Frank the film muse

Today was sort of really productive and yet really unproductive, I got a couple of my large sheets almost finished and started to add to my sketch book but at the same time I watched a lot of tv and did a lot of laptop time. I need to get out of this funk soon and get some work done.

I did however watch a great film today, Frank, which stars Michael Fassbender, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Domhnall Gleeson, who was in Harry Potter but plays a much douchey-ier role in this. Its a really odd film, in a good way, it deals with artistic vision, the music industry and mental illness and it does so beautifully. The trailer kinda leads you astray and it goes in a completely different direction than you'd think. I love the weird jingly jangly shouty music that Frank's band 'Soronprfbs' which I don't think anyone knows how to pronounce, not even Maggie Gyllenhaal's character Clara, who is a super boss and has the best style in the whole film, I'm totally going to try and copy the makeup she does

. 

The main character Frank is really interesting, you kinda get the whole sadness about him and I love how the movie characters accepted his mental illness rather than tried to change him. Michael Fassbender is a favourite of mine and I hope he does more of the little quirky films like Frank in the future. One good thing about wasting a morning watching the film is that Frank's paper mache head, that yes he does wear even in the shower, has given me a bit of inspiration, I have his face drawn onto the back of my hand at the moment, I want to do some journal pages on it. 

All in all it was a great film and I'm obsessed with Frank's 'Most likable song ever' and it has genuine sad and funny moments. It's kinda weird to think how well they created a comedic film that centers around the issue of mental health. 

xxx

Rosie

I can't believe the turnout

Yes the time comes once again for me to change the layout of my blog, I was really bored by the previous design and I'm still not done changing it, I need my brother to help with the html a little. The background photo was taken at reading and I wanted a newer colour scheme to make this winter a little less bleak. I've been reading through Maya's blog which is forever an inspiration art and clothes wise and I'm finally coming out of the fashion rut I've been stuck in. I've been rifling through my wardrobe for more interesting clothes to wear, ones I've bought but never thought about wearing or worry that they look too 'quirky' for everyday wear.

These photo's were taken a few weeks ago, I was playing round with the flash on my camera, sticking bits of paper over the bulb and when I was taking off my makeup the other night I found the flower crown I was wearing to keep my hair back matched my shirt. Sorry for the bare face but I'm starting to take my makeup off earlier rather than 5 mins before I go to sleep.

~ Flower Crown - DIY ~ Mickey Sweatshirt - Charity Shop ~ Jeans - H&M ~ 

This isn't my best set of photos, I hate the way my room looks so green and I'm completely washed out, but its a start into what will hopefully be a new style of posts

xxx

Rosie

Ragnar Kjartansson and Artes Mundi

It's Artes Mundi time again! The welsh festival for contemporary and conceptual artists is back and this time the exhibition has extended to locations other than the national museum of Cardiff, which is a bit of a trek to reach so I went along to the photography exhibit which is a little closer to me and saw some amazing stuff. 

There was some incredibly heartfelt pieces by Sanja Ivenkovic who I would suggest to anyone looking at art and violence or war, the piece about donkeys sounds like it wouldn't be interesting until you properly looked at it. 

But my favourite piece was a film experience by Ragnar Kjartansson, I call it a film experience because it was just that. We entered the room upstairs and found seven films being projected on to the  different walls and a few stools in the middle. Titled The Visitors, the films work in real time, all in sync to show different areas of an old slightly disheveled stately home, singing in perfect harmony, in terms of timing rather than pitch.

It was incredible as the screens were all around you and you had to move and look at the different screens to figure out what was happening and sometimes the singers would move from room to room and they'd appear on a different screen. It was so weird to watch things just happen, no jump cuts or fancy editing to speed things along, it just flowed. I think that's the magic of the film, as it was shot in one take things just happened and you could never tell if that was planned or not. Like at the end camera men would wander round the house turning off the camera's and letting the screen go black, and sometimes you'd see one of the crew in the back of shot and it just felt natural. I loved that the song was repeated for the whole time, it ends (spoiler alert!!!! jk) with everyone running out onto the bleak misty field surrounding the house. 

