final major project

To begin with I decided for my final major project I would be creating birds through experimenting with collage and then creating lino prints. I research into different artist and how to lino cut. Also I did some life drawings of birds and also went to the national history museum in Cardiff to get inspiration.

So to start I photocopied some photos of birds and started to cut them up. this then using the different heads, beaks, legs, wings to create my own breeds of birds. here are a few:

By doing this I was finding that I was creating different size birds, some with very big heads and little bodies and other fun and unusable birds. I enjoyed doing this. then i started to give them a bio of there breed. like you would see in a bird book. One thing I found hard was creating names for the birds so I haven't done that.

Next I thought if I drew these created birds in colour pencil it would help my gain the structure of the birds form. And help me gain the feeling for the textures of the birds.

The next step was creating the lino cuts. At first it seem quite difficult as I had not really done it since our workshop day with Nick Morley. But it is fun and easy to crate different textures for different areas of the birds. I decided to mix up some of my linos with ink line drawings so heads of certain birds where drawn whilst their bodies was lino printed

this image is not a good scan

After feedback from fellow students some did not like the different in combining the two media together so I decided to just make them out of lino prints.

Because I was lino printing many birds this did consume most of my time and in the beginning I was just creating them not thinking what I'm actually going to do with them. So when Ian Murray came in for a talk I had a tutorial with him and we talked about backgrounds and how they could be simple colours and shapes, to being maps to suggest migration to using branches, leaves, reeds ect to frame the work.So I went about experimenting with this.

Here are just a couple of lino prints:

.Here are some experiments with full colour backgrounds:

 I dont really like this as the fact that they are printed and the colour paper I've used and marks I have done are lost some how in having full colour backgrounds. Thus I am just going to use the branches or some means of nature to create almost a frame for the images. Keeping it simple.

 The two images above are mock up of two of my final images. The final images are in different colours to these.

For my main final I will create a bigger lino print of a bird with its wings out, as I think I will be able to use many different marks on which I can show what I have learnt during this project and by printing it on different coloured paper collage it together to create a large colourful image of a bird.

I will upload an image when I get a photo.