Museum trip

I went to visit the local gallery with my friends. They were having exhibitions on World War artifacts, coastal sketches and portraits.

The statue at the centre of the Riversley park is a tribute to the fallen soldiers of the 2 world wars.

Photograph were not allowed inside the gallery, so I could only take a few secretly. The two above pictures are from an activity on the ground floor. There was a fossil under the paper and with the colour pastel, you had to rub it over the fossil to get an engraving of the fossil onto the black paper.

There were a few Gurkha objects displayed on the ground floor. This is the hat worn by Gurkha's during special military ceremonies, they aren't worn in combat nowadays.

Similar to the previous activity however this time, it is a figure of a nun from the medieval era.

There was a small selection of African art, this is a photo of an activity related to the section. The art pieces had to be placed in its correct order.

Graffiti on the fence near the lake in the park.

Photos

The main focus of these collection of photos are the patterns used to design the object which have significant value in the culture I have grown accustom to. By observing and studying these pattern, my plan is to blend inspiration from the objects' detail and Minjae Lee's notable style. I want my final piece to show a mix of culture through pattern with at least one artist who I have studied this year (potentially Minjae Lee because his use of vibrant colours and patterns connect well to Nepalese culture).


This is a traditional clothing called Kurta, it is worn in Nepal, India and surrounding southern nations in Asia. In modern era, these clothes are mostly worn during festivals e.g. Diwali/Dashain however in Rural areas of India, these are commonly worn.
I love the pattern design of the clothing, they are very vivid and eye-catching with bold colours like red, yellow and dark blue. It has a unique geometrical pattern that I believe can be recreated using stencils made from paperboard and masking tape.

A Buddhist wall scroll showing Buddha at the centre with other notable figures in Buddhism.
This object uses neon colours but still is able to look gentle in the eye. There is gold colour glitter in the border patterns which is visible as reflected light can be seen on them.

This pattern is more complex than the Kurta's   To be able to recreate this I would need to sketch out the patterns before painting it with colours with a fine brush instead using masking tape or paperboard as stencils.

I talked about this in my previous pattern study post; this is a dagatopi, a traditional head-wear commonly worn by males.
It has geometric shapes with pale colours or pigments that do not stand out as much but the white spacing between the colours allow the pattern to be quite noticeable.
This pattern can be similarly recreated using the stencil technique that would be used for the Kurta's design.

Paper cutting technique

In today's lesson there was a workshop in paper cutting technique.

For the first piece I decided to sketch out my name in Nepalese so that I could cut out it out with a scalpel. It was a simple first attempt to get me accustomed to using a scalpel again.

For the next piece, I used a photo of a woman in traditional Gunyo Cholo. I only removed the clothing so the picture can be put on any surface and its pattern will appear as the clothes of the woman.


On the cutting mat, the dress will look like a dull green covering but this allows the model's face to stand out.
I chose to remove the dress for this piece because traditional Gunyo Cholo comes in a variety of patterns and to capture the interest of these patterns, the image can be placed on any object and the pattern will reflect on the picture as the model's dress.

Using patterns from other objects can be used when blending the influence of Minjae Lee with it. The Minjae Lee's works of portraits always contains complex yet vibrant patterns that are time consuming to create by hand. Instead of creating the pattern yourself, placing the image on a surface with hollow areas where the surface pattern will be visible can be useful when working with Minjae Lee's style.

This piece, that looks like streams of black clouds/smoke made from just cutting paper, is by Andrew Singleton.

For this work, I cut out the lotus print using a scalpel again. This is was difficult to cut out since it had lots of curves, which is hard to carve out since the scalpel had an angular preference.

For the next piece I decided to use Yan Pei Ming's portrait of Mao Zedong.

 I wanted to recreate Yan Pei Ming's brush strokes so I decided to cut out strips of paper in varying sizes to represent the varying strokes size of the artist.

I felt like there weren't enough gaps here so I made a few more afterwards.

I placed it against a light source to see it will appear differently. It wasn't much different since it was white light, it just looked like it refilled the image.

I removed more strips of paper here so that more lights pass through the paper.

I removed the background of the original work but kept a white frame around the figure. This makes the work look like a portrait taken with a 1980s style background. (Sci-Fi theme background was popular due to the Start Wars franchise)

The background was a galaxy background from a tablet.