conceptual reference.

Niki pilkington 

i really like the contrast between the grayscale detail pencil drawing and the coloured clothing. this is a effect i have been trying to capture in the development of my tone of voice using collage. however with this project i want to develop the concept behind the collage/coloured section of the piece, such as adding the colour by hand or digitally rather then using paper, this way i could personalise the information i use e.g. symbols/text/patterns relating to that person. 

                                                                      Angelica Paez

drawing detailed portray of marie and playing around adding the pattern.

adjusting levels to make the pencil marks more prominent. 

adding the pattern design in illustrator.

to do this i created a swatch colour and used it to paint the shape inside the dress. the problem with making the pattern a swatch the edges of the designs is included which meant that gaps appeared when painting with it. 

making the swatch pattern bigger to avoid the gaps. 

though it avoid the gaps, i feel it does not show the shape of the dress well due the large amount of white areas which makes the dress hard to work out. i also think the contrast between the pencil and the pattern is to obvious, the pattern looks to bold and just a random block. 

to try and make the dress shape more obvious i used the rubber tool to rub out parts of the dress like under the arm to show the shape of the arm. 

when selecting the pattern it turned this blue colour which i thought looked aethetically pleasing against the white background as it is a subtle contract/combination. 

-maybe i could look into more subtle, natural colours to use.

creating polish folk pattern envolving science symbols to create a stronger link and concept to marie curie

firstly i drew a recogniable polish pattern out by hand using photoreference

as i am still not 100% confident on illustrator after the previous studio brief, i have decided to attempt to use it again to create the polish pattern to hopefully improve my skills. i also know that illustrator is meant to be idea for creating shape illustrations. 

firstly i started off using the pen tool to creat the shapes as it it the only thing i know how to use 

subtly adding the radium element sign into a flower shape by using the circle tool. 

this was very time consuming, i wasn't particularly happy with the result as i think the flower looks too controlled with straight lines, i think they need to have fluid curvy lines it the pattern is going to take on all the characteristics of the original polish pattern 

i then discovered how to use the paint brush tool, which made it alot similar to paint curved shapes. 

experimenting with adding colour on photoshop

matt suggested we should attempt to play around with photoshop as we need to familiarise ourself with the progress as it is a very important and useful skill to have for editing or  creating work.
i have only really used photoshop for editing work, therefore for the colour task i have tried to create work from scratch, adding colour digitally to a drawing.

i used the paint brush tool for the skin, i found it quite difficult to build up tone as i started off with a low opacity and tried to add more to where was needed, however this made it hard to create a smooth texture. so then i experimented with just using darker and lighter colours at full opacity to see if this made any difference to the smoothness.

though i enjoyed doing something different, i think i will need to play around further because i use this software to produce fully digital pieces, for now i will stick to using photoshop to edit handmade work until i can use it better.

peer feedback.

discussion with matt about ideas.

 matt really liked the idea of adding things that relate to marie curie in her clothes, he especially liked the idea of adding the floral polish pattern into the dress (bottom right of sketch) we then talked about how i could combine more then one element that relates to Marie Curie in the same pattern by adding subtle science signs in the floral pattern to represent her career/achievements swell as her polish heritage. 

playing around with adding science symbols (radium element) into a floral polish pattern.

patterns that relate to Marie Curie

poilsh folk pattern 

polish/warsaw landmarks 

Maries lab notes

neoplasms under the microscope 

the pattern around Maries nobel prize 

radium 

radium element 

polonium element 

radiation symbol 

a few more potential ideas.

i wanted to try and develop a idea where i could concentrate on figurative work, as i feel this is my strength. developing on the collage clothing technique i have used in previous projects and 

taking inspiration from the notebook idea where i would add drawings of things that relate to marie carie,  i thought about adding these elements to her clothing as either a repeated pattern or a single pattern on a block silhouette of her clothing. 

 i also found out in my research when marie invented radioactive therapy, 'radioactive' products where very popular as they were believed to be good for the skin etc. in the thumbnail above i have draw out a few of these products as simple line drawings, i quite like the simple geometric layout of the products, and think this would be a nice design idea for either the post cards or the stamps. next to the radioactive products i have thumb nailed the same layout but using science equipment which will/may have been used by marie curie.