It's kinda beautifully capturing because its like nothing I'd seen before, I found the whole thing on YouTube but I dont think it has the same feel, it couldn't really. It did give me a good idea for using a projector in photography, like a makeshift camera obscurer.

xxx

Rosie

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity

Slightly creepy title from Edvard Munch 

I usually I dislike Wednesday, as I've already stated, but today was quite fun, our tutor gave us an actually quite interesting task to complete, after a cringe worthy hour of sitting as a group discussing our journals. 

We were given a ripped out page of a dictionary, a quite modern one as well, you can still see the remnants of the word glue sniffing under the petal of the flower on the right, after we'd been given the page we had to read through and find a word that we liked and illustrate it. I was planning on choosing Gloomy and painting/drawing a moody atmospheric sunset on the paper but then I spotted Gloxina.

The word looked odd enough to make me read the definition and google the plant  and find that it was a really pretty flower that I really wanted to draw and I'm pretty pleased with it. I know the colour isn't great and I haven't been wonderful with the fine-liner but overall it reminds me of the botanical drawings my granddad has in his house which makes me happy.

xxx

Rosie 

All That I Have Is A River

So for the photography course I do at Chapter we had to do the first shoot of our final pieces, my idea was along the lines of a girl being stood up, time passing and the isolation of being in love, the idea changed a little when we got down to the beach, it was a really windy grey Friday afternoon so it was pretty wonderful as we never had people awkwardly trying to duck out of shot. The photo's were beautiful and it was partly thanks to my lovely model and soul sister Ella, who I used to do modeling with and is used to me shouting at her  to pose in the 'right way'. The photos have a lovely analogue feel despite being taken on digital, mostly because I left the white balance for florescent lighting on by accident which made it feel really dark and moody. It kinda reminded me of Richard Ayoade's first film Submarine, the whole film had grainy feel and a lot of the scenes had similar blue hues to them. I've actually really gotten into how directors colour their films, I've already done a page in my school journal analysing the colours of Sofia Coppola's work. 

Thanks again to Ella for being fab. 

xxx

Rosie

P.S. please don't take these photos without crediting/linking back to me, i.e please don't steal them, I don't want to say it but I these are being graded and go towards uni so they're a little more important than most stuff.

Duvet day

This week at art school is animation, not something I'm really interesting but I can totally appreciate it... if it weren't sitting in silence drawing shoes all day. Yeah, yesterday we drew shoes in black and white all day and I was so bored I put almost no thought into them and just tried to finish them as fast as possible. I was feeling pretty crap so I took today off as a duvet day, well I was supposed to catch up on some work for the general assessment coming up but I spent most of it watching Sofia Coppola films and writing a letter to my pen pal, I did finish 4 pages of un-needed work in my school journal but it just highlights the blank pages in my book I still need to finish. The worst are my Visual and Contextual pages that I tend to do the background for and then put off the writing for a few weeks, I even surprised myself  by starting to write one this morning.

I was trying to find a picture this morning for some artist research and ended up looking through all the pictures I've saved on my laptop with halfhearted plans of doing something with them. There's no definite theme throughout but I hope you can appreciate the cold winter-y vibe to them.

xxx

Rosie

Thunder only happens when it's raining

I was looking through my phone and found some pretty and moody photos from the last week that I thought would be semi interesting

xxx

Rosie

Bored of Bauhaus

Okay, calm down. Despite the title I don't actually hate the Bauhaus movement, what I hate is sitting through an hour long German Documentary about it that required a lot more focus than I could give it. The title came from a snapchat I sent of the doodles I was doing when my concentration finally snapped and I gave up. 

While the lectures aren't at all boring and my lecturer is totally engaging, she's taken a lot of my group's classes when the tutor is away, I just find Wednesday to be kinda boring. 

It always seems to be really busy and rushed, the train is late or packed and I stand in a sort of daze on the train waiting for my stop. Then as soon as I get to uni everything slows down to mind numbingly boring pace and I can feel my brain turning to Jelly. We have drawing practice on Wednesday which consists of splitting an A3 page into 4 and doing 15 minute sketches before doing one big hour long drawing on a full A3 page. I seriously cannot do one drawing of a pretty boring object for an hour, Life drawing, portraiture, paintings, I don't mind doing for hours and hours, but drawing a crumpled up piece of magazine paper, yes that's what we drew, kills the limited concentration I have. 

