Wednesday, May 14, 2014

"Recent" exhibition work

As I mentioned in an entry not long ago, I was recently a part of a public exhibition. While that sounds nice, it may not be what springs to mind when you first hear exhibition. The school I go to (Or rather, went to, as I'm graduating in a months time and don't have any classes anymore.) has an arts programme, which I was a part of, and every year the graduating students get to showcase their work in a public exhibition. This year, we actually rented a place near the city square and held a real two week exhibition, completely free for anyone interested.

As this is a part of our work towards the art diploma, which is, perhaps contrary to popular belief, something that is governed on a national level. We had to work a set amount of hours on it, document everything, and create a piece of art based on one of five assignments. Everyone who took the same diploma in other schools had the same 5 assignments to choose from, so it's actually not just something us art freaks do at our little corner of the school. Our work will also be evaluated on standardized values, so in theory it is completely comparable across every individual school.

You may now have the impression that this diploma might actually be worth something, but that isn't really the case. Well, not for me, anyway. It does not aid me in my education-applications whatsoever, experience is the only thing that I carry with me out of the arts programme.

As the exhibition was open to anyone interested, I figured I might also publish my work here. Originally, I made a publisher document for the portfolio, which I used to print a booklet of sorts. The document contains all the art and a fair bit of documentation.

The portfolio has been rendered in a JPEG format, page by page as different pictures. Click on them to make them fullscreen.



Exhibited artwork #1.


Exhibited artwork #2.









I apologize for the fact that it's entirely in Swedish... In a future post, I might quickly go through some of the core ideas.

And yes. Our public exhibition included a picture of me in my boxers only. Well, almost me, anyway. It's kinda Photoshopped, but I'll explain that some other time.

Even though we didn't have as many visitors as we hoped for or even expected, I was pretty satisfied with the experience. It brought us art students together (Well, at least a bit.), which the programme had frankly failed with before. Oh well. I guess the point of the programme was to teach us to draw, which... Failed. Pretty much. I'm quite sure these last three years didn't fulfill anyone's expectations. But the exhibition itself I would say was memorable.

During the exhibition, not a whole lot of attention was ever paid to our written work and portfolios, so I hope some of those who maybe missed out on that might get to some reading. As I couldn't always be there to explain the thoughts and ideas behind my work, I think it left my art a little bit... Weird.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Putting down some practice

I thought I'd throw in a short one while working on another entry. While reading for my matriculation exams, I had this weird goal of filling an area on my wall with drawings (Yeah, I got my priorities straight. Drawing > Working towards a successful future. Story of my life.). While I didn't quite draw enough to fill that space, I did create one or two really interesting drawings. The one shown in this entry some of you might recognize, actually. A few entries back, I posted a drawing of a woman which is quite similar to this one. I actually drew both in the same evening, trying hard to figure out the female face.

Just because you know how something looks doesn't mean you're able to draw it. At least I can't do that. I see my foot every damn day but if you asked me to draw a foot... Yeah, no. You have to practice different things individually. If you draw a loot of hands, you really only get good at... Drawing hands. A couple other certain aspects of your drawing skills might also improve, but you will still have problems drawing things that aren't hands. 

I've seen that happen to a couple of artists. Eyes are a popular motive, and some people just draw tons of those familiar windows to the world (Or soul, depending on what kind of person you ask.), and they get really good at it. In the end, what they end up with is a deviantart account full of sweet drawings of eyes, but not much else. It's like knowing how to play one song on the guitar, and knowing it really well. It's handy if you want to impress strangers, but you won't impress any musicians.


Anyway, I'm a lot better at drawing male faces than female faces, so I wanted to put down some work on diversifying my repertoire.



I'm not blogging from home right now, and I didn't have any of my usual equipment or software at hand, so the quality is a little bit... Uh, crap. It's better than nothing, though. Many of my recent uploads were photographed using my phone, which explains why they aren't exactly as sharp as one might wish. I don't have access to a scanner, and it's a lot more work to photograph them with my DSLR than it is to snap a quick picture with my Nokia phone, which automatically backs up all my photos over the internet, onto my PC at home or wherever I need to access it. Alas, this time the quality suffered a little more than usual.