Painting wall panels

Hello!! 

(Did you miss me?!)

It has been an extremely busy year for me! Getting my work finished for degree show, then starting a new job... and subsequently deciding to return back to Duncan of Jordanstone to do my Masters in Fine Art starting September 2016! 

I have been terrible at updating my blog, because of this I have so many photos of my degree show work throughout the year, these photos are urging to been seen so I am going to be uploading them in somewhat of a chronological order first, then I shall explain what I've been up to since degree show! 

Painted mannequin in front of wall panels.

I fully primed the MDF boards with a white primer.

Above you can see right at the bottom of the picture my little steps as the panels were too tall for me to paint standing. 

I free hand painted the entire boards using acrylic paints to achieve the vibrancy I desired. 

Positioning part of a sculpture in front of the painted panel to see the contrast. 

I used a much larger pattern for the walls using less intricate detail than I put into the sculptures, in order to create different focal points for the eyes. 

Here you can see the almost finished wall panels, but fully white floor panels, I chose to wait until the week we had to install our work to paint the floor (which was a lot of added pressure). I chose to do this because I wanted to lay down the floor first, and then paint the pattern directly onto the floor to create an even larger pattern. 

This was when I was given access to my degree show space and first leaned my panels up against the walls, I was starting to see how my vision was coming together... and how much work I still had to do! 

I will be updating again soon as I have many more photos to share!! :) 

If you would like to see more of my work, don't forget to like my Facebook page, and follow me on my other social medias - find all links at the top. 

Alexzandria

Generator exhibition

Hello! 

I am months away from my degree show and will be updating very soon on how I am getting on with that, but I wanted to make a quick post about the fact I am currently showing some work at the Generator projects gallery in Dundee. The show will run from the 7th of February until the 1st of March 2015. 

Here are some photos from the opening night of the show! 

I feel like there was quite an eclectic mix of style and types of work including surrealist paintings on canvas, sculpture and performance art.This made for an interesting show that managed to keep your attention at every turn.

Feel free to pop along and have a look around if you are in the area! 

See bellow a link to the Generator projects website -

  http://generatorprojects.co.uk/

If you would like to read more about the artwork I have on show here is a direct link to my blog post about it -

 http://alexzandriaart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/as-part-of-exchanging-resources-project.html

If you would like to see more of my work, don't forget to like my Facebook page, and follow me on my other social medias - find all links at the top. 

Alexzandria

Painting My Mannequin

Hello! 

At my desk in the studio

 Update! which will be mainly shown through photos as I think they are reasonably self explanatory. After priming my mannequin I then began to paint it, which is a very long process as I use a small fine paint brush in order to achieve the amount of intricacy I wish for. 

Arm

I finished painting both arms and then moved onto painting the torso of the mannequin 

Finished arm

I started to paint the torso

I took a few photos of the mannequin in front of a wall I had painted to see what effect I would get with the pattern on pattern. 

Front of the torso

Back of the torso

This is the arms and torso assembled and almost finished in my studio space. 

mannequin plus my sketchbook

The back of the torso

The front of the torso

My aim is to use the mannequins as part of a sculpture. I plan on distorting the figures and began doing a series of quick sketches to work out different ideas for the forms to take. I want to deform the shape of the body somehow. 

Here are a couple of the quick sketches. 

A few more images of the mannequin. 

My next step is to finish painting the full mannequin, and then begin experimenting with distorting the figure.

If you would like to see more of my work, don't forget to like my Facebook page, and follow me on my other social medias - find all links at the top.

Alexzandria 

Priming My First Mannequin

Hello! 

It's been a very busy time for me so I am going to try to back date what I have been doing over the past while with a few blog posts this week. I am three weeks off having to do my presentation before Christmas, also my dissertation is due soon! So I am juggling a lot of things right now, it's all happening! 

 I got my first mannequin at the start of October, I quickly began experimenting with how I would go about priming it! 

Mannequin head with blob

Fully assembled the mannequin appears to be floating 

One thing about the mannequin that at first made priming it quite an obstacle was the many different textures and types of plastic it was made up of.

my first attempt at priming the hand

I didn't do any research into how to go about priming plastic but I already had white acrylic paint, which in the past I've used as a primer on numerous occasions. So I gave that a bash but I was not surprised that it didn't take to the plastic and it pealed right off as soon as it was dry, as you can see bellow. 

The paint pealing off the plastic arm

I then started researching how to properly prime and turn a shiny plastic surface into a matte paintable one. It turns out you can buy spray on plastic primer, that kind of works like a spray paint however it adheres to what are usually very difficult to paint surfaces, such as shiny plastics and metals

With one coat of primer

This worked perfectly, So I sprayed the entire mannequin with it , at first with just one coat and left that to dry

With one coat of primer

The mannequin has glass eyes I did not want to ruin, so I covered them with tissue and primed the head 

I also primed the metal stand.

Then I sprayed the mannequin with a second coat.

With two coats

With two coats of plastic primer

I then decided in order to get the best results and vibrancy in colour, when I start to paint the mannequin, I needed to add a third coat. The third coat I used was a canvas primer, which I painted the entire mannequin with. 

This shows the difference the canvas primer made

I was very happy with the opaque white I was left with after taking all these steps. 

Ready to paint now! 

I will be posting again soon to show my next steps, so keep an eye out! 

If you would like to see more of my work, don't forget to like my Facebook page, and follow me on my other social medias - find all links at the top. 

Alexzandria