I would almost hate Wednesday if it weren't for the free period between lunch and our lecture, I went down to the textiles room to finish, or begin to finish, the self portrait we did yesterday. I think I've gone a bit over board on the portrait, So far I've almost finished my skin/face, its abstract so the colours are all weird pastel shades and kinda geometric, but I still have the hair and background to do, which is like 3/4 of the painting. 

But whatever.

It's sitting in my room drying so I can take it back to uni tomorrow while I try to finish some pages in my uni journal, sort out some upcoming posts and get some research down for an upcoming essay, my lecture said I could do it about Raf Simmons which is a designer I've been wanting to look into for a while.

xxx

Rosie

A week (and a bit) in pictures

On Wednesday I had a well welcomed day off as my 3d tutor wasn't in, so I got to have a glorious sleep in and pj day. These day's off are officially 'self directed study days' but I don't always stick to that, I was expecting a few hours wasting time online and a couple of pages mapped out in my sketch book, with as minimal actual work done as possible. In fact I managed to get quite a bit of work done as well as begin the arduous process of tidying my room, I cleaned most of my desk and sorted through a huge heap of stuff I was supposed to have done months ago. 

Sunsets are my favourites and it makes me hate winter a little as we don't get anything as cool.

Home grown green'n'spooky pumpkins

I was looking through our tape collection and found some gems, this actually was a Duran Duran cassette after opening it up but I'm still happy.

From my Instagram feed, it was supposed to be baby Leo but didn't quite work out.

xxx

Rosie

Early October is the pits

Early October is the pits by utterlyrosie featuring Topshop

I've been really ill recently and kinda fed up so I've not got all the motivation to be really clever and creative and stupid early October isn't helping, I just want it to be Halloween now and then let November start and get all excited for my birthday. I'm also battling with technology again, I really need a new laptop as this one crashes almost everyday and half the keys have/are about to fall off. 

This set is literally the only things I wear recently, other than the picture obs, that was just there for emphasis on the gloom, my jeans aren't ripped as I need all the insulation I can get and I have fake vans, because I'm a poser, but its pretty close. I have begun to take my Pentax film camera round with me more, the photography course I'm taking has given me a huge amount of image taking knowledge and I feel a lot more confident taking photos with them, I also did the photography week of my art foundation course and I would show the photos but they're just of forks which aren't that interesting, I should know we spent a whole week looking at them. 

xxx

Rosie

All rise for the wonders of 90's denim

So on sunday me and two pals headed down to city hall for the vintage fair that's held every few months, it was a really cool affair, lots of cool vintage clothing a hell of a lot cheaper than in Urban or Topshop, they even had people doing vintage makeovers and live rockabilly singers. I've been suffering from low bank funds which has put a stop to wasting money so I'm back on a second hand kick,but I managed to find some sweet stuff, all of them very 90's denim related. 

* Apologies for the rubbish quality of photos, I forgot I'd left my camera on manual mode which isn't great when it's on self timer *

Very 90's over sized Levi's jacket, I've wanted a large denim jacket for a while but wasn't hot about the £40 + price tags they came with, this was £25 and has genuine distressing on the collar from wear rather than just a bit of sand paper on the fabric. I've been wearing it to art school and its great for keeping both warm and cool in the un-predictable weather, I didn't wear it with the check shirt to school but I thought with the crop top, circle skirt and a denim jacket I wasn't quite 90's enough.

This super cute dungarees that aren't only adorable because they're dungarees, they have Winnie the Pooh on them. Winnie the Pooh, the book I used to read all the time as a kid. They have a cute little Winnie tag and bees on one leg with an embroidery of the silly old Pooh bear floating away on a balloon. Yes I look like an over grown six year old but whatever. You can only wear dungarees a few times in your life and I'm calling mine now.

Technically I didn't buy these at the vintage fair, I found them at a charity shop the day before, these fab mom jeans are a bit tighter and more tailored than the last pair I bought, they're also really long so I'm going to have to roll them up a bit. They were only £2 so it would be criminal to let them go and waste away in the charity shops, I doubt anyone in my town would want to buy them. 

I have some slightly more fun stuff lined up for the next post rather than just a post of pictures of my pale chubby stomach and the proof that I'm not really good at saving money.

xxx

Rosie