Author: Benita

for sightseeing, I went with the places I commonly go to as I don’t usually go out of my comfort zones and where I know. There are very few places I go to, my own house, the CBD for school, and my mum’s work.

I had just wanted to capture just the moment I live in and not think too hard as it is just something I do and never stopped to think about every detail. I feel these capture the places I see every day, whether it’s sitting and talking with my mum at her work or seeing the bottom of the stairs and dreading having to start functioning as a part of society.

I had done two different types of intervention. I had wanted to paint the places I frequent in the city and paint a part of it as quickly as I can and put my image into the site. Because I had forced myself to paint more quickly than I’m used to the “quality” isn’t as good as my more time spent filters but I think for the time restrictions, it isn’t too bad. I had also had this character that I had designed years ago and wanted to interact with my everyday life. I had used her as a way to show my important places and where I go every day, one happening to be my family garden. It’s a place where my mum and I connect a lot, with our growing plants and our excitement when they grow perfectly.

where is painting actually took a turn where we used everything but paint. We had started with this only knowing the materials newspaper, glue, and a surface to apply it. In studio we learnt to apply the newspaper onto the surface with the thin layer of glue below and above it and slowly rub at it until the desired image shows through. This was very exciting as i’ve never done anything like this before and was a learning curve to understand how to peel the layer off and the pressure amount used and seeing how much we want to see and completely peel towards the surface.

After doing this we got assigned to go beyond this with surfaces. My first though was to play with fabric. I have lots of extra fabric laying around so i had decided to see if i could keep that layer style fall fabric does and keeping it still with watered down glue. The watered down glue didn’t work so i had used glue right out of the bottle and it finally kept it stiff! i had used paper and tinfoil to create the layers and fluffs so it would stiffen in the shapes. On one of them, I had decided to use an yellow oxide to use on the lower deeper parts of the fabric.

I had also started a small flower like shape with paper. At first all i did was draw a blob on a piece of paper and rip pieces of paper and sticking it down, then it developed into small lines or drawing for texture, then random text, then writing secrets/worries and ripping and glueing them. It was therapeutic in the way as i was literally ripping it all away, but also a cool detail as you can see words on each ‘petal’ giving it texture. Then i moved onto a bigger piece and and used multiple shapes.

This was something exciting but also therapeutic as I haven’t really thought of the same worries since writing them all out and tearing them apart. It kind of looks like the red spider lily which symbolises a final goodbye that also serve works in the sense that i’ve said my final goodbyes to my worries that i’ve written out.

I spent week one getting to know my fellow classmates or my subgroup tahi. It was great learning what made them take art as I felt we could get to understand each other better and what can actually influence each others art styles. From learning we continued into a task to bring us together using Iterative. We had decided as a mini group in tahi to do the combination man or the drawing game, not too sure. We had changed it up and started with the face, everyone taking either an eye or the actual face without knowing the style. When we had finished we thought it would be fun to do the rest of the body.

After we had been tasked to do our own iterative work and i chose to do it on figures. I had started with just normal figure poses/photos but then thought if i could add texture to it, so i added just strips of masking tape. When i had seen the cool effect it gave i experimented with patterned washi tape and used it to highlight parts of different figures.

This was a good start as it helped me get a feel on how i can draw my own style of figures and mixing different mediums together to make it pop!