Friday 28th January - Sixth Form Art and DT

My brother was given my A-Level Art portfolios to return to me today. It's quite handy to have a sibling who goes to the same school you went to too. Anyway, I was sifting through my sketch books looking at how much effort I had put into (most of) my work, and thought I would share some of it with you.

A sketch drawn as part of my research

Art used to be my life before theology came along. It was always art and DT. One of my art projects based upon the theme 'viewpoints' resulted in an A1 sized book out of cardboard that had turning pages and words that popped out. It was a lot of fun to say the least. That said, the amount of extra effort and time that must go into creative subjects such as art and DT is immense.

For DT, a lot of my free periods were spent in the workshop cutting things up on the band saw or drawing on CAD/CAM. I rarely had the chance to rush back home after school as it was inevitable that I would have to do some printing or research that I couldn't do at home (I went through this one phase where I was printing on acetate. It was AMAZING. Sure it took me ages to work out how to do it without it smudging or jamming the printer, but still, the end result was worth it. I now have a triptych that looks like three stained glassed windows. Will have to upload a photo for you sometime).

I needed a tripod so I improvised

Band saw love

I loved art. The painting; the drawing; the sculpting. The long-winded interpretations I had to write on pieces of art were made-up tosh most of the time. Waffle. I threw around words such as 'juxtaposition', 'composition', anything basically ending in 'ition'. I loved DT too: getting my hands dirty; hunched over the worktop making sure my measurements were within the millimetre; laughing about how close I was to losing a bit of my finger. One of my favourite design briefs was to make a collapsable chair. Here's mine:

Do you remember the WKD advert with the drills? We had one of those moments.

My sixth form days were good. Looking through my sketch books was just another - sad - reason to get nostalgic.