Photoshoot @ Fort Canning

On Wednesday, I was at Fort Canning Park for a photoshoot with my groupmates in class. We were supposed to have a photography project which involves every group to select a few old photographs from the photography archive in the National Museum, and then reinteprete them in our own ways.

My sketches of the original photographs we intend to render for our project

The weather was very hot, but it was nevertheless fun. At the very least, it is still better than rainy or gloomy weather which would otherwise hamper our progress, and we only have got 4 weeks to finish everything. For "protective" reasons, I shall not disclose the images we have taken and our concept; perhaps I shall do it after assessment at the end of the year!

My 3D Models

I'm very relieved. Yesterday was the review session for my 3D lesson in school, and we were supposed to bring all our 3D works to school for our lecturer to review. Although I have yet to finish everything, I was one of the few in class to have almost all completed. Plus, next week is the project week, and with the progress of my works, I am very confident that I will not lag behind after the break. Jiayou!

My four basic geometric shapes, cube, pyramid, cylinder and cone, ready to be fragmentised and reconstructed into 8 models

"Flying Bird": inspired by the bronze sculpture of a yellow crane at Parkview Square

"The Warrior": a minimalist (sort of) interpretation of Henri Moore's "Warrior with Shield"

"The Entertainer": no explanation needed; a clownish character

"Dragon Dance": no explanation needed too

"Tornado": inspired by tornado off a sea surface; it may look a bit like "Dragon Dance", but this has got sharper angles, representing destructive forces of the tornado (and choppy sea)

"Head of a Man": I don't know how I got to this; perhaps I was thinking of Picasso's Cubism at that point of time?

"Upright Kangaroo": alright, the tail looked more like a squirrel!

"Dancing Man"; actually I thought it looked more like a Mexican musician with those big traditional hat, was playing rqandomly sticking pieces together and got this

Last but not least, my one-fifth completed wire model of my head! Well, it looked a bit too small...

My First Acrylic Drawing

This week for 2D lesson, we were asked to use acrylic paint for our drawing. Well, although I've used acrylic paint before, I never really tried to do a real painting (the last time I've tried was re-coating of my string marionette's head). We were originally told to do 3 drawings, but I've only managed to finish one. My lecturer told me it looked not bad, but I was too slow. Well, I think it was already quite good for me because I could not control my brush strokes well. At the very least, I felt that the drawing still looked presentable, except for some random strokes which had gone beyond the area which I was supposed to paint.

One-Two-Go Incident

Yesterday it was announced over TV that a One-Two-Go plane from Thailand had crashed in Phuket International Airport. It had just arrived from Bangkok and was landing when the tragedy happened. I was shocked to hear the news, because I've flown twice in that carrier (once from Phuket to Bangkok and then back a few days later, during Songkran festival earlier this year). No doubt the planes were rather old, as I knew from my friend Oh, and that the service on board is just average, but I'm still rather satisfied with this budget domestic carrier. Then this afternoon, I got more shock: the crashed plane was one of the two planes I had taken before! Suddenly I began to think what would happen if the tragedy had occured back then and not now; maybe I won't be here updating my blog anymore. However, I think this would not stop me from flying with this carrier again in future, as I believe this is just an unfortunate isolated accident. It has made me treasure life more though, for you can never know what may just happen next that might just change your life drastically...

First Project Submission

Yesterday morning, after a few consecutive days of hard work, I finally completed my project for IT (Photoshop). My work was in a form of a booklet, a thin book, actually, and with a CD containing my PSD files inside. I had originally planned to finish everything by Saturday night so that I could start on my other assignments like 3D on Sunday, but I'd overestimated myself, and therefore the project completion date dragged on for another day. I was quite satisfied with my final work, though I personally felt more could be done to improve it.

The theme of the project was on nature, and we were supposed to do 4 artworks based on this theme: 1 on greyscale, 1 on monochrome, 1 on full colour and 1 on abstraction. My first 3 artworks weren't that great, as I got to know after seeing how some of my other classmates did their interpretation, but many did not do a good presentation as well. Not that my presentation was fantastic, but having a friend who was a Lasalle student, I roughly know what kind of output the institute requires for our projects, and therefore made a more presentable submission, and my tutor Nadia seemed rather pleased with it.

However, having said so, I'm not going to stop at just that; the deadline yesterday was just an "estimated assessment", and the "real" one is actually at the end of the academic year. That means I still have time to work on this project before the "final deadline", and I think I have to work real hard to produce better artworks to score higher marks. But for now, it's time to tackle other projects that are silently piling up behind me!