I made it a lot of final prints in the print room and after a lot of work and effort, blood, sweat and tears I finally finished most of my prints. Some of them turned out less pigmented and patchy than others, some had smudging and one of them I had to repress under the press because it did not push down all the way so it created a motion blur effect which I loved.

This final piece means a lot to me because the background images all merged together of different buildings in different memories in a persons life, the main character in the middle is the devil and it’s almost like taunting you to death but I find beauty in that, when life taunts you into death you have a choice to make and desire to either want for a new start or to stay in the same life is purely up to you and it’s a very psychological and philosophical matter to discuss in one piece and I don’t think I could describe what I fully feel just in this blog but this final piece has made me realise a lot about my life and everything in between it.

I’m really happy with the outcome of my pieces and I don’t think I would ask for a better final piece. I am so happy that I stepped out of my comfort zone and explored something new because it has led me to a whole new world and I feel like I can finally learn something that does not require me to throw a bunch of materials at a canvas and say that it’s art.

When displaying my artwork I decided to go for a more industrial yet nature themed look to bring us back to the roots of life and how we all started and where we have came to, the nails represent different pain and anguish that we go through life to reach something better, the main artworks are hung up by pins to represent the fact that we’re all pinned together in this lifetime and we all suffer and live through a lot but in the end it all connects to start a new life that links us from our souls to our bodies.

For our 11th week, we did mostly some research on the final piece planning and I decided to research more into the printmaking techniques and what they look like back in the olden days. I found many examples and stuck them into my sketchbook taking references of what they did to shade the bodies and how they were positioned. I also did more research on what is beauty and sexual desire because this is an important meaning behind my piece that everyone has a different perception of beauty and in my eyes my artwork I want to display the beauty that I see in everyday life

The sketches above show different architectural buildings that I had drawn and pieced together to create a final result for my final piece, after that I got a large sheet of plastic and started carving and edging into it creating the design on the plastic to be used for printmaking. This was a very tedious project but, in the end, it paid off and every single detail and every single line was where it was supposed to be. I did not want my piece to look less detailed I wanted to add as much detail and realism to the piece as I would add colour and different materials to one of the other pieces. I put in a lot of care and effort, and I was so happy to have finally finished etching into that plastic after four full consecutive days.

Before the printmaking workshop, I was experimenting around with mono printing, and I took influence from Damien Hirst’s Piece that was named “Apollo’s foot” the rat had a lot of wavy lines and different textures to work with so I carved into the sheet of plastic and just let my hand go free through the lines and try different techniques. This piece was purely experimental just to see what would happen if acrylic paints were laid down with a bit of water and pressed together on a piece of paper the results came out with a cell-like pattern of water patches in some areas which I have highlighted in my sketchbook and shown these patterns got me really intrigued and it was something that I could definitely use my final piece but if it didn’t add too much action to it.

For our next workshop, we were down in the printing room and playing around with screen printing. I can say that I did not enjoy this at all just because screen printing is very difficult, and you have less control over the outcome since different materials can react differently with the screen printing itself. It took a lot of manual labour, and I did not really enjoy the process at all it was nothing special to me and it was something that I cannot see myself doing in the future, but I am grateful for the experience because now I know something that I should stay away from and not try in the future. I am happy with the prints but at the same time I feel a bit sad because the colours were not as bright as I wanted them to be, the textures were off on you can’t really tell what is going on in the piece.

Week 9 we started our ceramic pieces, my idea for my ceramic piece was to create an ancient rune display to tie in with the different architecture that I was drawing. Ancient ruins can reveal a lot about past lives and how people worshipped gods or even different sacrifices that were performed at these ruins. I wanted to add the oni mask still to be the main subject of the ceramic piece, but I added little details like Peony flowers to represent life and the beauty of what’s to come in it. I wanted the ancient ruins to look very worn dying and old to fill with the static of the piece and related back to olden day occult.

