Samantha Groom print making artist

Samantha groom is a Sheffield based printmaker specialising in wood and lino-cut printing onto paper, cardboard and fabric although she does enjoy all forms of printmaking. she likes to perform work with out technical equipment if she can get away with out using it. she recently became a full-time printmaker after over twelve years teaching art and textiles in secondary school. she works from her home studio, using her ‘Rollaco’ press.

she has always taken her ideas from the everyday things around and these days she finds her inspiration in the fun she has with her six year old; from the songs and books they share. from her blog I have found that she likes to create simple, brightly coloured and playful prints that also remind her of imagery from her childhood in the 1970’s.

here is some of her prints :

Jonathon Borofsky

Borofsky was born in Boston,Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in 1964, after which he continued his studies at France's Ecole de Fontainebleau and received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale Universityin 1966. Borofsky specialises in sculptures, his most famous pieces are the hammer men which slot together to create a tower. Each structural piece is near 30 feet tall and have been constructed all over the world with the largest structure bieng in Korea and the second largest in Germany.  His work is in many parts of the US and one piece was placed over a drug store in the US looking like a clown.

Cardboard city town centre trip

This week we had a walk with the whole group where we would go round taking photos of the town buildings and the skyline, as well as visiting the matisse exhibition at the civic. Then we came back and were told that we would be in pairs and would have to make a scene with the boxes by cutting them and painting them to create a one of a kind city box. This would then be our chamber where our wire figures would then hang and create shadows on our city scene.

Zoatrope workshop

For this workshop we had to make a sort of film strip of anything we wanted. To make it we had to fold the paper into 12 squares and then draw 6 different images of a sequence. Then we would draw the 6 images in the backwards order on the other 6 squares. Then once we drew them with pencil we would go over them in fine liner to make the images stand out, then we used colour to finish them off. 

The Zoatrope was created by ding haun in 100 bc and was later improved by a British mathematician called William George hornor in 1843 where he created the drum like structure. 

Card board city

In this session on our cardboard city project we were introduced to a photographer called James Brunt who introduced us to his way of art. The aim of the session was to build a cardboad city but we decided to create a castle/turret where we added guns and a cannon. After this we were told we had to build a pyramid but had to work together as a class, this showed us who were the leaders and who was confident.after this we had to build a sort of chamber where we would put our wire figures we made in the last session, then we turned off the lights and turned on the lamp in the middle of the chamber where it showed us shadows.

New project

This week we have started a new project where we have done things a little differently, in our first lesson we started off by doing an activity in a sort of drama form where we would do different actions when an instruction was shouted, then we looked at some art, and looked at pieces which were done by matice where we then moved onto shadow outlines as matice used to instruct his models to lay on the canvas and draw round them which is then what we did, aterwards we then made wire models which we made from the outlines we drew and added in some organs like the brain, heart n lungs. After this we then moved onto stop motion where we drew parts of barnsley on the windows of barnsley college, taking photos of the sketches every five minutes, after this we then did a flash mob where all the class had to perform a scene which was then recorded and played back to us. 

Some of what we did was out of my comfort zone but i did enjoy some thing a little different and outside of the box.

Animal project evaluation

When i first found that we would be looking at peter clark and collage work i found this as kind of a disappointment as i am open to trying anything with in the world of art but collage is one of my weak points so i found this project a little challenging. My research sheet on peter clark didn't turn out as well as i had hoped as the collage was not neet or full. For this project we had to choose 3 animals to explore, the 3 i explored were the bear because i keep my guard up but i am strong, the wolf because i am independent and the dolphin because i am caring. Over all i chose to be the wolf because i thought it would be an animal that i could experiment with as it has been caught on camera in different positions for example, when it is standing in the forest or when it is layed in the grass waiting to pounce. In the end we had to create a model of our chosen animal and I chose to create a 3D piece as i thought it would be the only way to capture the wolfs stance and give the animal a good look as well as going the extra mile so to speak to make my work worth a better mark. I used the slot method where you slot each piece together after i researched the work of others, i would say my work is ok but then again modeling is another one of my weak points with in art but over all i would rate my method of modeling as 6/10 because it could have been better with the way it was constructed and cut. In a way i would say that i have improved my modeling skills in the sense that i have experimented and gained more knowledge and know how in modeling. I think my time management through this project could have been a little better but i have managed to hand in all work on time through out the project. I do feel i could have produced a better standard with my final piece but apart from that and my artist research i would say my work is to a good standard as the work has filled the pages and helped to inspire my final piece. Over all i did like the project to a certain extent as it has helped me learn new skills and open my mind to new things in the modeling art category but there is still the feeling of that i would not like to revisit collage in this sense but yes overall i enjoyed the project and learnt new skills.