners and discussing what was good about them along with gathering examples of artwork that links to the current themes for this year’s competition. My teacher recommended that we look at examples that fit in our course's range (i.e. fashion/ garments, graphics, art/ paintings, etc.). We then had to narrow out research down to just three of the 6 available themes we were allowed to do and talk about some specific works that we liked.

After lunch, I had Sam for my fashion/ textiles class where we drew still lives of fruit in multiple different ways; how we normally draw, non-dominant hand, non-dominant with a different medium (twice), dominant with a pen/ fine liner, without looking at the page (twice), drawing with two mediums in one hand and drawing with one medium in both hands. This was quite difficult as I wasn't sure where to start at first but then I got more used to drawing the organisation of fruit, so it didn't feel so terrifying. My least favourite part was drawing with my non-dominant (left) hand, it was very uncomfortable for me to use and made my hand feel weird, I also felt as if I couldn't put as much strength into my left hand and so those ones appear to have less depth in them. I also found the double medium in one hand challenging because I kept having to make sure that both mediums were actually on the page and drawing. However, the most difficult of the drawings I had to do was the one medium in each hand as my mind kept wanting to focus on one of my hands at a time and you can see in the piece where I faltered in one hand while getting confused and focusing more on the other hand. The last part of this lesson was choosing the 3 different topics to focus on for the projects (I chose fruits, veg and plants) and doing some artworks for some of the fruit that was sat in front of me.

The last lesson of the day was with Charlie where we set up our blogs, had a bit of an issue where half of us couldn't because too many people were attempting to make a blog at once and discussing how we can format things to make it pleasing to look at of evoke different feelings or interpretations. We also chose a word out of a few given words and were tasked to create 3 different cutouts that depict that word in our opinion. I chose the word danger and cutout a bold shape, a sharp shape and an intricate shape.

 

Wednesday started off great with Lareen where we tried sewing a double turn hem and a rolled hem. The double turn hem was slightly hard because I had to get the seam allowance (3cm) pretty much perfect, and I struggled a little bit there. The worst part of this session was the rolled hem. We did this on a curved piece of fabric which made it hard to work with. Even when only folding the fabric a little bit, it wanted to crease and also didn't want to stay folded even when ironed down. Sewing it was even trickier because it kept wanting to unfold as I was sewing it. I did end up with a bit of a messy stitch line and some of the fabric didn't keep rolled so there is a bit of fraying but other than that it was a partial success.

In group tutorials, we had some announcements and then we worked on our blogs. This does not normally happen but when it reached noon, I went downstairs for freshers’ day where there was a multitude of different stands about different things. During this I acquired a goody bag from Hobbycraft and ate a slice of pizza from Dominos.

After this, my schedule ended for college time, so I walked home and started my home work for the week which was a decently long list of things to do. I still need to work on my time management, so I didn't get much work finished. I hope to eventually double down on my time management because I don't want to be stressing too much.

 

Thursday; day off.

I spent the day continuing my work and getting one of the main parts down. My favourite part of this time was when I had to create a piece of work using lines and pictures that I took in college of examples of lines. I think I did well on this task and used a wide variety of different types of lines and materials including thread/ stitching, highlighter, fine liner, pencil and marker. Not much else happened, I just continued to work on some annotations and other pieces of work.

 

Friday; last day of the week.

I went into college in the morning for my lesson with Sam where we continued with our still life drawings. However, instead of using plain paper we worked with coloured/ black paper and used chalk, oil pastels and soft pastels to interpret the still lives. I then, independently, worked on some depictions of a cabbage to add to my project.

At home I continued my work, annotating pages and doing pages for the principles of art. I related my work for this on my work on fruit to link the different parts together.

 

On the weekend all my time was spent on finishing all my work. I enjoyed writing and evaluating the different examples of line found in magazines, however there was more I could talk about for some of them compared to others and I found that I didn't feel I had enough space to talk about some of them.

 

Overall, week 2 gave a good sample of the amount of work I would have to be doing and really set in stone that I had to work on my time management since I was working on the weekends from 8/10am to 20/21pm at night.