I continue to further research different architecture and try to see if I can piece together anything that would work with these ancient ruins, unfortunately, nothing sprung to my mind so I continued with my main idea. I started moulding the clay under this letting my hands do the magic, I do love making sculptures and I feel like this is one of my stronger pieces. These runs meant a lot to me and I am very attached to the piece overall I’m so happy with the outcome and the way the colours just pop off the sculpture itself, I decided not to glaze it so it would have this matte finish to represent the rock texture for the ruins and I painted it with acrylic paints mixing different shades of green for the grass and different shades of pink for the flowers

For our green screen class with Laura, we were tasked to create a short film or clip including a green screen of our character or person. I had drawn up my main character the Oni mask wearing devil and I wrote a bit about him in my sketchbook and the meaning behind why I chose to continue with the design. I uploaded a video below displaying what happens,  I wanted to portray a sort of afterlife with the devil almost taunting the viewer when it peeps around the screen and then almost it capturing the soul in a distorted way. I wanted to make it as distorted as possible because when you reach a near death experience your brain releases a highly hallucinogenic chemical which can cause you to hallucinate or to see things that may not even be real it is a defence mechanism in the brain for when death arrives.. The short film was supposed to represent the fact that death is always looming around the corner and even when we least expect it, it can happen anytime, any place, anywhere.

We had a painting class with Luke Foster and he taught us how to use oil paints and experiment with mixing different colours to create other colours. I have always disliked using oil paints because they were very hard to use and you had to have a very good blending skill to create something that looked not like a child’s drawing. I experimented with my old style again and added a hint of realism creating this sort of entity from another world. But I realised that I was back into my comfort zone I needed to stride away from it, although oil paints are out of my comfort zone I decided to go with another route because I still felt comfortable painting and I wanted to really think outside the box and explore things that I’m not used to.

I decided to draw a statue that I found in a book about the occult, this statue represented the balance between a feminine sort of figure on a masculine figure. I loved the tone and depth shown and I wanted to recreate that to test my skills and see where I could take it, so I decided to replicate this statue with a pen, I sat drawing for a tedious amount of time shading and I decided that the way the pen allowed me to use tone and depth and have complete control over it was going to be a definite factor in my final piece so I quickly moved on to drawing buildings that I found from magazines scraps.

For our first week starting our final workshop, it was the 6th week and we were tasked with researching our new project I wanted to do something similar to my previous project and keep it along the theme of religion so I chose to explore life and death and what people make of it, but also what they fear in it, in short terms, REBIRTH. The first few pages of the sketchbook were architectural drawings and research that is beneficial to my project to see what boundaries I could push and what methods I could use to step out of my comfort zone. I always relied on throwing everything out of the page and hoping for the best the more I had on a page the better it seemed, but my teacher advised me against it and challenged me to explore simplicity yet emphasise the subject in the piece.

These next few sketchbook pages are showing different ways that I could step out of my comfort zone and explore different types of art techniques that I’m not very comfortable with because I wanted to challenge myself during this final semester. I also made a few ideas on ceramic and wire pieces and sculptures for the weeks ahead the very last page is the start of my research that I did behind rebirth and I read a lot of philosopher’s work on what the afterlife is and what other people believe happens after you die. I wanted to take in every ones perspective and not just focus on my own because it could give me some ideas to where my final piece could lead and what the meaning behind everything was.

I have highlighted it on emphasised quotes that I thought would be useful for my final piece, some of the phrases did not end up useful but I still mentioned them so that I could still have a backup plan if my main ideas did not work and I would have supporting evidence of it in these quotes.

I dedicated a page to why I chose these certain topics to focus on. Some of the topics are about beauty and some are about life and death, I feel like it is important to understand that life and death is not always what we find beautiful but it is a form of beauty in itself. A memorable quote from a book is “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” even though I know my final piece will not be the beauty that other people appreciate I know that I will be able to appreciate it because it is a form of beauty that I see, I want people to see what beauty is through my eyes when they look at my final piece.