Days of hope

Saatchi & Saatchi launched a campaign called 'Days of hope' in 2013 to raise the profile of increasing homelessness in major cities across Europe. I have been looking at a lot of Saatchi related artists for my dissertation which is project based.

This video highlights the struggle that homeless people face in winter, with the homeless population rising I feel this kind of campaign would be effective here in Britain.   

Artist of interest Isabella Bunny Bennet

Isabella Bunny Bennet is an children's book illustrator and is also part of a steam punk band called Steam Powered Giraffe. In Steam Powered Giraffe Isabella plays the character Rabbit, who is a Victorian Robot who is prone to malfunctions.

I love her style it's very quirky, she incorporates texture into her digital pieces. This piece is called Bathtub Skeleton and is from her book "Pudding Bat's Big Night Out."

She also publicly posts about her transition from male to female and has little comics she posts on her deviantart and tumblr called Trans-form detailing some of the struggles of transitioning.

  

Even if you aren't trans it is very enlightening to she her artwork and her transition vlogs.

My response to women's sanitary products being classed as "Luxury Items"

I was angered to find out women's sanitary products are classed as a luxury and that some men were comparing their preference for being clean shaven to women's sanitary products. It's not specifically the tax which angers me more the principle behind them being labeled as "Luxury Items". 

Women in 3rd world countries are not as educated because they have little to no access to sanitary products and have to stay off school for 5 days to a week each month. That 5 days to a week puts them behind in their studies making it harder for them to further their education.

So a school year is roughly 195 days, roughly 6 months of the year. Take 5 days average from each month so that's 23. So times that by 6 (months) and that's 138 days. So that's 57 days of missed schooling a year that's roughly 2 months each year.

It gets worse the average start of a girls period is 12 and lets say that girl finishes school at 16. so that's 5 years, so total days a child should be in school is 975 and if you total in the time that these girls have to take off that is a total of 690 days they spend in school total from the ages of 12-16 years of age.

Shocking isn't it?

And people are telling us being in a position to be in education for 195 days a year is supposedly a luxury? We aren't after this stuff for free, we want people to admit this is not a god damn luxury!

Stella Creasy hit the nail on the head when she said "Tampons and sanitary towels, even I'm struggling with the words tonight it seems, have always been considered a luxury. That isn't by accident, that's by design of an unequal society, in which the concerns of women are not treated as equally as the concerns of men,".

Jaffa cakes are zero-rated for crying out loud! Yes stuffing our face with Jaffa's every month is fantastic BUT it is far from essential.   

I would love to at some point create some work around this issue but it would be a stretch to incorporate it into my current project, even though I am sure access to sanitary products is an issue for homeless women. 

I am homeless but I am a human being

Today I watched this buzzfeed video and I think it informs people about homelessness and the stereotypes homeless people face in the right way.

I am homeless

I was in Manchester on Wednesday and one of the homeless guys came up to me and my friend, I remembered him and how I had given money to him before. He gives people poetry in exchange for their charity. The last poem he gave me was on the back of a betting slip and sadly I misplaced it, that poem brought me to tears and I instantly thought I need to bring attention to this. From what I can recall the poem he gave to me the first time was about how he used to be addicted to drugs but now he was clean. This time I was glad to see he had gotten a note pad instead of writing on the back of betting slips, it's such a small change for most people but for someone on the streets paper is a luxury item. My friend gave him some money (I have a rule that I only give what I have in my pockets) and my friend told me to chose a poem, he just so happened to have a poem called stereotyped so I asked for that one and told him about my project. He seemed so happy when I told him I wanted to dispel stereotypes around homelessness he said "that's good, there is way to much of it believe me."  He was the one who inspired this project and I told him his poem will really help. He smiled and I am so glad I saw that.

Uni project and upcoming stall

My university project 'Outside The Penthouse' is about dispelling preconceptions of the homeless.
Going straight into doing work about homeless people didn't work out very well, I found myself really hitting brick walls, thinking that my super vivid style just wouldn't fit the message I was trying to convey.

I had the idea of depicting the homeless people as monsters because a lot of people seem to adopt the attitude that they shouldn't exist and to validate this I feel people connect negative connotations to homeless people. The most common being drunks, druggies, lazy and uneducated.
I wanted to pull the carpet out from peoples feet and show them how they have been thinking about homeless people compared to how they should be viewing them.

