Painting With Photographs.

As you might of guessed I have a passion for photography and also fine art. For the last few weeks I have been trying to figure out a way how to combine the two together to make something that would satisfy my excitement for both subjects. 
So using my homemade camera I proceeded to take some more pictures. Once my negatives had been produced I turned them into positives, but the trick was not to develop the picture properly but instead paint the developer on, this gave some interesting results.

Homemade Camera.

Using my ideas of drawing machines I made a homemade pinhole camera with an old enlarger lens to make some paper negatives, I then inverted all the images in photoshop.

Collage.

I was given a task to collage a broken camera in a few hours. The top one is the camera and the bottom one is my interpretation.

Tv Portraits.

Tv portraits came from the idea of when people would visit a photographer in their studio and sit still for a period of time. But instead of taking a picture with a old fashioned plate camera and waiting to be developed I decided that Ill make a drawing machine using similar principles. 

The first thing I did was to find an old video camera and connect it up to a monitor, I tried tracing the image off the screen with paper and all I could see was the basic highlights and tonal areas of the face. The next material I tried was tracing paper and this also turned out to do the same as paper. Then I used an acetate sheet which worked and produced the desired effect. As shown below.

The next step I would try would be to colour behind the drawn image with acrylic, this would appear to look like an animation cell.

Collaboration.

I have been set a new project in which I must work with my fellow students to create a collaboration of work based around the same subject, we started off looking at drawn masks and making a movie, the main purpose of this would of been to get the creative ball rolling, but when we started drawing the masks we noticed something we were all drawing portraits and so our theme, idea or even our reason to draw was born.

Transport.

I was given a word Transport as a project and I created a series of images. I based them on photographs that I took around my local area and added objects such as lampposts, signs and other cars. Here are some of the pictures I drew using nothing but a pencil. 

The Car Wash.

Speeding Lorry.

Petrol Station.

My Favourite Photograph

My first real practical machine I made was a humble pinhole camera, I could of gone with the blindingly obvious of my Mothers backing tin and stuck a hole in the side of it, but true to form I went seeking bits of old timber from the battered shed at the bottoms of my Grandad's garden and made myself a light tight box which could of been mistaken for an antique on Bargain hunt.

After strenuous  hours of taking what seemed like a hundred photographs just to learn the time of the exposure to gain a image, I had appeared to have cracked the mysterious code of the pinhole camera. So I jumped in my Grandad's car and went for a ride. After about half an hour we arrived at a suitable location. I placed my camera on top of the car and opened up the hole and waited an anxious 30 seconds.

When I got back I hurried up to my dark room and started to develop my piece of empty paper, once in the developer the magic started to happen, an image appeared, at first it was only a faint outline of what I could call a image, once fully developed and in the light I saw the true beauty of this picture. It might never make it up on the walls of the Tate but to me this was an amazing achievement as it was my first real success with a pinhole camera.