Wallop!

Testing out stylised portraits in 3D (using Salt dough!)

Katie — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:10:37 +0000

After a very successful Art Workshop with my Class of Post 19 young adults with Special Needs, where we looked at a formulaic approach to painting a stylised portrait and used the works of Julian Opie for our inspiration. This week I have been working on my planning for the next session, in which we will be interpretting our original 2D portraits into 3D.

I needed a low cost material we could use, that would be highly tactile and easy to manipulate for our less physically able students, yet could allow the high ability students to create a detailed and ‘finished’ looking piece of 3D art.

I have used Salt Dough many a time before with Primary School students and thought it would be worth a try, but with different objectives in mind on this occasion I needed to have a test run first. I was pretty pleased with the results.

The key seems to be to bake the creations for several hours at a very low heat and to use layers of Acrylic paints once the pieces are stone cold. Now I’m looking forward to seeing how the students get on later in the week. We will be initially be measuring ingredients, mixing the dough, and finally creating our portraits and will paint the finished pieces the following week.

A ‘Rubbish’ Fairy Princess

Katie — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:38:41 +0000

Having a child off school ill is always a tricky situation, but one of the many times that I count my blessings I mostly work from home and can be flexible around this kind of life hiccup. Yesterday, it actually worked in my favour as my main task of the day was to complete a ‘Rubbish Picture’. A commission for a second artwork to match another produced a couple of years ago for the same family. This, as the first was to be created entirely out of the wrappings and bits and pieces of sentimental ‘rubbish’ squirrelled away at the birth of a new baby girl.

..and so my day was spent under the critical eye of my youngest apprentice, in between calpol doses and quick rounds of Snakes and Ladders, creating and completing a Rubbish Fairy Princess from ribbons, wrapping paper, tissue paper, gift tags and a novelty nylon flower bouquet. My apprentice thinks we’ve done a good job, fingers crossed the young lady who will be taking delivery of this picture for her nursery wall, will approve as well.

New Year, New Start, New Workshops With Post 19

Katie — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:01:31 +0000

2013 looks to be a very promising year ahead for me as Wallop! with lots in the pipeline. With my other hat on, as a member of The Classroom Creatives Artists Network, this year starts an exciting ongoing relationship with Post 19.

Post 19 is an excellent learning centre for young adults with a variety of learning difficulties. This week started off the new Post 19 term and yesterday we kickstarted our first series of weekly Art and Design Workshops at the Ash Centre in Surrey.

This term our theme is ‘All About Me’ and we will be exploring self portraiture in a multitude of different forms of media, using some unexpected art techniques and looking at examples of all our favourite artists.

I am fortunate to be working in my day to day life as a graphic designer / illustrator and therefore have the opportunity to introduce the students to the work of contemporary, professional artists and creatives that they may well not have been aware of before. My Twitter contact list is going to come in very useful :-) More on that to follow at a later date…

Our first introductory session involved a read through of the inspirational book, ‘Dot’ by Peter Reynolds, a resulting dot ‘doodle off’, followed by speed drawing whatever popped into our heads, introducing ourselves with pictures instead of words…. and a lot of chat and laughter. ( All of that, not for fun, but in the name of assessment of abilities, obviously…. ;-)

I’m thrilled to have been included in the Post 19 plans and am privileged to be able to share workshop time with such a creative bunch of young people. I’m looking forward to seeing what they can produce over the coming months. Watch this space…. I think it’s going to be something special.

Grafting a new book cover…

Katie — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:46:57 +0000

So back to earth with a bump after a rather wonderful summer off and onwards and upwards with the continued creation of a series of anthology book covers.
The first two books, as I showed in my previous post: Judging Books By Their Covers are now out and available in the big wide world, and two more are close to complete and ready to go to print. Exciting times.
Book 3 in the series is called ‘The Graft’. Its another superb collection of narratives by a collection of both new and established, gifted authors.
This cover illustration makes use of another of my (long suffering for their mother’s artistic whims) apprentice’s silhouettes. This time posed as a hard grafting woodcutter, working through a forest that ever increases in depth and darkness… A sneakily placed ‘grafted’ apple pays homage to the alternative interpretation of the title.

Judging books by their covers…

Katie — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 17:35:45 +0000

I’ve been busy lately working on a series of book covers for Anthologies of Stories published by Chapter One Promotions. The Anthologies are all the results of writing competitions and are therefore cram packed with fresh new writing talent alongside some more established authors. The design briefs for the covers have been as diverse and intriguing as the stories within and have been a delight to work on. Two books are now complete with more files winging their way to the printers as I type. I’m looking forward to adding the full series to my own book collection as well as my portfolio.

