Sunday, May 29, 2011

Almost there, Vivien



A rough colour test for the Vivien Leigh portrait

drop




rainy day
ink drawing
hot tea
good music
wooly jersey

happiness

__
x

we so hot we burn your eye



This is Steve and next to him is me. We are not so cool, but maybe if we were, we would look something like this! haha...

Dickens in progress

Ok, so I didn't mange to finish Charles Dickens on Friday, but I have made some more progress... will definitely be done by tomorrow...


Thursday, May 26, 2011

What the dickens?



Work in progress for Charles Dickens portrait... will hopefully be done by tomorrow!

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Portraits

Charles Dickens

Vivien Leigh - ink

Vivien Leigh  - pencil



Some sketches for portraits of famous people who suffered from some kind of mental illness - will explain in more detail soon...

Thursday, May 19, 2011

depression

Hot off the .... err... drawing board! Just finished this page, from the visual diary that we have to keep for the duration of the Sappi project. So all the drawings in here will be about mental illness. This one is about depression.




I tried to picture a really depressing background and eventually came up with old, mouldy, seventies style wallpaper with damp darkness creeping in towards the subject. Pretty melodramatic!

afternoon find


forgotten house

sunlit leaves

faster! faster!

last colour on the hanging creeper

love the blue-grey colour of this beetle
old Soph'


My dog, Sophie, is scoring high in the dog-years department, which means that she walks a lot slower than she used to. But she still loves her daily walk around the neighbourhood, so this afternoon i decided to make use of all the stopping and waiting and brought my camera along on our stroll.  

I love afternoons in autumn.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Sunday Mist











I took these yesterday while walking around Zandvlei with my best friend/ boy friend, Steve. It was so misty and nice. My favourite kind of weather.  I was fascinated by the purple rocks and the swirling pond weed. I think Steve thought I was losing it!

taking sunday






Sunday swing
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x

Sunday, May 15, 2011

oblivious





Something from my new visual diary - a different take on mental illness
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Sunday, May 8, 2011

Warped views

clouded perspective

warped view

a poor reflection




These are a few of the shots from the documentary style series of photographs that I'm handing in tomorrow as part of our Sappi project. There are some more in this series, (which focuses on the negative impact that the media has on people with mental illness through the way in which it spreads stigma, which results in many inequalities for people who have suffered or are still suffering from, some form of mental illness and are trying to recover their lives and find a place within society), but I haven't included them due to the fact that they show people's faces - one of the conditions that for us photographing at Fountain House was that we would respect the identity and privacy of the members and not publish their faces without their permission.



The series is also about the way in which society in general has such as warped and clouded view of mental illness and how the way in which the mentally ill are treated is a very poor reflection on society.

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this city



imaginary album cover
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Saturday, May 7, 2011

hello



Just messing around, trying to show the effects of being in front of a screen for hours at a time, combined with stress, boredom and winter weather!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Thursday's medicine

click on the image for a larger view


I've been working on this for a while now, and I think it's done!
I think this version is a LOT better than the first one, but maybe it still needs a typographic element?
It's basically an adaptation of the previous Intwasa Sangoma Starter Pack promotional poster, but this time it's much more abstract. The main face is meant to be a sangoma in a state of trance, with all the little elements spinning around his head as if they are from one or many of his visions. I used my left hand to draw them, since I wanted them to look like they had been roughly drawn by the sangoma while in a trance. Some helpful comments here would be great!

Nonspecific type sample #12


Haven't done this for a while. Snapped this while walking to Fountain House early Wednesday morning.
Love the slant and white drop shadow!

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

pancake wednesday





 Our group has been hard at work in Obs (our NGO is situated there) for the past two days, but this morning we took a little break and had coffee at a sweet little cafe called Queen of Tarts, that conveniently happens to be just down the road from Fountain House. The boys had flapjacks, with banana, almonds and lots of golden syrup and they really were the best things I've tasted all week!

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Team photos

We're all busy working on a nine-week group project that basically involves creating a campaign for a Non Government Organisation (NGO) and then entering that campaign into the Sappi Ideas That Matter competition. Exciting stuff. I was in a mood to procrastinate last night, so I took pieces of each of our group's faces and mashed them up to create this thing! I'm calling him/her/it JAAR - Jared, Aimee, Arno and Renate. Ok, back to work!



Monday, May 2, 2011

proper winter

this was taken last weekend, today is much stormier!


It's so rainy and magical in Cape Town at the moment, the first proper rainy, stormy weather this year - I think! So I'm going to hide under my duvet and drift off to the sound of raindrops hitting my roof. Goodnight!