Colour and Collaborating

For me today was centred around experimenting more with colour, as well as continuing to refine the layout of my final piece. Although I have said that colour is going to be a definite thing within my work, I'm still unsure, as the tests I carried out today have shown me that no matter how hard I try I can never fully see the grain of the wood after I have painted it. This is unfortunate, as I really like using colour within the sculptures, but at the same time, being able to see the grain of the wood clearly is a very important part of the meaning as well as the aesthetics of the pieces. This is something that I need to consider, whether or not I want to sacrifice the colour or being able to see the grain. I need to decide on this matter soon.

I experimented with a range of colours which all worked relatively well and made the sculptures much more vibrant when I displayed them in different ways on the wall. This experimentation process has continued to enable me to decide on the right colour for the right emotion, as well as allowing me to mix up a range of colours to use for the sculptures. I also tried using black and white, as the negative and positive colours. This was, unfortunately, unsuccessful as the dark colour reduced the ability to see the grain even more so than usual.

I was also thinking about the layout today, first positioning the blocks in rows of the six individual emotions, moving slowly down as the week went on. I then juxtaposed this with the simpler version. Having simply the negative emotions on one side and the positive on the other, slowly angling whenever there were multiple days in a row of negative or positive emotions. I went through this process because I hadn't displayed the layouts on the wall before, and wanted to see in real life if it was aesthetically pleasing or not. The latter turned out to be better, as the snake like wave that was created was easier to understand (I learned this from talking to my peers) as well as being more interesting to look at. Gaining someone else's perspective on my work is always helpful to me as it allows myself to see my work through the viewer's eyes, finding what may be confusing to them and fixing it so that they can understand it easier. 

Additionally today I collaborated with another student on my course to create a range of paintings that were displayed as one whole. They were centred around the idea of what makes a painting or a piece of work finished, and making a comment on the fact that it's finished when the artist(s) says it's finished. You can look at his work on his blog here: http://thomasewing-internal-external.tumblr.com/