British Museum London

I'll be heading back to London again soon (nearly exactly one year after my last visit), so I thought now would be a good time to share some of my favorite photos from the British Museum. Taken in wildly different exhibits, here you have everything from the Netherlands to Greece!

 

Enhanced Illustration - Pencil, Pen, Paint and Pixels

Last week I was in London for a short course at Central Saint Martins. Part of the University of the Arts London, CSM is best known for its fashion department, having helped to prominence notable alumni such as Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton, John Galliano, and Zac Posen (among many other notable fashion designers). But far from preferring the fashion department over all others, CSM has a huge variety of courses - and a truly excellent selection of short courses.

Tempted by several of their offers, I finally settled on a course titled "Enhanced Illustration - Pencil, Pen, Paint and Pixels". The course description promises to teach students to manipulate and combine hand-drawn elements in Photoshop, "all the while mantaining a personal, hand-crafted look to your resulting illustrations". As you'll have noticed from previous blog entries, I enjoy combining traditional and digital elements (the Japanese Tea Ceremony illustration comes to mind), but I booked this course when I hadn't yet started fiddling around with things much on my own, and had hoped to learn from this course the best methods to clean up a sketch and combine elements.

Now, I had learned a fair amount of this during my studies at the IADE Madrid, but I felt I was still lacking in professionalism. Unfortunately(?), in the months between booking the course and taking it, I played around a lot with Photoshop and my own drawings, finding that cleaning up my sketches tended to work better with ctrl+M (Curves) than fiddling with Brightness and Contrast, and that layering colors over lineart worked really well with a layer style called Multiply. (I spent quite some time playing around with all the layer styles to find out how they'd react - time well spent!) Imagine my dismay when the only Photoshop things the course really focused on were Brightness and Contrast, Hue/Saturation (ctrl+U), and Multiply! The rest was all taking scanned traditional elements and rearranging them in Photoshop.

So I didn't learn anything about Photoshop during the course - but I still found the course immensely interesting, and at times quite illuminating. The instructor, Bill Wright, was an excellent lecturer, bringing in videos, examples of previous students' work, and even other people to help and inspire us. While I didn't learn anything new about Photoshop, I learned about a professional illustrator's work, what different types of illustration there are, and tried out forms of illustration I had never tried previously - such as newspaper illustration.

For that project, we were each allowed to choose a newspaper article from a selection Bill brought along, and then had to present him with a concept before moving on to create a fitting illustration. He approved my concept for this tennis-themed article with little discussion, but gave me a lot of useful feedback during the process of creating the final illustration. The most valuable advice was to crop the image, zooming in and focusing on the action - and it really pulled it together. Before I cropped it, it looked something like this:

Still cute, but... nowhere near as good. (I also did away with the clouds.)

Then, there were all the other students. All female but for one lone male, we all came from different professions and walks of life, with people hailing from the UK, Germany, Chile, Jordan, and other countries. Twice during the week we printed out the work we'd done that far and gave each other feedback, saying what we thought turned out well and, sometimes, what we thought wasn't so great. For many pieces I found my tastes didn't quite match those of most others, but that made it quite interesting, actually.

I asked my two favorite artists there to let me share their projects on my blog, so check this out: Our first assignment was to take the concept 'kitchen' and draw objects, later assembling those into a colorful composition in Photoshop. Here's my end result, followed by the work of Dina Fawakhiri (from Jordan) and Bernardita Errázuriz (from Chile).

Sophie-Therese Lupas

Dina Fawakhiri

Bernardita Errázuriz

Aren't theirs gorgeous? Mine pales in comparison, though the image is refreshing when on its own. Dina and Bernie used such vibrant colors and powerful compositions - and I love the bold lineart.

They also gave me permission to post their final projects, for which we were to create at least two illustrations with a common theme and present them on the final day of the course. I chose to illustrate the hostel I was staying at (click on the images to see them bigger):

Dina did three beautiful illustrations with a theme of finding one's way to a woman's heart:

And Bernardita did a lovely collection of illustrations based on her family.

Lovely, aren't they? Thank you, Dina and Bernie, for letting me put them up here. And a reminder to everyone reading this: Just click on any photo (in the blog post) to see it bigger! The details are really worth looking at.

In conclusion, the trip to London decidedly was worth it! I hope the other participants feel that way, too.

Alice's Adventures Underground

On Friday the 17^th I went to an immersive theater event in London called ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’, having been thoroughly intrigued by the posters in the London underground. Check out the website here – it’s worth it! The event took place in The Vaults, a large underground space underneath a train station.

The show started out simply enough: I (and at least thirty other people) was led into a studio strewn with antiques and loose sheets of paper, a slightly chaotic look to the room despite it being big enough for all of us to fit in. Then attention is called to a mirror and the woman trapped within, her voice too faint to catch more than a few phrases – and then we’re off to Wonderland. 

Walking down a winding, cramped corridor completely covered in pieces of paper, we enter a circular room with a spinning, spinning ceiling, Alice’s voice clearly audible as a black shadow of her form runs around and around, slowing gradually to a stop before we are led on into a trompe l’oeil room where we are given the choice: Eat Me, or Drink Me? Depending on our choice we either shrink and file out through a door that is far larger than us, or grow in size and duck through a door that only reaches our shoulders. The group is halved, and from here on out our paths are different, experiencing four separate versions of the same play as we are halved again, the original large group split into suits: Spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. (S.U.I.T = Sanctioned Ultrasensible Identifying Travel Permit. Anyone caught without a suit and number is assured by her Majesty, either they or their head shall be off.)

For the duration of the play I am given a card designating me as the nine of hearts, and with my fellow hearts I am briefed on the more elite status of my suit, all of us charged with the task of finding out just who has committed the heinous crime of planting white roses and disguising them with red paint. 

