Our sculpture project is to make some sort of contraption that can fly or glide.  First of all, I looked at some videos on youtube to get me started as I had no idea what to do!  Here's an example of one that I looked at.

http://www.artbabble.org/search/flight

  Rather than go down the route of making engines as this would be too time consuming, I decided to go back to humans first encounter of flight and aerodynamics.  This was the boomerang.  I spent this week making 12 boomerangs out of various materials like resin, wax, paper and plaster.  To make these, I got a real boomerang to use as a template.

With all these ideas and the influences of other professional artists coming together, I managed to make a final piece for my project.  

This combines all the ideas I had over the course of the project, such as the idea of the time the trick started to when it finished, the journey it involves like the board flipping and the skater moving forward and I incorporatedthe idea of the silhouette on a coloured background.  It's quite large, longer than an average car.  I thought this would have more of an impact if I went on a larger scale.   

Nathan Hudson is currently completing his Certificate in Graphic Design for print at Emory University in Atlanta.  He uses both Mac and PC software to create his pieces.  Although much of what he does revolves around sports, I was more interested in his silhouette pictures.  I like how he put them against a colourful background rather than a plain white background.  It's different, unique and more interesting I think.  Here are some of his works.

Towards the end of the project, I came across people who did silhouette pictures with coloured backgrounds.  Up until recently I have really only been dealing with the traditional black and white silhouette.

By definition, the word "silhouette" describes a drawing consisting of the outline of something, especially a human profile, filled in with a solid colour.  So even though the traditional silhouette is black and white, that doesn't mean we have to stick to those two colours.  As long as we have one solid colour, we can use whatever colours we wish.  It was really pictures like these that inspired my spray painted pieces.

Here are a few coloured silhouette pictures I came across that inspired me to use vivid, bright colours.  Some of the artists who did these are anonymous.

Temple of Dawn in Bangkok, Thailand by David Marshall.

I mentioned using a Go Pro camera in the skatepark in my earlier posts.  I got this idea from a guy on youtube who films skateboarding tricks using this type of camera.  Here's a video he's done that I took inspiration from.

After a couple of weeks I finally managed to get one of these cameras!  Here are two videos that I did at the skatepark.  I had to do this twice as I've never used one of these cameras before and made a mess of the first try.

Watching this and the injuries that Chris Cole got in the process inspired me to look at the suffering that goes on in order to get a trick.  Cuts, scars, broken bones and so on are something every skater has to deal with, myself included!  The most common injury I get if I fall is cutting my fingers.  This happened the other day and it gave me the idea of casting my hand in plaster and using red Indian ink for blood.  This might look like something you might see at Halloween but I think it was worth trying!

I also thought it might be cool to let red Indian ink drip down a page and see the marks left behind.

While I was looking at falls and injuries, it gave me the idea of creating a life sized silhouette of someone who's just after falling.  I used the same tools, the overhead projector, black paper and a scalpel.

Most of the time, falling trying a trick is a skaters own fault.  However getting tripped up by your friends for the laugh is also a common occurrence! 

The way I've brought the concept of "time" into this project is by examining the time taken to perfect different tricks, from the first time they are tried to when they're landed and all the falls and injuries suffered in between!  This video of one of my favourite pro skaters, Chris Cole is a perfect example of what every skater must be willing to go through at some point or another.  This trick took him a total of 68 tries and most of the day, suffering greatly in the process.  Enjoy!