Paul Chan is another person I took inspiration from to do my shadow figures life sized.  He takes a different approach to Kara Walker as he uses shadows and lighting to create his figures on the wall.  Here are some of his works.

His shadows depict political problems such as the war in Iraq with America.

I mentioned Kara Walker in my earlier blog.  Her silhouettes are life sized, taking up entire wall spaces and made from cut up black paper.  Her reasoning for making them life sized was to strike awe and shock into the viewer's eyes.  In other words, they're more effective on this scale.  Here are some of her works depicting slavery.

I decided to take a similar approach and make my own silhouettes life sized as I thought they would appear more interesting this scale.

Moving away from silhouettes briefly, I'm now looking at the evidence of where skateboarders have been such as the scratches on benches and handrails from grinding, marks on the ground, etc.  Here are a few pictures I.ve taken so far.  There's more to come.

I tried making a cast of the surface of the ledge, however since I can't bring the ledge into college with me it proved to be difficult to achieve.  I tried it anyway, making a clay mould and doing my own carvings, then pouring the surface over with plaster.  This was the outcome, I don't think it worked though.

I will make more moulds such as this one in the foreseeable future and see if I can get some convincing markings without the ledge being with me in the plaster room.

Soon afterward, I started looking at the sequences of tricks from start to finish.  I drew some in my sketch pad, however most of them are in a small flipbook I made, which everyone is welcome to flick through!  Here are a few sequences that I've done so far.

Later I took a sequence of one of my favourite professional skaters, Felipe Gustavo and use the overhead projector to make more cut outs.  These are only A2 sized because I wanted to work quickly to see how they'd look.  This was the outcome.

The plan is to do a similar sequence, but life sized.  As soon as I get enough wall!

A few people inspired me to go life sized with my silhouettes, some of whom are the following, Kara Walker, Paul Chan, Tim Noble and Sue Webster.  All of them can be read about in my contextual notebook.  They are all silhouette artists however each person uses them differently.  Kara uses silhouettes to tell the apalling story of black slaves in America during the early 19th century.  Paul Chan is an activist and an artist who uses shadows to address international issues such as the war in the middle east with America.  Tim Noble and Sue Webster use everyday objects such as rubbish and light to cast a shadow of very convincing portraits of iconic stars.  Each persons work is truly remarkable in my opinion.

I've decided to go life sized with the silhouettes at this stage.  I achieved this by drawing the figures on asotate and placing them on an overhead projector facing the wall which I had covered previously with black paper.  This is the projector I used.

I then drew the outline of the shadow onto the black paper using white chalk.  Once I had my outline, I was able to cut the figure out using a scalpel.  At the beginning I tried using a scissors but it didn't cut as smoothly as the scalpel.  Here are a few life sized pieces that I've done so far in the project.

I soon stepped away from pro skaters and decided to turn my own skateboarding pictures into silhouettes as I thought it might make things interesting if I included myself in the project aswell!  Here are a couple of the photographs I chose.

Once i'd finished these, I figured it was time to move out of the sketch pad and start hanging stuff out on the walls.

I recently saw a dotted circle painting by Damien Hirst which can be seen in my contextual studies notebook.  Although his work doesn't have much to do with my project so far, he did give me the idea of drawing my figures with dots rather than a full silhouette.  Here are some of the dotted pictures from my sketch pad.

 

This idea never really took off as it was too time consuming and I personally thought the silhouette was more effective.  Having said that, although I didn't run with it, it's good to try out new things!

I soon went back to my sketch pad to try out new things.  I decided to do some basic silhouettes of my favourite skateboarders like Colin Provost, Cody McEntire, Dustin Dollin etc.  The plan is to make these life sized later on but for the moment here are some of the few I did in my sketch pad.

While I was doing this, I thought it would be cool to do a small flip book of little silhouette skaters doing tricks.  It's a whole book but these are only a few pages.