I wasn't happy with the result of the woodcut so I did it again only this time from my imagination with no reference material.  Here's what I got.  I'm personally happier with this result.

To me, its more stylised and more interesting to look at.

I made a woodcut of a hand holding a phone with the wires going into the arms veins.  It suggests we need technology to function and we're dependent on it.  I did two of these.  These prints are from a photograph I took.  This was more of an experiment because I kept working into it and trying ideas and things I haven't done before.

These are the photographs I used as reference material.

The Gollum print was born out of the idea that young people were addicted to their phones so Gollum became the symbol for addiction.  Just like he's lost without the ring, we're lost without our phones!

The idea between the writing on the phone is that the phone is telling us how we think of technology.  I always hear people say things like "I'd be lost without my phone" or "I can't leave my house without my phone" and so on.  I've made the phone prints in a way that they know that young people can't function without them.  I'm currently making a series of these.  I don't know how many i'll do but here're the ones I've done so far.

I've done more prints of each but these came out the best.  Here're the plates and the prints.

As the project went on, I worked mainly with etching and woodcut.  The problem with these types of media is that I don't always remember to reverse my writing!  Major inconvenience!  The worse part is this happened twice!

 
I was so infuriated at this that I made a sign to remind myself of this.  Its on my wall in my studio.

During the 4 week drawing project, we got another brief.  This one was optional but I wanted to do it anyway!  It was based on the various symbols of the Mount Saint Lawrence graveyard in Limerick.  I picked rock as a symbol as rock seemed like the most obvious choice.  Its everywhere, the tombstones, the church the ground etc.  I read about rock being a symbol in a book belonging to Alan Crowley in the library.  It said that rock represented God for obvious reasons, its makes up most of the planet so its also a symbol for being a creator.  Since rock has been around since the dawn of time, its a symbol for eternity.  Rock symbolizes multiple other things but they're the 3 main reasons I went with.

I also thought the rock would be cocky and full of itself if it was capable of human speech.  So I personified it as I wanted to add a humorous twist to the project.  I worded the print to make it sound like its accusing the viewer of being inferior and lazy.  The print is a lithograph because I thought it would be clever to include rock in the formation of an image of a rock.  Here's the editions!

I started the project by adapting this naive cartoon like approach and drew a few A3 sized drawing with some markers.  There were supposed to be 6 drawings to go with this.  I have 5 of them and the first one I turned into an etching.  The first and third drawings are slightly more complicated to mix up the approach a bit.

The Tweet box design I did last year became the idea for my new 3rd year self directed brief.  Here's the brief I set for myself.

Conny O’Connor – K00185158

3^rd Year Printmaking

Self Directed Brief

My self directed brief is based on the concept that the young generation of today are almost completely dependent on technology.  Our youth have become addicted to social networking.  Most people up to the age of around twenty five just can’t be without their Iphones or Tablets or Ipads these days.  It’s so easy now to check Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tinder, Instagram and multiple other social media.  Not so long ago you’d have to wait until you were at a computer to check the internet, now it’s as easy as checking the time on your phone.

As well as this, very few young people will send letters anymore.  Talking to somebody in America or Australia from Ireland now is as easy as talking to your friend down the road from you.  All it takes is a message on Facebook.  Faxes are from the last generation also.  I’d be surprised if anyone under sixteen years old knew what a fax was, or a Walkman, or a VCR.  Technology has completely taken over, thus making all these things of the past obsolete.  Now a smart phone can carry out the functions of all these things and much more combined!

Technology to me seems like a drug these days.  Everybody wants, everybody needs it.  Kids around eleven or twelve used to start off with a simple phone to keep contact with their parents and friends.  Then a phone with a camera came out, then a built in Ipod, then the internet etc.  Before long everybody needed access to facebook all the time and the whole generation got hooked.  It’s like a simple phone was the gateway drug to fancier technology.  Now all it really takes to get a young person to spend an outrageous amount of money on a new phone is to put a higher number in the title (IPhone 4, IPhone 5, IPhone 6 etc).

To top off this entertaining aspect of life, I’ve also come to the conclusion that young people are prisoners to their phones as they’re never free from them.  They’re slaves or mindless zombies to their phones because it’s at the point now that the person no longer controls the phone but the phone controls the person.  It’s even at the point now where technology has introduced its own language to our way of life.  Words like “yolo, lol, soz, totes v defo, prom prom, a9 etc” are all commonplace and are as a result of constant social networking. 

I was going for a humorous/childlike approach to the project as I personally find this style of making art quite enjoyable.  The 3 main artists I first started looking at were David Shrigley, Jean Jullien and Theresa McCracken.  Here's some of their work and why I chose them for inspiration.

Conny O’Connor – K00185158

3^rd Year Printmaking

Artists/Concepts to research

Jean Jullien

Jean Jullien is a French graphic designer who’s currently based in London.  He’s attended Quimper in Nantes, Central Saint Martins College and the Royal College of Art in London.  He works in a wide variety of media from Illustration, Installations, Photography, Video, Costumes, Posters, Books and even Clothing to create a large body of work.  He draws his compositions with thick markers which gives them their cartoon like quality.  I love his work because it frees me from the anxiety of needing to spend hours drawing very detailed images.  I enjoy the simplicity and entertaining aspects of his work and I can relate to his sense of humour quite well.  I also enjoy the subject matter of his work and how he mocks it through his images.

David Shrigley

David Shrigley is a visual artist who’s best known for his bizarre, crude and immensely entertaining drawings.  He received a BFA in Glasgow School of Art in 1991 but claims that he’s an outsider in the artworld.  He has exhibited widely and has done solo shows all over the place including San Francisco, Glasgow and Copenhagen.  Although he recently started encorporating film into his practice, he mostly just puts pen and pencil to paper and draws whatever is going on in his head or the world around him.  David Shrigley is my hero and I really love his child like approach to art.  I’m a huge fan of the humour he implies and the way he draws with crossed out words, uneven lines, no perspective or attention to detail.  Usually in the artworld this would look like criticism but not in this context.

Theresa McCracken

Theresa McCracken is a great inspiration to me.  She’s a cartoonist with a unique sense of humour who apparently lives with a few stray animals outside of Waldport, Oregon, USA.  She’s also a naturalist, historian and writer but is most well known for her simple yet effective cartoons.  She’s done illustrations for many magazines and newspapers including The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post.  Theresa aims her work at a wide audience as it’s for everyone to enjoy.  She mainly draws her cartoons with pen or pencil.  I’m a huge fan of her work.  I love her simplistic drawing style, just lines, no shading or much detail at all.  It showed me that a drawing doesn’t need to look photo realistic to draw attention and love her approach to adding humour to her work.

 

Here are the processes I hope to use

Image making Strategies/Print Processes

·         Start off with sketches of ideas in my sketchbook

·         Make all of them into etchings

·         Start using big, thick black markers and make drawings into screen prints

·         Do larger scale drawings around my studio space

·         Maybe incorporate photography into my practice (Photograph models doing funny poses)

·         Do a few woodcuts of these sketches as well

Resources

https://mchumor.com/about-the-cartoonist/

http://www.davidshrigley.com/

http://www.jeanjullien.com/