Making a blog title

Monday 30th November

This was our third session, and last before Christmas. Today we had a look at this blog again, we had a look at the page layout, and thought about what could be added, we also had a look at the other pages that have been added so far.

One of the main items that we looked at was the blog title, everyone thought that it was a bit boring just having text, so today we made some funky graphics which you can now see above.


This is what the title looked like before:

Pretty boring and ordinary, by adding graphics (using images to illustrate the blog name) we can make it more fun and appealing to ourselves and to visitors.

Dave and Andy introduced us to three techniques that we could use to make the graphics for the title, some were familiar and some were new...

Stencils

Stencils are shapes which can be drawn around or can be painted through to make a shape or letter, the stencil can be used many times so that you get an image which is exactly the same every time it is used ( although you might want to change the colour of the paint). Stencils can be used on all sorts of different surfaces, in an example Andy used a stencil to put a letter onto a big stone. We thought that making stencils was a lot like the techniques that cave men used when they made cave paintings using their hands as the stencil. Here is one of the stencils and a stenciled letter on a stone, the paint was applied using a sponge.

Potato Prints

Lots of people have made potato prints and the are so easy to do. All you need is a largish potato, cut in half, something to carve with and an idea of what to carve. Once you have carved your shape into the flat side of the potato, you can cover it in paint using a sponge and then press it down onto a piece of paper or card. One thing you have to remember is to make your carving a mirror image of what you want the print to be. Andy mentioned a printing technique that would be familiar to the Egyptians and can still be found today in a similar form. The Egyptians used a device called a cylinder seal, important people had these and it was a sort of signature. It was a cylindrical rod that had carved letters and symbols on it, the important person could role this along the bottom of letters written in slabs of wet clay, and it left an impression or print in the clay, this meant that the letter could only have come from that important person. Here are a printing potato, and a sponge used for putting the paint on.

Light-Writing
This was a new one and sounds quite technical, but it is really simple and gives fantastic results. To do this you need a camera with full manual controls, the best ones to use are SLRs (Single Lens Reflex), the cameras that the lenses can be changed on. Andy had a Digital SLR, but it could be done using a traditional film based SLR, if you know what your doing. The idea is to recreate a "bad" photograph where everything is blurry, this is done using a LONG EXPOSURE- which is how long the shutter on the camera opens for, and a NARROW APERTURE- which is the device that controls how much light gets into the camera. The best way to do light writing is to be in a dark space, you can then use a small LED torch to provide a single point of light, as you move the light around the camera picks it up as a blurry streak, and this allows you to draw shapes. It is a lot like drawing with a sparkler on bonfire night, but it is recorded as a photograph. This is a practice image on paper we used this to train ourselves in how to make the right movement.

(For anyone who wants to recreate the images the camera settings were  EXPOSURE 8seconds @ f.7 (Aperture 7) in a completely black room)

The Task
Working in groups of three everyone was given a letter, which could be used to write the website address for the blog. http://projectbreakingpoint.blogspot.com . As we were using techniques that allowed us to repeat certain letters we only had to make the following letters once h t p : / r o j e c b a k i n g . l s m, the templates for these letters could then be copied again and again. We also didn't have to worry about making the letters in the potato prints mirror images as this could be done on the computer when the artists photographed the images.
Each group had 5 people in so everyone got to make 2 letters each.

Here are some examples of the things we made or used for the three techniques.

Stencil
Potato
LED headtorch

Completing the Task
Once everyone had made their letters it was time to print them, or in the case of the Light Writers time to make good on their practicing of writing in the air.

So here are some examples of the result we got... Potato Print, Stencil, Light Writing

and Here are the finished titles in full (they were a bit too long to fit in the title box oops!!) just click on them to make them bigger.

AM Group

 

 

PM Group

 

The images were created by the artists using the following techniques and tools.

Photographing the images on Paper and Uploading these and the Light Writing images on to the computer. The images were then sorted into folders for each title. They then used a program called Photoshop to cutout the images, make them smaller and put them together into one big image. They then used another program called Graphic Converter to create the animated title image (animated gif), and uploaded this to the blog.**



** it's actually hosted on our website as blogger does not support animated gifs directly.