Our first masterpiece 

defeated......  by SHM

This is a 1.2 m² piece of artwork consisting of 100's of images of the 80's to create a mosaic portrait of Margaret Thatcher. We decided to call this piece of art defeated.... stemming from an infamous quote by Thatcher whilst in power Defeat—I do not recognise the meaning of the word!.As we all know the Baroness was kicked out of power by her own party and in turn her party then thrown out of power by new labour. The IRONY!! (excuse the pun, irony, iron, iron lady! cough cough)

On either side of the image of Thatcher are the portaits of my classmates and I from college(clockwise from top right Ayla, Jonathan, Lana, Julie, myself and Karl. The ones to the left where born pre 1980s and to the right post 1980s.

Our work was to represent the 1980s, the good and the bad...Thatcher being the latter of the two. We decided to have Thatcher in blue, the colder primary colour and us in yellow and red, the warmer of the primary colours. We wanted our portraits to appear as if we were laughing at Thatcher as she was defeated and look at the good that came out of the 80s, hence why we thought it was an excellent idea to form a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from a mosaic of all iconic images from the 1980s.

Mosaic Maggie....look closely!

placing our piece of art of the wall in college!

My team and I are extremely proud of our finished product and it is now displayed in the corridor of the arts and media department in college. Chuffed!!!

Inspired by artist Gilbert & George

Our class has now been divided into two groups, I'm in a group of six. Myself, Julie Ayla, Lana, Karl and Jonathon.

This morning in class we discussed what approach we should go for regarding our art work in relation to us as a team and Gilbert & George.
The subject we all seemed to agree on was the 80s. We decided that somehow, our finished masterpiece was to display all things 80s!
So first, we decided to gather images of stuff that represented the 1980s to us as a group and to us as individuals. Things like toys, sweets, tv programmes and clothing etc.

With Gilbert & George being renowned for their grid like structure I suggested using a rubix cube and the main backround image. The colours were perfect, in relation to Gilbert & George and it was a iconic symbol of the 80s. I also suggested that maybe we could use hundreds of images of iconic 80s memorabilia to make a mosaic. When put to the test, it did not work. In the assignment each member had to produce at least two images to be included in the finished product. The face of a rubix consisted of only 9 small grid like squares, we need at least 12.
So, I had another brainwave, Margaret Thatcher! Use her as the main image to generate a mosaic of 80s iconic images. I thought this was quite apt seen as though Gilbert and George were an oddity in the artistic world because of their openly conservative political views and their praise for Margaret Thatcher. George claims never to have been anti-establishment: "you're not allowed to be Conservative in the art world, of course", he says. "Left equals good. Art equals Left. Pop stars and artists are meant to be so original. So how come everyone has the same opinion? ... We admire Margaret Thatcher greatly. She did a lot for art. Socialism wants everyone to be equal. We want to be different."

Another member of our group suggested Maggie being in the colour blue, while our images could be in the warmer primary colours yellow and red!! We were firing on all cylinders now!

We did a trial run with my chosen image on http://click7.org/image-mosaic-generator/?create
It looked good. Now we had to decide how we were to get our faces on there too, just like the famous Gilbert and George did!
Our tutor Bill suggested using our portrait images we had taken for one of our previous assignments.....we were back on track again.
Over the next couple of days we ordered a high res image of the Maggie Thatcher image and set to work on editing our portrait images on photoshop. We also decided to take some new portrait shots of each other.

Lanas turn!

Karl doin the big fish little fish!

moi

I had been reading a book called Experimental photography by John Warren and when Karl suggested an Andy Warhol type of portrait effect a technique sprang to mind....LINE CONVERSION! Perfect!  Line conversion is a common technique used today, due to media production, half tone images in newspapers are used widely. Now we acheived this technique in photoshop by first of all converting the orignail portrait into black and white with an adjustment layer. We then used the artistic CUTOUT filter. Each portrait had the same level 2 through out. To then ensure the image had a true black and white conversion and no midtones we adjusted the LEVELS.
So our images went from this.....

Lea by SHM 2012

TO THIS.....
I then made a template in Photoshop to the size of three images by one, I dragged all the yellow images across onto this template and using the rulers guidelines set the images up so they were ready to print out and be put in their A3 frames. I suggested this method as it was easier to give them all the same colour yellow rather than doing it individually. We added a fill layer to the images with the yellow and in the drop down menu for layers we selected multiply. Tadah!!!
We did the same with the red portraits too!
Saving these templates along with the blue Maggie mosaic we were ready to print baby!!!!

We purchased the frames from a hardware store for a mere 2.50 each. Just thin black framed A3

We were now ready to print..........my next blog will include the final masterpiece

Our next assignment given by our tutor Bill was named After Gilbert & George.

In a nutshell, as a group and as an individual we had to research the artists Gilbert and George. Who they are, where did it all begin, their work throughout their career etc
With that information on-board we then, as a selected group, had to design and produce a work of art using a similar method and style as Gilbert & George did.

This is what I found during my research.....

I've finally sifted through the hundreds of images I had taken for my family project and reduced it to just a small collection, as I stated earlier in my other post, my photography technique would be natural action shots. The composition for the majority of these images was to capture what my eye sees in a natural way...this was angle, lighting, colour to enhance the moods etc. I shot in complete manual mode because when I shot in Aperture Priority the images became blurry due to slow shutter speed to keep the light coming in. ISO was cranked up to 3000, the room was just too dull at times thanks to the winter months!!

Nannypop

HOHO GLOW In this image my daughter Evie was dressing up. She had just found the jazzy Santa hat in the decorations box. This close up was how close I was to Evie at the time, as I stated earlier, I want my viewers to see exaclty what my naked eye could see at the time. I added a few fill layers on photoshop to soften and warm the image up. My little teddy bear!

death by ipod

This image is of my eldest daughter Sarah. By this point she was oblivious to me taking photographs of her, partly because Id taken so many beforehand and partly because she was engrossed with the contents of her Ipod. This image is so natural, taken sat on the floor next to her on bed I just clicked away while she was chatting to friends.

Evie dont mind them

I put these together as they come in sequence. Grandad was letting my snake Ang stretch his legs and cheeky Evie wanted to get in the shot.
Mum in the background was in a world of her own until I started laughing at Evie pulling faces....which brought her attention to the snake....HAHA look at mums face x
I love the way I made the snake the main focal point of the second image with mums horrified face in the background

Mum hates snakes!

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Sausage in the middle

Evie & Gangang

Buddah and Me

Lawn darts