a début

today!

The Stampopolis Post

~long awaited~ Stampopolis post ;) on 14th April (my birthday!) myself and some of Art School Disco  took part in Urbandsey, a pop up exhibition at The Vibe gallery in Bermondsey, around the theme of 'Urban'.
My contribution was a 3m x 1.5m (almost)blank canvas for visitors to contribute to and build a city. I carved around 20 rubber stamps, allowing them to be put together in near-infinite combinations to make the elements of a city.
I started off the city centre at home, as documented in the below video:

my lovely husband helped me with the videos. superstar! below is some rough sheets i used to clean off the inks..

 I was very lucky that there were (at least!) 3 fantastic photographers at the show, who got some great snaps of the city growing.

Below: 3 photos by Miles Dell, including my /stamp-station/ (read: table i found in a bin)

Below: great snaps by Mike Brown. i was amazed at how many people interacted with the art!

Below 2 photos are by KLV who also took part in the show!

 before and after shot:

and finally, a fab video of the show!

Space and stone

 Catching up on the blog- above, an artschooldisco collab between myself and Keiron. he did the stunning collage of Laika memorabilia, and i did the typography and some colouring bits.

below is a quickie example i did for my final photoshop session at school. i cracked out the rubber stamps and took inspiration from some statues in Ferdinand Cheval's Palais Ideal.

Queenie

This week's entry for Art School Disco's theme! looks like an 80's album cover, eh?

Spot the Difference

The brilliant Scribble Project is looking great recently! Here's a scribble i did:

photoshop fun

I've had an interesting few Fridays at school teaching some GCSE students (15 y.o?) some photoshop basics. I was pretty anxious as to how it would work out. I'm not really a natural at explaining things, even when it was a small group of 4 students. I've found that using Photoshop is like learning to drive- it's hard to explain the process of something that has become as 2nd nature as walking or breathing.

The image above is an experiment as to how I could structure the images! ...We went through the process of how I use handmade images and finish them digitally. It was tricky explaining the process of using layers to build up an image. I used tracing paper so the students could see the image building up. I kept it relatively simple by limiting our images to 3 layers:


This is my example- a Pacific Island mask! layer 1: fineliner detail, holding the image together. 2. oil pastel textured layer- adds definition. 3. ink wash layer, as a background. This also helps the students display a variety of techniques in their artwork.

I found explaining everything on photoshop very hard! (the students watched what I did on a projector and copied the process at the same time). Sometimes photoshop can be a bit unpredictable at the best of times. I thought the students would find some of the jargon boring (I don't even know what contiguous means, but I know it's handy in photoshop!) but they were engaged the whole time and very on the ball.
Above is my final example! I love purple and orange together!

Below is a final image by one of the students. He was cheeky and did his original 'background' in coloured pens- so I told him to keep the colours as they were, resulting in this funky rainbow bug.
I love the sense of colour in the image below, by another student. The bugs were taken from the book 'Living Jewels'.
The bee was from a lovely photograph this student took.
Phew! Great aren't they? 1 more session to go. Does anyone else do things like this? I'd like some tips!

Open/Closed Exhibition

another longtime no blog! I still need to do a little write up about the exhibition i took part in last month. Open/Closed was devised by Ben and Doug, creating a pop-up exhibition in a studio space at The Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey. Art School Disco, our badass ~illustration collective~, all exhibited, along with a few others ;)

--- urgh --- my blogger uploader is mad-- uploads in a random order? here's a photo dump, in some sort of random order :S

work by Johnny Ace (photo: Sabina Campbell)

Work by Simon Abbott (photo: Sabina Campbell)
work by Ben Phe (photo: Sabina Campbell)
work by mee! (photo: Sabina Campbell)
work by meee (photo: Sabina Campbell)
we had films playing and stuff! (photo: Sabina Campbell)
more of meee (photo: Daniel!)
Keiron's installation! (photo: daniel)
Work by Ed Brown (photo: Daniel!)
work by meee! (photo: Daniel!)
my stuff! (photo: Daniel!)


done!

Natural History

Just a few photos from some recent daytrips. We went to the Natural History Museum a few weekends back; it was the busiest I've ever seen it with queues outside! Our friend wanted to go to a guided tour of the museum's archive and research dept. We gladly obliged and saw some of the quieter & less popular exhibits while he was busy. oh, later on there's some photos of dead animals.... some people might not like that bit. just a warning.



I then went with Kieron to the Booth Museum, which I'm sure I've blogged about before.... anyway, it's wonderfully strange and always fun to spend an hour or two looking at the birds and skeletons.