Sitting in the garden this afternoon i started looking at all the different leaves there are. Some smooth, some shiny, some furry, some green, some red and some yellow. I collected an assortment of leaves and took a few photos. I placed them in lines and imagine them as a sort of repeat linear striped pattern.
Although i live on the outskirts of a small town i see a lot of wildlife and in the past week i have been lucky enough to see some deer, an owl and a heron catching fish. I saw the deer and owl whilst driving on a narrow single track country lane, lined with trees and hedgerows and the heron whilst out walking my dog. Unfortunately the heron was too far away to get a good picture and i missed it actually catching and eating a fish. Here is one of the pictures i did take of the heron and some pictures of the cute baby calves i saw with their love heart markings!
I have just been looking through some of my old photos and thought I would write a quick post on the RHS Show Tatton Park 2009 that I went to last year with my mum, as she is passionate about gardening. Flowers have influenced my designs and artwork on numerous occasions over the past few years but the unusual modern pieces of garden furniture, flower arrangements and garden designs are also inspirational to me. Below are a couple of my highlights from 2009.
Melanie Garbutt’s flower arrangements are particularly beautiful. Below are some of the photographs I took of her work:
I love this modern twist on a ‘summer’ house, which I think looks very stylish and would be a prefect addition to a large contemporary garden.
After getting caught up with things at home and working a few odd shifts I became quickly bored of the summer holidays and set about finding ways to occupy myself. Firstly I installed a 30-day trial edition of Photoshop and began experimenting as this is definitely a tool, which I could use to further my design work if I was more familiar with the software. I started with basics and playing around with some old photos to see what I could achieve.
I have now set myself the goal of creating a design for a T-shirt, which I hope to enter in to a current Fenchurch T-shirt competition. It is unlikely to be a fantastic, jaw-dropping creation however it will not only occupy some of my summer but also help me to learn some new techniques I can hopefully use to aid my textile design work next semester.
After installing Photoshop and spending a day glued to my computer screen I decided I needed to get back to doing something that was not just creative but messy and hands on creative! I decided to order wooden MDF gift tags, which I plan to decorate and use when sending gifts to family and friends. I hope it will add a personl touch to their gifts and that they will keep or recycle the tags. Below is a photo of the tags... they are not yet painted, but when they are decorated I will post some photographs!
Here are a couple of pictures and a link to the website where I came across some unusual photographic wallpaper today:
Below is a link to a recent news article I read about a Boeing 727 being turned in to a 'luxurious new hotel suite' in Costa Rica. http://uk.travel.yahoo.com/p-promo-3311477 I personally think the hotel is not only ridiculous but also very ugly. I can see that it is a recycled plane that was otherwise going to be scrapped but surely it is now an eyesore, which simply attracts people due to its unusual appearance? The article reads ‘Jutting out from a hillside, the Boeing offers views of the ocean and the jungle from balconies built on each wing’. Why put something so ugly in a beautiful setting, I think a luxurious property, which was eco-friendly and blended in to the natural environment would have been a lot more tasteful.
I thought I would just quickly blog about the current home base advert, I like it for two reasons. 1. It’s colourful and I love bright colourful things and 2. Its filmed in the train station I pass through on my way home and where I get off to visit my dad.
I remember calling my mum a while back and saying ‘mum…. why are there sofas in the train station and carpets and lots of gardeners and why are there flowers everywhere’ I think initially my mum thought I was quite crazy she then suggested that ‘perhaps royalty or someone important is visiting, perhaps its for publicity’. I think the advert is fun and it completely transformed the space available, unfortunately i think the station is now back to normal. Dull, dingy, grey and unwelcoming, despite a Facebook group protesting to keep the station how it was decorated for the advert. Below is the advert i am talking about:
Perhaps in the future artists and designers could permanently transform bus stations, train stations and other public spaces to make them more fun, interesting and inviting?
Yesterday whilst having a wander around town I decided to venture in to the Wellgate shopping centre in Dundee, somewhere I never have any need to go. This unusual clock caught my interest and I took a quick couple of photos, unfortunately the quality is not very good as although I did have my camera in my bag I had left the memory card at home and so had to resort to using my phone. I think this fun, colourful clock will be appealing to young children and something on a smaller scale would be well suited to a children’s bedroom to help with telling the time.
I am really interested in design which incorporates or is influenced by nature and recently i came across these business cards created by a company called Tatil Design.
I came across this video on YouTube. This machine is a mechanical music making sculpture with many individual moving parts, the machine looks complex and I imagine to watch in reality it would captivate the audience as they tried to figure out how everything connects and works together to create music. The use of lighting within the machine is also interesting and I think this machine could easily work as a gallery installation. I like the composition of this video as we see the close up working details of the machine but are not really sure of the overall appearance of the machine until right at the end of the video. To me the machine looks like an overly complex drum kit.
Earlier today Core 77 tweeted about www.engraveyourtech.com/ I really like the idea of engraving artists work or custom designs on to laptops, notebooks. iPhones etc. I think I would personally quite like to have a design from within my sketchbook engraved on the outside for example and I often think my Mac looks quite plain. I would always wish to have my own design engraved so that it was personal to me, however from the website I particularly like the design by Justine Ashbee. Shown below. I think the design is quite simple yet interesting and rather sculptural.
