Carmen McNally's Art

Artist research Photographer Craig Fleming I like that Craig Fleming uses lots of eye contact with his subjects. A lot of his black and white photos have high contrast and dramatic lighting. His use of composition is noticeably well planned. He uses symmetrical and diagonal composition well with his subjects like the images below.     Even though I would like to keep my backgrounds simple In my own portrait photography, I really like the use of negative space, depth of field and colour Pallet in Flemings photos, like the images below.      A lot of the photos I've come across have got a cinematic look. And I like how he is managed to capture expression and emotion in his photos. I think Fleming is a great photographer to have in mind when I'm creating my own portraits and in post production, editing my photos. https://www.instagram.com/craigflemingphoto?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==  

  Cyanotype for Portrait I explored further with some of the photographs using cyanotype. I do like using this process as they give the gritty and dark effect that I wanted. However, they do look like something from a horror scene. Odilia's face, the first image below looks like she has a growth of frosted ice snowflakes on her face. She looks like the evil Ice Queen, which is not quite the look I was trying to achieve. In the other images below, the eyes do not seem to have any definition to them which also I don't like. I believe that the eyes can draw you into a photograph, which is what I want to do with my photographs.   The above images were printed on water colour paper. I wanted to experiment with other surfaces so I developed the images below on calacoe material.  

  Tape on Acetate Today, we used tape to draw onto acetate. We had to keep our shapes and lines basic and simple. Tom showed us a quick demo tracing over the outline of a leaf but there was no set direction with where we needed to go with it. I taped my acetate onto the window and I followed the outline of the buildings looking through the window. It was actually quite tricky after a while following the outlines as it was hard to get the right perspective so I did most of this outlining with one eye closed which helped me out. The good thing was that you could come back to it when you got tired and leave your acetate taped up at the window as I knew my view wasn't going to change. I decided to change the thickness of the tape by using thinner tape for buildings that were further back to create more depth in my picture.

  Cyanotype Photography I coated watercolour paper and calico in a tray with Cyanotype to develop my portrait photos in the darkroom today. Cyanotype is made of a 2-part powder form. Potassium and Ammonium. Whilst it was drying in the heater I converted my images to a negative on Photoshop and printed them onto acetate. We travelled up to the print room to use the self-contained exposure unit. Cyanotype is UV-reactive so I rested the acetate image on top of the dried cyanotype watercolour paper inside the exposure unit, vacuumed it tight and set the timer to 123. Roughly after 5 minutes the image had transferred onto the cyanotype paper in a dark blue shade. This was only a test to see how it works but I think this will be a great direction to move in because of the effect from the cyanotype. Moving forward I want my portraits for the Portrait project of people to look more gritty and unflattering as I think this helps to show more emotion and hardship . I would like to explore this

  Portrait i deas As the sitter is anonymous in the portrait I want to play on this more by creating what the sitter could potentially be looking at that had created her expression. I thought of numerous ways I could do this, something that came to mind was when I'd seen a film that showed someone with Trapped in syndrome called 'Locked in'.    Below were just some quick sketches that I did looking out to a rainy day with someone with the umbrella. These these weren't any finalized ideas they were just the first things that came to my mind which I didn't think were very successful. My second idea, using photography was to take lots of portraits of random people's facial expressions. I find that black and white portrait photography shows more emotion in my opinion maybe it's the contrast between the highlights and the shadows in the creases of the face or the mood that the black and white tones have that can tell a story and add a more dramatic effect.  My th

Traces of Landscape Evaluation I'm really happy with how my ceramic pieces came about. In the beginning, it took me a long time to grasp a concept but once I was sure about what I wanted to do I was really excited to start exploring and experimenting with clay. When I had the inspiration from my motorbike trip across Europe, I originally was going to paint an abstract piece. This is where my artist research really helped me and set me on the path of ceramics. Moving forward, I need to not doubt myself and push myself to do things that might make me a bit uncomfortable, so I don't stay in the safe zone. Even though I'm happy with what I created I still feel like I may have played it a bit safe. Looking back, I should have held off with photographing my ceramic piece when I couldn't get the photographic studio I needed. I ended up having to use the 3D workshop to photograph my piece and this restricted me in ways that affected my final outcome. I need to try and not to be

  Final steps for my Ceramic Sculpture I made up my frame and sealed it with some silicone so it was prepped and ready for the ink to be poured into. I unfortunately wasn't able to use the photographic studio and I ended up using the 3D workshop space to photograph my piece. Because the ceiling in the 3D workshop was covered in stainless steel vents, it didn't look very nice in the reflection of the ink. As I photographed the sculpture from a bird's eye view, I had to try and cover the vents reflecting in the ink by using a large black cloak. This unfortunately meant I lost most of the wanted reflection against the ink and made it look like a deep black void instead. To make the ink appear more reflective, I brought down the contrast whilst editing the images which helped to make it look like a liquid again. The image above is my favourite photo out of all of them. I found that when I didn't take the photo from a bird's eye view, I was able to capture a better refle