One of the first few activities that we were asked to do was to get into pairs, and then one person from each pair had a blind fold on and had an object to describe to their partner who had to draw said object whilst neither person actually knew what the object was.
I paired up with Holly and she began to describe a roundish shaped small object with a top section, and middle ‘filling’ and a bottom section that had 2 triangular pointy bits coming out of the top section as well the ‘filling’ being sort of ‘frilly’. The object also made a squeaky noise when squeezed, so we concluded it must be some form of dog toy. After we came to that idea, we both fairly quickly worked out that it must be some form of burger toy. My drawing was more comical than anything else but it did make some sense.
After we had both had our turns with describing and drawing, we were asked to make a sculpture out of only cardboard and brown tape to mimic our drawings (not the original object). I struggled with this at first because trying to make a cardboard burger is not something that I’ve ever really done before or would’ve ever imagined that I would do, but once I had conceived of my way to do it, it was quite fun and relatively easy.
At the end of the day we were tasked with making another sculpture in our own time back at our halls that was a copy of our cardboard one (not our drawing), but not out of cardboard. So for supper that night I made burgers and took a few pictures of them before Gus, Henry and I ate them.
There was also a monday half price on all burgers and hotdogs offer on at the pub my friends and I went to the next day, so we clearly just had to get some which also helped my burger sculpting task.
The next day we had a photography session in which were shown how different angles of light can create different shadows and how a front on light is better for 2D objects, like flat drawings and pieces, whereas a light from one side can portray 3D objects better as it helps to create a more interesting shadow which contributes the 3 Dimensional qualities of the object. The objects I used for the photography were my cardboard burger (as seen above) and the original burger dog toy that I had to blindly draw from.
What I took away from this photography class was a new knowledge on how to get appropriate lighting for my work when trying to take pictures of it. But what I took away from the whole two days of sculpting and drawing was that an ability to experiment with new ways of working, even if I wasn’t particularly fond of my original drawings or cardboard burger, as it proved that my work doesn’t have to be perfect or desirable for it to teach me new things and ways of thinking.
Ophelia Bate 