A big challenge with this project it to keep it out of the realm of being too condescending but also try and make it so it isn't a guilt trip. Talking to members of my class they told me that most charity ads are patronizing or tell the viewer though the use of black and white that this should make them feel sad. People don't like being told what they should feel on a subject, that's the reason why differing opinions can spark arguments. I have thought at length how I can stay clear of all of these things and realized it's probably not possible to do, my priority instead has to be keeping these factors to a minimum.

People told me they would rather see something that is uplifting and that will inspire people to help rather than something gloomy which would just depress the intended audience.

My tutor recommended I step away from the theme of homelessness for a bit and focus on creating characters (which is what I enjoy doing) and that has really unblocked me creatively. Since switching the focus I have been coming up with concepts I really enjoy. The project before had become a chore but now it has become something I do for enjoyment and if I have learned anything forcing creativity rarely gives good results. Also my tutor's lecture on metaphor really helped me come up with new ways of communicating my chosen message without blocking myself off creatively.



Switching topic, I have a stall coming up in November and I am focusing on making things that are reproducible in order to keep the balance between my stall and uni work. So far I have come up with the idea of doing lino prints, I had a little look on etsy to see if anyone does pop culture inspired lino prints and found one person by the name of Chase or TheBeardedGoldfish as the shop name is called.

If there is one thing in this world I love, it is Pokemon. And Chase does very unique Pokemon lino prints (if only he shipped to the UK). I have always loved the bold look of lino prints. 

He prints them on to rice paper of different colours depending on the character in the print.

I think the boldness of a lino print would look absolutely amazing paired with a vivid watercolour background that I have recently been creating with Dr Ph Martins concentrated watercolours.

This is also something I would love to experiment with for 'Outside The Penthouse'. Maybe I could even bind them into a zine format.

The etsy shop for TheBeardedGoldfish

Doll test how ingrained is racism?

I just watched this video and the video really made me feel uneasy, which I think is what it is supposed to do.

This video is entitled Doll Test and in the video the people conducting the experiments ask children from varying racial backgrounds questions about two dolls and a diagram with different skin colours. What really pulled at my heart stings was watching the children of colour pointing to the "black" doll and labeling it as the ugly doll, with most preferring the white doll. And when asked to give the researcher the doll which looked like them they handed over the "black" doll which they had earlier categorized as the ugly doll.

The fact they considered a doll with a similar skin colour ugly just shows how much the stereotypes made by white people have been rooted within coloured children. I felt tears come to my eyes several times no child should think that their skin colour makes them ugly or untrustworthy.

AVDWT Progression 15th of June

WARNING: If you believe in the Leviticus part of the old testament you may not want to read this post or be on my blog at all for that matter.

I'm currently on page 36 of Iain Bank's "The Wasp Factory."

 This first page you may have seen before in my last blog post, I have gone back to this page and started to work into the bottom portion with typographic transfers. I just couldn't stand the empty spaces and there is still to much empty space for my liking. So I'll be refining this page over the next few days.
 I used numbers, letters and symbols it represent this characters need for information. In the book he is and educated man, a man of science whom I would think craves knowledge and information. Since reading further into the book there this character has be described more so I plan on making a tracing paper overlay and re-designing his character over the top of the old one.


The next page is still in progress as well this page is currently full of extracts from the book I found funny or interesting. The extract I focus on is about a person named Leviticus, now this extract is obviously the writer having a bit of a not so sneaky dig at Leviticus which is part of the old testament, most well known for being against same sex relationships/marriage/sex.

The full extract reads "Leviticus Cauldhame, my father's eldest brother, emigrated to South Africa and bought a farm there in 1954. Leviticus, a person of such weapon-grade stupidity his mental faculties would probably have improved with the onset of senile dementia, left Scotland because the Conservatives had failed to reverse the Socialist reforms of the previous Labour government." The quote continues and shows us how much of an intolerant, closed minded dolt Leviticus really is.

In my sketch book I drew inspiration from Dada cut ups to make my own dig at Leviticus. A bit of background about me I am not a religious person and I believe very strongly in LGBT rights being bisexual myself, even if I wasn't bisexual I'm sure I would still be an avid supporter of LGBT rights. One thing I dislike about people who claim to believe in Leviticus is that they pick and chose what they do and do not take from it. I have seen many anti gay marriage protesters wear mixed materials yet that is banned according to Leviticus, and I'm sure they wouldn't blink an eye while eating mussels  when shellfish is also frowned upon according to Leviticus and is mention more frequently to be an abomination than being homosexual. Leviticus in my honest opinion is pure stupidity.