I also have an idea of making a short video of skateboarding.  I have taken inspiration from an add of one of my favourite skaters of all time, Geoff Rowley.  Like this one it's going to be in black and white with a hint of colour in places.  Again, it's a simple, yet very effective idea, in my opinion.  Here's the link.  Enjoy.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=293mR3DNybs

After a while I went away from my sketch pad and began making things.  The idea of making a short skating animation came to me a while ago and i thought i'd build the skatepark, draw the characters myself and take various pictures (kind of like a flip book), rather than rely on computers (cos I hate them).  Here's part of the journey from start to finish of the parks construction out of card.

It's not complete but I'm eager to move onto other ideas, so I'm going to leave it for now and maybe get back to it in the future.

Keith Haring was the first artist I looked at.  He's associated with the whole modern culture of street art.  He'd draw basic figures out of chalk all around New York City.  Keith was an activist aswell as an artist and he promoted awareness of AIDS and HIV through his art in the streets.  He died in 1990 of AIDS complications, aged just 31.  Although his approach to art is different to mine, street art, graffiti and skateboarding have always been associated with one another as they've both been frowned upon until recently.  The rebellious attitudes of both skaters and graffiti artists has always been something both have had in common.  This is where the idea of skateboarding first came to mind for me.  The way Keith leaves out all the detail of the figures, leaving just the outline and a block of colour is actually where I got the idea of using silhouettes.  Here are some of Keith's works.

Jean Michel Basquiat was another modern cultural artist and he and Keith often worked together, creating street artwork all around Nwe York.  Basquiat was also influenced by the modern cultural movement that was coming about at this stage.  He died in 1988 of a drug overdose, just 28 years old.  Here are some of his works.

Here, I went to the skatepark and got a few pictures of myself doing different tricks.  I think these are relevant to the topic "time" as skating is all about timing and motion.  Here are two photos i've taken.

After this, I decided to encorporate a silhuette approach and got rid of the background entirely.  This is one example.

I'm hoping to use photoshop to create many different silhuettes out of these pictures as I think they will be more effective this way.  I have done a few silhuettes already both in my sketchbook and in various flipbooks.  Here are some of them.

Here, I took pictures of different tricks in the skatepark.

Hello everyone.

This is my first blog update.  I started my project with a couple of ideas about things that change over time like evolution, age, war etc.  Now i'm focusing more on skateboarding as this is my favourite pastime.  I'm exploring the timing and motions of different tricks at the moment.  I started by taking pictures of myself skating and doing the odd sketch in my sketch pad.