Forever Manchester (FM)

Hello my beloved readers, it's a new year and a new term. Naturally I've forgotten to update my blog. I've been doing an assignment for Forever Manchester where I have to create 3 A2 murals based around Manchester and Community. (Update: Bee's are banned)

Initial Ideas & Research

Naturally my first thought was to do some mind maps of initial thoughts as well as researching topics.

Initial thoughts:

community - helping one another, close knit, funding, homelessness, family, friends

forever - always there to help, consistency

material exploration - brick, wood, posters, 3D

Whats a mural?

public, message, advert, political, social painting, commission, art, big pieces, expression, graffiti, common since the 19th century

Who is Forever Manchester?

young, old and disabled people, established 1989, cancer support, charity, fun days, activities, funding, manchester based, their logo is a love heart wing thing, they fund over 1000 projects each year

I also did a timeline of the history of Forever Manchester

Greater Manchester

students, metropolis, trams, drugs, homeless, crime, night clubs, working class, canal, hope, community, industrial, inspiration, culture, gay pride, football, curry mile, down to earth

Initial mural ideas

timeline of manchester, buildings, music, this is the place poem typography, forever manchester logo, bee wings, spray paint, original mosaic bee, "#happydays" phrase, big doodle piece

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Bordalo II & Leonard Hilton McGurr

My tutor gave everyone 2 random names each of graffiti artists for us to research. I was given Bordalo II and Leonard Hilton McGurr.

Bordalo II

Bordalo was born in Libson in 1987, while researching this artist I instantly fell in love with the big trash animals he does where he'll go to a rundown area and collect trash, sculpt it into a big animal piece and spray paint over it in beautiful vibrant colours. When I first saw them I didn't realise it was 3D at first, as soon as I looked closely and noticed it I was blown away.

He also did a lot of simplistic activist graffiti, I assume it is stencil work. As I said it is very simplistic but it has a lot of depth to it, one of my favourites is the sheep silhouette on the green traffic light. I also love the CCTV camera one where it's sight is whited out and sterile while the outside is fun! It really has a 1984 big brother vibe. Another reason I like it is because it really reminds me of Pink Floyd as well.

I would love to recreate his work for my mural. I don't know how I could do his political stuff and make it positive for Manchester but I could use the simple style. I really want to recreate his trash animal work though, I love it.

Leonard Hilton McGurr

More commonly known as Futura 2000, Leonard was really big when the graffiti scene started kicking off in the 70-80's (I think that was the time). The style he uses is more of the traditional graffiti style that in my opinion mostly looks garbage. Don't get me wrong, some of it looks really good but simply writing your name on a wall is stupid, at least throw some art into the mix! I couldn't really find that much on his work so I decided to draw a NYC subway train from the 80's as they were covered in graffiti back in the day.

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Art In Didsbury!

One afternoon at college we was challenged to go around Didsbury and find some street art. I had no idea how many murals were right on our doorstep at college, they're incredible!

We started by going to Princess Road and we found the murals for Alan Turing and Rolls Royce there, the amount of detail featured in the Rolls Royce was amazing. We then travelled down to Burton road and then finally Lapwing Lane, both feature murals that are hidden in a side street and only really uncover them selves when you're right upon them.

I found a wooden sculpture of a bird that I really liked just outside the mural on Lapwing Lane and it had a pit of slate under it. Naturally I loved the texture and had to steal one or two. I love how there is so many layers to the slate, kind of reminds me of pastry. When I got back to college, the first thing I wanted to do was play with the slate. I put it in the photocopier and messed around with the colours and size of the copy and it ended up looking like different minerals in the end.

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Manchester Poem

When I was on the bus to college I came across the HSBC Brexit poster "WE ARE NOT AN ISLAND" I didn't really care about the message but I loved the way the poster was laid out. I instantly wanted to replicate this with what I was going to do with Forever Manchester. I did a bit of research into famous Manchester phrases, icons, quotes and landmarks then went onto creating a quick example of what I wanted to do. Then inspired by the creative writing we did during the last project I wanted to write my own poem. What is Manchester to you?

I'm not sure whether I want to pursue this as a mural but if I do I will rewrite poem and then make it digitally.

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Protesting!

So my tutor decided it would be a good idea to get us feeling angry and have us do a protest around the college, while everyone was in class and not in the halls.. Never the less I decided to do mine about sauce, ATM charges and Donald Trump, quite the spectrum there. More specifically we have to pay 10p for a sachet of sauce even though we're students and have no money, the ATM has started charging us 95p to withdraw money and that's outrageous and I came up with the slogan "Don't fear the Tweeter" f course being a play on don't fear the reaper, so sorry Donald.

We got signs out and painted them and like I said we went around and on the streets protesting! It was a really fun lesson to be fair, it made me want to put on a yellow vest and protest outside the parliament.

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Stencil Making

My tutor gave us loads of different themes to choose from and I picked "Inspire". The first thought that came to my head was a light bulb, I then wet onto drawing it and cutting it out with a knife. I wanted my stencil to have a rough and broken look to it though. After cutting the stencil completely out I decided to put tape over the entire thing and then cut it out again, but really roughly this time.

I had created a positive stencil, I then went onto using different materials such as crayons, paints and pens to get a good blend of colours and textures. Next I tried to do some string art painting thingy where basically you soak some string in paint, sculpture it on your page then shut the sketchbook completely and pull the string out of the bottom. I tried to put the string in the shape of a light bulb, but it didn't really turn out as I think the paint was to thick (it ended up looking like a bone!) I tried it again with some blue paint on top, this time thinner and it worked slightly better.

I then went back to the trusty photocopier and scanned in my stencil and played with the colours and size again. They came out really well and actually looked a lot like the scrappy broken light bulb look I wanted.

The next day we continued this and I then did a negative of the stencil, I basically use my original stencil and used a sharpie to trace it onto some plastic and then cut out the reverse version of the last one. I decided to primarily use paint to stamp the negative version all over the page's I've been working on with stencils.

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To finish I have done more research into Manchester, but this time I look a visual approach and found pictures and what they mean to me (when I think of Manchester)