Welcome to Summer Term Two (Lockdown) 2020

Welcome to the new term.  My thoughts turn to my last year at DMU when I was a young student and I began to think of Professor Nicholas Zurbrugg.  I had the privilege of being taught by this great man and he supervised my dissertation which I absolutely loved writing. 

Nicholas Zurbrugg (Born 1st February 1947; died 14th October 2001)

You can read the obituary from the Guardian here .  Zurbrugg died a year after I left university but the short moments that I spent with him were a joy.  I studied avant-garde literature and I had a love (still do) of the dadaist and was writing my dissertation on John Heartfield and prewar Germany and Anselm Kiefer and postwar Germany.  Zubrugg sent me in all the right directions and although I used to leave notes under his door in his office he would always file these away somewhere in the piles of papers and notes, he would never forget what I was doing and he took time with a very naive young woman who wanted to learn (that was me then).  Zurbrugg introduced me to Baudrillard and Postmodernism, got me excited about Beckett and really just made me want to read more and more.  When I was at university I had no idea that he had written books as he never recommended his own.  A beautiful and admirable individual.

DMU also has a curated collection by Zurbrugg which you can read about here

I am hoping that you all find someone who inspires you as much as you go through university...

Reflection on Object Therapy

Cast Alive (1967) By Marcel Duchamp

I will start with Duchamp here as this piece of work the artist becomes the object casting his own face, hand and arm above his beloved chess set. This must be the ultimate object therapy - I am now considering how exactly I can become the object!

In my own small little book here I did not add this to my website as it was more playing with an idea and some techniques on the images. I enjoyed making the book and adding the text and I thought the overall look was good and the concept was good however if I wanted to go further I might use this as a prototype and then perhaps complete much more writing and research to make a more interesting and more in-depth piece of work.

I am looking forward to the last term of the year to see what else I will explore!

Object Therapy: Making the Book

All the pages I have made with text by creating a coloured canvas on Photoshop adding the picture at the correct resolution 300dpi and adding the text using the text tool.  I used Palantino Linotype as teh font and I think this work s well for the style of the book - here is a sample page:

I now will convert my files using a jpeg to pdf convertor tool online - there are many of these I just make sure it is a free one!  Then I go onto Yumpu and upload book as PDF pages.

To view the flipbook please go to this link below...

Object Therapy By Zoe Van-de-Velde

Object Therapy: Final Images

Finally completed all the images so here they are: 

Head Hat (2020) By Zoe Van-de-Velde

This image has my two holiday hats they sit forlornly now on my cupboard awaiting to be adorned upon my head in hot sun!

Mask Head (2020) By Zoe Van-de-Velde

This mask I bought from a craft fair - it was probably the only thing not for sale - I persuaded the maker to sell it to me and again it sits on my cupboard totemistic and most enjoyable to have around.

Orphan Doll (2020) By Zoe Van-de-Velde

Found object - found upon a Leicester bin (prior to the Covid I might add!) I took her home and now she stays with me. The pot was given to me by a friend, it holds emergency cash in case of crisis.

Big Putin/Small Stalin (2020) By Zoe Van-de-Velde

Genuinely from Russia - I bought them back with me the little dictators - I punish them by making them sit by books they might hate!

The Hand (2020) By Zoe Van-de-Velde

The hand I an art project never completed _ I bought it and never used it so now it stays holding out its little fingers perhaps praising God, perhaps just waiting to be useful in life!

Woman (2020) By Zoe Van-de-Velde

Woman a gift from husband when I left I think it is one of the best presents I have ever received.  A woman alone is always at her strongest. 

So here they are and I am most pleased with them - they are consistent and they have the look I intended.  Now I just have make them into a little book!

Process of Creating Aged Images on Photoshop

I am doing this rather late as can be seen I should have finished this last term however assessments took over but always determined to finish what I started I will continue!

So here is my process for ageing my own images - I will just post one as otherwise this will be very repetitive and you will get the idea!

So here is the original image that I chose to work with for the book 

I have uploaded this image to Photoshop from my desktop.  I then change the colour to Sepia

To do this I simply went into adjustments and photo filter and picked 'sepia' and adjusted the density.

I now want to create a kind of frame to give it that old photo look.

So here I created a new blank layer and then used 'edit' 'fill' and picked a colour from the original image.  I then used 'transform' and scale to place the border around the image.

I now want to add texture and that old 'feel' to the image so I downloaded a couple of images from the internet of rust and old paper - here they are:

I will now layer these on top of the image and use opacity to give the look I am after.

I now want to soften the edges of the photo and frame so it looks dated and not sharp.

I used the smudge, blur and burn tools to soften the edges and just darken the image in places.

I will now save this image as a jpeg so that I have the final version ready for the book pages

I think that this has worked really well and each image will be unique as I can use the tools creatively on each to give the look I am after. 

I will now create the rest of the images show these in my next post

Process: Technical Research Photoshop

It has been a while since I have looked at aging and photographs and the last time I did this I was restoring old family photos rather than making them look older which is what I want here.

My aim is to create a very mall book with photographs and text as I stated at the beginning of this project. I want the photos to look aged and used to add some depth to these objects and give the photographs a more textured feel.

I am following some of the instruction here on this video - which is very simple and very clear:

Ageing the Image By David Tipper (2015)

The video using a variety of tools including the smudge, blur and burn tools to soften and discolour the image.  It also uses overlay and opacity to create the texture that you want to create.

Take a look if you are interested for any of your own projects.