Cover design for 'Infinite' An Anthology of Stories published by Chapter One Promotions

Cover design for 'The Beginning' An Anthology of Stories published by Chapter One Promotions

Basil Comes Home

Katie — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 16:02:05 +0000

“Basil is a small dog in a big world” says the intro blurb on this book, and that’s exactly what he is – a small dog over flowing with character, who was brought to my attention by his owner Mary, a writer with a collection of children’s stories up her sleeve. Basil is a little bit of a local celebrity in the village he and Mary live in, and is much adored by the children who know him. Mary was inspired by his antics and adventures enough to write the stories initially intended just for those children. She has now written almost a dozen stories featuring Basil and other characters and I was delighted to be asked to be her illustrator for the series.

The first book, “Basil Comes Home” is due out within the next few weeks and the first preview copies will be available in local Hampshire bookshops this summer, if you prefer shopping online it will also be available through Amazon and Lulu.

If you can’t wait and want a sneaky peek…. Here’s Basil in a selection of pages from the book.

The Water Cycle. In 3D. please

Katie — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:15:54 +0000

If you’ve followed this blog recently you’ll know I’ve been working in schools running art workshops alongside my graphics and illustration work for sometime now and am now officially part of the collective, Classroom Creatives. The upshot of all this is really rather lovely in that I’ve started to get ’special requests’ such as the one I had a few weeks back from a lovely year 5 teacher who was planning her terms project work on the water cycle and was not surprisingly, feeling a little stumped, as to how she might create a river with the children. In 3D.

We planned a fantastic art workshop for her class and I spent two fun filled afternoons with her 30 very enthusiastic artists creating ‘Swans-Ville’ – a 3D landscape created out of recycled materials complete with a river of discarded water bottles filled with blue jelly, flowing down to the beach; a model town complete with hospital, church and pub and a plathora of countryside and river animals. The children then painted various backdrops with differing cloudscapes, and lo and behold, we had our very own enormous and rather wonderful, sculpted landscape ‘teaching aid’, whereby the children can now explain the water cycle most efficiently. Oh and they do – with proud grins on their faces to boot. Well done Swans Class. Good job :-)

For the full gallery of photographs, pop over to The Classroom Creatives Facebook Page.

Classroom Creatives

Katie — Wed, 23 May 2012 22:13:18 +0000

For the last couple of years or so, I’ve been leaning more and more towards the work I do as a sideline (to my everyday design and illustration work as ‘Wallop!’), teaching Art and design in various forms to primary school aged children. It’s something that I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed and I’m delighted to have now become a partner in a collective of artists who offer bespoke and unique Art workshops more widely to KS1 and KS2 pupils in and around our local area of Hampshire.

My partner in crime and I, Kathy Mason, who have worked together in school for some time now have just launched ‘Classroom Creatives’ with a Stopgap flash website in situ and a facebook page. Please do go and have a peek. A ‘like’ would be even better to keep up to date with our events and offerings.

To Kick Start our new collective we wanted a logo and a look that was fun and entertaining, so would appeal to our young artists but was also professional and business like for those Art Co-ordinators who might commission us. The brand I came up with combines simple sans serif type with a ‘doodled character ‘ formed by combining the initial ‘C’s of the two words. This character can be altered to become a different gremlin or doodlebug for the different uses of the logo and lends itself perfectly to be animated blinking or swaying for our online purposes.

Our new brand appears on the web pages and litererature we send out to schools and also on sets of badges and certificates awarded to the participants of our workshops.

We’re looking forward to a happy and successful future, sparking the imaginations of our young artists, one school at a time :-)

Watch this space to follow our progress :-)

Monday. Chronicled

Katie — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:33:23 +0000

24 hours. 1,440 minutes. Or 86,400 seconds.

The Chronicle Project from the Art House Co-op challenged 1000 artists to document a single day in their lives and share it at an exhibition in the Brooklyn Art Library. Collapsing 1,000 unique days into one.

I’m looking forward to seeing the other 999. This is my day – Chronicled using only iphone snaps.

(Click image to view larger)

Knocking on new doors

Katie — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:25:23 +0000

Yesterday I was actually quite happy to be out in the rain with my partner in crime, Kathy Mason, installing the results of a very lovely project. We were surreptitiously fixing and hiding a complete set of miniature doors and windows recently completed by the year 6 pupils from my weekly art class, into the early years garden area of their school. The idea being that the youngest members of the school might then stumble across these ‘Borrowers’ styled dwellings and they can be incorporated in imaginative play and also used for storytelling and outdoor lessons.

The project was a joy to work on, both for the enthusiasm of the older children to create the pieces and the anticipation of their being able to display them in such a delightful way. As these children will be leaving the school this year, they have also left a little legacy behind for their younger friends.

The process involved a session of discussion and design, considering the characters who would live behind each door. The doors were then cut out of clay according to the initial designs and embellishments added, before first firing. The children finally coloured their pieces and they were whisked away by Kathy to be fired ready for installation. The final part of the project for the older participants of this project will be some map drawing sessions of the ’secret’ locations of all the pieces now that they are in situ.