The subsequent voyage is cleverly done – we pass by other suits, each on their own tour, but these glimpses are brief as we travel through Wonderland and imaginatively arranged rooms, led by a white-faced, short card of hearts. We see Alice struggling to figure out her identity in a mirror room, babysit a rambunctious Tweedledee and Tweedledum as they spin around the room reciting ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, even hear the Mock Turtle sing a lament under the full moon. 

Just sketches - I apologize that they don't quite do the madness of the show justice! See a few photos here.

Finally we enter a large hall – and the Tea Party begins, several actors gamboling around the room as we spectators sit along the long table. More than once we are roused, the Mad Hatter commanding us energetically to move down one space while the Dormouse sleeps in a metal bathtub in the middle of the table. 

At one point the March Hare runs down the length of the table to offer the Dormouse some butter, for lack of tea, and a squeak sounds from the audience as a glob of butter goes flying. “Oh,” the March Hare looks down from the table in consternation. “Don’t worry; it really is the finest butter!” With that reassurance she runs back down the length of the table to continue the skit, involving a tale of three sisters (three audience members are chosen to illustrate the point; two are male), a riddle (“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”), and other follies before we are all summoned to the Queen’s court.

We find ourselves sorted back into our suits – such distinctions having been briefly forgotten during the tea party – and witnessing a court hearing led by the King and Queen of Hearts. The villain of the piece – the Knave of Hearts – is exposed as being guilty of planting white roses, and his severed head is presented to the room on a platter; the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse are called upon as witnesses to discover the person who stole the Queen’s tarts, and the court hearing begins to take on nonsensical overtones despite the Queen’s best attempts to quell all nonsense, culminating in the return of Alice through a large mirror and the Red Queen’s banishment through the same mirror, all of us cards lead victorious through the halls by Alice and into the final room – a large bar area with a live band, pies and drinks. 

Having greatly enjoyed the trip that far, I was personally disappointed by the bar (which resembled a barn more than anything else) and left after only cursory exploration of the area, turning over the events in Wonderland in my mind as I stepped out into the crisp and cool night air. Truly, it was a magical experience. 

So, should you find yourself in London before the 31^st of August, and should you find yourself in a Wonderland ruled by the Queen of Hearts, always remember: “All hail the Queen! Coo!”

Four Seasons Chinese Restaurant

Just a short post - in London my friend and I went to a Chinese restaurant called the Four Seasons to have the Cantonese-style duck, as recommended by a friend who knows his stuff! And boy, did he know what he was talking about.

YUM.

That was some great duck right there. Intensely flavorful, with deliciously crisp skin and fat that just melted in your mouth... *sighs contentedly*

I also really liked the metal decorations they had on display around the restaurant, and took a few photos.From the shape and the small bar holding the two pieces together, I think that these might belong on double doors, with the small bar being the bolt to hold the doors shut. So neat!

More on my short trip to London soon!

The Economist, March 7th - 13th 2015

From economist.com.

Today I did something that I admittedly do not do as often as I should: I read the Economist cover-to-cover.

Reading about politics was as depressing as always (gotta love potential nuclear conflicts), but there were some other, very interesting posts that I would like to share here.

The first is the article Silicon Valley gets a taste for food, which is all about creating realistic "fake" meat and dairy products out of plants. It's an extremely fascinating article, and definitely worth the read! Personally, I really want a taste of that burger.
"For meat, the aim is to recreate its key components—muscle, connective and fat tissue—using suitable plant materials. [Impossible Foods'] first product, a hamburger patty, already looks and cooks like meat, and will taste as good or better by the time it reaches the shops, Dr Brown promises. (...) The company has also spent a lot of time working out what gives meat its unique flavour. According to Dr Brown, the secret to a burger’s taste is haem, a compound found in all living cells, including plants. It is especially abundant in haemoglobin in blood, and in muscle tissues as myoglobin. It also gives a burger its red colour. During the cooking process haem acts as a catalyst that helps transform the amino acids, vitamins and sugars in muscle tissue into numerous volatile and flavourful molecules, he explains. To create the meaty flavour in its burger patties, the company uses a heme protein equivalent to one found in the roots of legumes." (Text from economist.com)


Then, there's the short article Particulates matter, which briefly addresses an amazing presentation by Chai Jing that went viral. Already the video has been removed and hidden - censorship at work, one assumes - but I found the video with English subtitles, and HIGHLY recommend it. I started watching thinking that I'd get bored within five minutes and skim over the rest, but no. I was captivated, watching the entire 1 hour, 44 minute long video with mounting incredulity and disbelief. It's... frightening, to be honest, and amazingly presented by Chai Jing. Please take the time to watch it.

Lastly, I found to my surprise an article on fashion - to be precise, one concerning the late Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. A recently published book is mentioned, and I've already added it to my shopping cart on amazon - Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. It sounds excellent.
However, of particular interest in the article was the mention of an exhibition to take place in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, starting this Saturday. A retrospective of Alexander McQueen's creative work up till his suicide in 2010, it's an exhibition I don't intend to miss - since I have the great fortune of being in London right in time for it! (Unfortunately, it says on the website that sketching is not allowed within the exhibit. Phooey.)

Speaking of my trip to London, however, I'll be there for just under a week, and already have quite a few things planned! I'm going with my best friend, and she has a very good camera, so you can look forward to a few photos posted either during or after the trip - and don't worry, I won't fill the blog with tourist photos (those can go on facebook, thank you very much), but some more artistic shots might find their way onto this blog. Some sketches, hopefully, too, but those will have to wait till I'm back in Germany and can scan them in!

That's most of what I did today - what about you?