Ceramics

I decided I would experiment a bit and do some ceramic work, I have recreated a statue of zeus but used a drawing I had done of the statue as a reference point.

I tried to give the piece the same effect I had given the drawing, giving an 'unfinished' look to it.

The piece isn't as successful as I had imagined it to be, the structure of the face lacks a realistic quality to it which gives it an unprofessional appearance. for example, the cheeks, nose and eyes don't have the same strong structure that it should, also the hair and beard didn't turn out how I had imagined it , I tried to give it a thick wavy appearance but once again it didn't  work out, it instead has the appearance of clay worms. 

Promethues' Punishment

Prometheus

The champion Titan of humanity

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Prometheus was one of the elder gods overthrown by Zeus and his fellow Olympians and managed to save his twin brother and himself of the hideous punishment his other brothers Atlas and Menoetius had received by convincing his mother to side with Zeus during the war between the titans and Olympians.

As he was known for his wisdom he was given the task to create life  on earth to end the gods boredom, so he and his brother Epimetheus had created all of the animals out of clay and had given them there survival techniques, all apart from the humans, eventually Zeus gave the humans fire, as to survive but as a thanks for this gift, they had to sacrifice the majority of their meat to the gods, but Prometheus tricked Zeus and made the humans sacrifice the unimportant parts of the meat, such as the bones, fat and skin. Once Zeus found out, he took back his gift of fire and left the humans to die, but Prometheus had grown affectionate towards to the humans and stole fire from Zeus and gave it back to men. As punishment, Zeus ordered Hephaestus the blacksmith god to forge adamantine* chains and bound Prometheus, naked to the top of the Caucasian mountains, where he could not escape, the final part of his punishment was that everyday a gargantuan eagle would rip open his stomach and eat his liver, as he is an immortal the wound would heal overnight and the bird would return the feast again.

the image of Prometheus is a popular one, and one I find interesting. so I used an image of a statue, copied the face and added it to a collage of different interpretations of the story.

image based on 

*adamantine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamant

Zeus Statue

I chose to draw an image of the a statue of Zeus' head, I found the image fascinating as the way the sculpture has carved the structures hair, and the dominance portrayed in it.

I wanted to replicate it in an image in black and grey, so I used several different types of pencil with a variety of different shades to give a diverse range of shade.
I have decided to leave the image 'unfinished' as i believe finishing it would take aways its artistic appearence.

Greek Collages

To start off the project, the first step was to build up a collection of images and materials of varying textures, and using these to create collages based around the chosen subject, I then found some books based on the Greek sculptures, although some of the sculptures weren't based around the mythology, the aspects of the statues were very visually appealing. I also used some images of paintings and sculptures I had found on-line and different images from and line qualities of paper from news papers and other magazines.

these are some of the collages I have produced so far;

This is the first piece I have done, I used a piece of paper to create a black line behind the images, I then stuck photocopied images of a drawing and painting I have done previously, the one on the top is a sketch of the Perseus and Medusa statue, the bottom left is a painting of the David statue.

I am quite proud of the way this piece has come out, I used an image I had photocopied to create a stencil I then used the stencil to cut out from a book based on Greek sculpture, I used the typing horizontally to create a posture and by tilting the letters for the helmet it shows certain angles as it does in the image.

for this image I have used tea to dye the paper a bronze colour to emulate the statue. I then sketched out an image of the statue shown above.

for the rest of the images i have used many types of papers with different tonal qualities to give different effects, one of which I am proud of is the old sepia looking paper such as an old encyclopaedia which I had photocopied images and drawings on.

I have used a certain style of composition in my collages to emphasize the difference between light and dark, and the images a certain structural quality. I feel this draws more attention to the main images and in unison give the image an interesting visual quality

In this image I have tried to experiment with a different style of collaging, though the image has no structural quality and looks unprofessional and disorganised.  

This image was the most complicated of all,  I used a piece of cardboard underneath the images to add a layers  and different textures, the image layered on top of the cardboard is an image i have photocopied onto a piece of paper i had already put which gives the image a layered effect, I then used several layers of images and different types of paper such as book exerts and an image of lightning also photocopied.

Mounted Collage

The unit requires us to stretch up a collage and mount it, I stuck to my style and created one I am pretty happy with.