Gcse course work and exam pieces...

I’ve always preferred 3d pieces to traditional art- drawing and painting. During GCSE,  I started exploring wire work people shapes and particularly enjoyed making this modelling clay carousel based on photographs of my school friends dancing around the Maypole and the little model of me sitting on the floor texting a message on my phone.  Didn’t enjoy papemache work much, and a head and shoulders study of my little brother asleep was a disaster – he looked more like the ‘Big Friendly Giant’ with massive ears – my art teacher took one look and suggested I lost it!

 

This is the front page of my year 11 coursework sketchbook, I was absolutely fascinated by flowers and still am- when ever I get stuck on a project I can't help but come back to them!







This print was part of my flower sketchbook, this was one of the first times I'd printed so I think I managed the task pretty well.

My teacher suggested an after school felting class. Following the flower theme, it seemed obvious to try and recreate a felted rose. After a lot of rolling and puffing, with sleeves pushed up, getting hotter and hotter (and that was just me, not the wet wool fibres), I finally came home triumphant with a felted square and a rose design.




 I enjoyed felting so much, that I made a further 12 flower felted squares at home and used them to create an embellished shoulder bag as a final course work piece. I was thrilled that the fibres could be tamed to give really close likenesses to the original photographed flowers. 

I still remember the endless hours it seemed to take to roll each of the felt shapes out- by the end of the night my arms were dead!

This textiles related work was completed during my first year of art gcse, I love to look back through my sketchbooks now and again and see how my skills have developed whilst I was so unaware of my future obsession with textiles.

  

  

  

This is my final art gcse piece- a pastel drawing of my brother in his room looking into a mirror globe. 

For my exam sketchbook I decided to follow the topic 'people and places', I felt inspired by this topic and spent time looking at people in different environments from parks to doctors surgery.

After experimenting with all the possibilities I could work with, I focused on the mediums of wire work and mirror globes as I was interested by their shape, form and as far as mirror globes went the way they distorted everything.