But by the time I'd been brought upto speed on that it was too late, I'd figured out what it was I wanted to do and alas, it involved a bed sheet (it actually involved 4, but that number went down to 2 when the market stall only had 2, and it went down to 1 when I started trying to do it) and I couldn't think of a new idea that I wanted to do.
The brief was to pick a font and get a letter form as big as you can and as accurately. I thought it HAD to be on a vertical surface, but judging by the fact that over half of them were done on the floor, I guess that can't be the case.
Which is annoying, because my friend said to me when I got the brief "Oh, I'm going home for the weekend (to her farm in Staffordshire) you could come with me and then use one of the spare fields and just go mental with it, and we've got stuff to lift you up to photograph it and everything"
"no, no" I said "that sounds fantastic and I'd really like to do that, but it has to be on a wall."
I wanted to keep pushing myself and trying new things after the success of my Justin Bieber video, so I went to the print making room and had a chat with Glen, and he said try this cyanotype thing, so I researched it, liked the look of it and decided to do that. I couldn't use the facilities until thursday, which meant I missed most of the lesson, but it sounded like it was just a lot of grumbling really.
Cyanotype works by coating something absorbant (paper, wood or fabric) with a mix of 2 chemicals (Ammonium iron(III) citrate and Potassium ferricyanide) that react with light and turn blue. If you block the light however then that area will remain white, and then you wash the chemical off and it will stay white and the part that was exposed will remain this really nice blue.
This is a very easy, cheap process... on normal sized bits of fabric, not on 3 metre square bed sheets. I did a test and it looked great. So I made my stencil, took the sheet to a dark room (which turned into a pitch black room about 2 mins in as the red light refused to work) and began coating it in this chemical. It took aaaages and loads of the chemical to coat the bloody thing. It has to dry in the dark, so I left it there over night.
I came back the next day, after looking around for a studio with enough space next to a big enough window I gave up on the AVA building and took the sheet back to my kitchen and laid it out beside the window. And then I went and did some other stuff (went to my friend's fashion show, hung about with my mate who got roped into wearing a rediculous dress made out of metros (where I saw more of her than I'm used to!) had some dinner, went to a party, left early because I was just so knackered) and when I went to bed I couldn't sleep for thinking of the sheet and how this was the best time to wash it as it would be dark in my kitchen. I checked on it and it was the right colour blue, so I put my dressing gown and some plastic gloves on and got washing.
And that's when it all went wrong. I mean, there were a few bits of fabric I'd missed with paint cause I did it in the dark (like propper dark) but the bloody thing hadn't exposed properly and so it came out a pathetic watery blue. Like a swimming pool blue rather than a nice american passport blue. Which made me lose heart somewhat, as I'd sacrificed on size so I could experiment with a new technique and it'd come out shit.
I hung it off of a bridge and photographed it and threw it in my wardrobe, embarressed by my failure. I'm back in birmingham next weekend, I'm going to see if with access to the country side, my parent's garage and a bunch of mates with nothing else to do than sit around in the park for the next 2 weeks we can create something worthy.
Here's the way it looks in my portfolio:
Still though, be a bit shit to just abandon my "try to push yourself and try new things" mentality because of one failed hurdle. Besides, even the projects I am happy with need tweaking/redoing, just because they can be made better, so mile high type (expect the next one to be on the floor and huge) wouldn't be any exception even if it had gone a bit better.
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