Content and Summary Assessment
I was excited, anticipating the re-opening of the Edinburgh Printmakers for public courses and accessing this Workshop run by Jessica Crisp to see if I could consolidate and build on what I had been taught in the studio at Taigh Chearsabhagh with Margaret and Nicola. My intention was to at the end to be able to find myself the workings of that specific studio and be able to work there mostly independently. I was worried that I would have forgotten what I had previously been shown or that things would be too different for me to be able to grasp them. This was not the case and I was also able to see others working, reinforce what I had previously learnt and gain some useful aquatint knowledge and experience working on copper and zinc plates.
I felt confident in my ability from the course to be able to take this further and be able to plan and produce work in the future preparing work to take into the studio and make the best use of time booked to use the workshop's equipment.
Photo-etching was a further workshop run by Jessica Crisp where I was keen to discover what was possible in transferring a digital photographic image onto an etching plate and see what qualities could be transferred to a print. For this workshop over two full days we would only have time to print one image while gaining experience of the techniques involved so I just chose one photograph to work on the technique while realising the plate could be worked further or combined with other sorts of images such as photos of drawings or direct drawing on acetate.
This course was invaluable as it showed me exactly how to achieve what I had hoped from attending and I will be using this skill to produce artwork that realises many opportunities for this technique to be used along with many other etching techniques.
My reasons for choosing clay portraiture was that I wanted to build some skill in three-dimensional representation after starting to explore the figure and its relationship to nature as part of spatial studies in the first year of my degree. I had made a start using casting with alginate and plaster and tape and paper as a natural extension of two-dimensional printing and wanted to have some way of expressing the head and face that could be combined with these and in step with figure drawing. Clay portraiture seemed like a challenge as did not think I had any experience of anything like it and would not know how to start myself.
I think I expected a lot more learning of many detailed technical concepts for measurement and how to represent the sitter in this new (to me) medium. In fact it was more valuable than this in being an opportunity to learn more about simply looking and planning the order of the sculpture. The importance of spending the vast majority of time on the overall form and leaving detail to the very end.
Although there was not much time formerly showing or looking at the other artists' work I found this aspect really helpful even through though it was a virtual course on zoom. Whilst that certainly had its drawbacks I was grateful as it made the workshops possible.
I found I was able to use the clay making a start on portraiture and can see many applications for this as a first step in many forms of sculpture that can be developed or cast using a number of other mediums.
There were some technical difficulties with the delivery but this was offset by having good teaching video presentations.
A couple of sessions were cancelled and although extra time was added to sessions to make it up I don't think this worked as more that 2 hours at a time was not really possible as its too tiring for the participants and the teacher even with a tea break.
I feel confident in being able to make use of clay for portraiture and other projects and to develop further practical ability through future creative practice.