Intro to Design Craft

Hi all and welcome to my experience of the first week of the Design Crafts BA course, an induction week filled with various experimentation and drawing techniques that had no connections to the beginning of my next project but had to be documented somewhere so that it is not lost to the sands of time. This will be very thrown together as this whole week is kind of like a foggy blur but I’m sure someone will get a kick out of it

Induction Week

To start things off, I want to say this was a drawing exercise where we rotated stations to draw objects since I can fully recognise the Steve but I have no idea where that chicken came from. I’m going to assume that this exercise was a way to warm up the muscles since this was the first task set after a long summer and I’m sure many of us were rusty when it came to drawing.

Working with Shadow

The next task was to explore shadow and how it can be perceived on the page. From what I can remember, I had a mangled spool of wire that I rotated on a plane to show the shape of the shadow from different angles. With each new drawing, I used a different colour of ink so that the drawing itself didn’t turn into an incoherent blob. This technique proved to be a more useful way to brush the rust off and helped open up my mind to what shapes I could explore.

Sketching Glass

Towards the end of a week full of inductions and experimentation, we were brought to the reading room to study the various panes of glass on display there. Since this course was somewhat combined with the Glass course, it seemed that a lot of the material had a tertiary focus on glass and how it could be utilised in craft with this drawing exercise being the beginning of that focus.

Object Anatomy

To cap off the week, we were given the task of viewing objects differently, combining them with anatomy to give our objects a whole new use than what they were originally made for. As an artist with a huge focus in making with strings and fibres, I took it upon myself to experiment with different types of knitting that I had made out of different materials such as wool and shredded plastic bags. I used these objects along with some cheap slinky springs and combined them with the process of entwining and enveloping a form to give a sense of feeling confined while also showcasing an unnatural way of perceiving the power of nature.