Shadow art !

After having looked at my two wire hands for quite a while i realised that they make quite interesting shadows on whatever background they are against, so i decided to look into the idea of shadow art further. I found some really fun and interesting images on the internet.

 The shadows of this tree on a street looks in a way like the shadows of the wire.

The batman sign made from shadows.

and so on....

After dealing with the wire hands alone i decided to put the small hand on my own and work with it....

I took photos of it in different positions....

 

 

 

I then staerted to do up some small drawings of these hands using various medium....

such as pencil, charcoal and paint.

Looking at the three small drawings I realised i liked the paint one best and wanted to see it on a larger scale, so i made a large painting of it on brown paper.

 

Here is the finished piece....
I wouldnt mind doing a whole series of these in various colours but for now i have other ideas in mind.

more wire hands....

I had some photos from failed attempts at videos so i just kept them the way they were and used them.

I then began to draw these wire hands.....they seemed to be an interesting subject matter...

I used different mediums with each hand i drew...

2 wire hands....hmmm...

So after i had both hands completed in front of me I had to try and think of something to so with them....then i thought....why not try my hand at a small stop motion.....I struggles with ideas for this and went through a few bad ones but finally came up with something that worked in a wierd sort of way...

just a little experiment... :) 

Sign Language. :)

Looking at communicating with hand movements lead me to explore sign language, One of the more obvious ways of communicating using your hands, obvious? yes.....easy?..no.

I took the alphabet to begin with and started looking at all the different signs for each letter

 I decided to experiment with spelling words using pictures of the letters.

MOVE!

Movement and Motion.

Drawing these hands was good but I thought....why not see the real thing?

I got in touch with a woman at home in Donegal who teaches sign language. I asked her to sign the spelling of movement and motion for me while I photographed it.

 M

 O

 T

 I

 O

 N

  A

  N

  D

 M

 O

 V

 E 

 M

  E

 N

 T

 I had some video footage from this day too but it doesn't seem to be anywhere to be found...:( If it turns up ill be sure to post it :)

ok so the actual video footage.....gone....cant understand how...:( but i decided to make up for it by creating this little almost stop motion type video with the photos above....just thought id experiment a little with making videos :)

Its a wee bit short i know...but it was worth a try..:)

Hand movements, Gestures, Communication and all that..:)

Hand movements? Gestures? It's all communication if you think about it..

All of our movements have meaning. Each hand movement or gesture we make means something to someone.

 

 

Photos from my contextual and sketchbook exploring hand gestures.

One of the pictures that i found had given me an idea for a sculpture and/or a painting.

I started into the sculpture idea first.

The initial idea was to make a pair of shaking hands but out of 2 different materials. One from wire and the other from clay.

I started into the wire hand anyway...I modelled it around my own hand...wrapping the wire around each finger one by one...ouch..:(

 Then made a corset shaped piece for the main body of the hand.

 Once all the fingers and the body were completed all that was left was to attatch them. :)

When the hand was completed it looked like a small glove....it was quite interesting to look at so I decided against the clay hand and concentrated on just working with the wire.

After looking at this small hand i thought...hey....why not go bigger ?

I started into making a bigger version of this wire hand..

Having both hands side by side I thought....what could I do with 2 wire hands...hmmmm?