conceptual reference

found here
i like the layout of this piece, simple, yet interesting and detailed. if all the products where draw overlapping or closer together i don't think this piece would work aswell. 

above is another thumb of a idea which incorporates facts i have found out about radiotherapy. again using the idea of silhouettes of Curies clothing, and either blocking it off as a shape and filling in the shape with the written acts or using the written facts to create a sihoutte shape of the clothing.

more detailed thumb of notebook idea

initial thumb-nailing of ideas

 

Ra idea- potentially add illustrations inside the bubble writing of the 'Rs' of things that apply to Curie's life. so from far away it just looks like the radium symbol but close up it reveals the life of the person who discovered the element. 

radiation symbol idea- using the same concept as the last idea but this time adding the illustrations inside the shape of the radiation symbol. 

note book idea- from the research images i had looked at, i found images of Curie's notebooks which are said to be still highly dangerous and radioactive now. this made me think of using pages of her notes as background infomation which illustrates her occupation and achievements and then drawing other elements that represent her life on top of the pages such as a daffodil, polish landscapes, a portrait of her etc. 

pinterest link of my Marie Curie Achieve

http://gb.pinterest.com/rw251362/marie-curie/

radiotherapy facts

In 2004, nearly one million patients were treated with radiation therapy

Three cancers – breast cancer, prostate cancer and lung cancer – make up more than half (56 percent) of all patients receiving radiation therapy.

Nearly two-thirds of all cancer patients will receive radiation therapy during their illness.

Around 40 per cent of patients whose cancer is cured receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment, and the technique benefits millions of people worldwide

The average radiation oncologist sees between 200 and 300 patients annually.

experimenting with photoshop

i want to try and incorporate the fact that Marie Curie is said to have been a shy woman, so i decided to  play around on photoshop to experiment the ways i could perhaps portray this.

i played around with dropping the opacity on the image of her and added a polish pattern layer on top which i gave a overlay filter to, this meant that you are still able to see the image (portrait) behind the pattern. i thought this would be a way of illustration her modest personality and how she likes to hide behind her work or does not draw attention to herself. 

this is a really quick experiment and if i decide to take this idea further on photoshop or by hand i will need to figure out how to make this idea more subtle. 

inspiration from Alica Watkin

alica watkin


i found this artist whilst scrolling through colossal art web page.
i was initially draw to the pieces because of its subject matter, bacteria/molecules/ microscope.
i liked the simplicity to it and thought i could apply it to my project, especially when thinking about the illustrations/designs of the stamps, i could potentially use the microscopic view of radium, polonium (2 elements she discovered) or the symbols of them to create a simple images. though i would not be showing Marie curie in the image/illustrations , i am still illustrating things which are linked to her life and her achievements.

idea

ideas:
created repeated patterns of equiptment, mircroscope cells etc, polish landmarks, paris landmarks, polish patterns, radioactive products. - by adding illustrated subtle patterns that relate to Marie Curie will show i have a strong conceptual understanding of my person of note and their life.

using adobe cooler to pick out colours from the images of these things so i can create a stronger link.

Colour, value and Notan lecture

things relating to Marie curie

dafodils: unified battle agains cancer

The daffodil is one of the first plants to flower in spring, which marks the return of flowing plants to the eco-system after winter hibernation. Because of this the charity uses the daffodil as a metaphor for bringing life to other people through charitable giving.

bottles, jars

symbols-atoms, molecules 
radiation (radium, polonium, radiotherapy)
neoplasms (cancer)
love story
governess
feminist
nobel prize
polish

Victorian wear 
world war 1
paris 
polish folk patter 
family 

tuberculosis (mother died)

depression

shy (personility) 

discussion with matt about choosing person to note

after showing mat the research i have so far and talking to him about each person i have decided to choose marie curie as my person of note. though i was swaying towards jk rowling, after talking to mat i realise marie curie has more potential as i knew little about before hand, whereas jk rowling is more well known in the current day so i may find it hard to create work on her which has not been seen before and is not obvious (i.e. harry potter based) though i was intrigued about her life before harry potter such as her depression, past relationships and money problems, i think marie curie has a lot more pathways i could go down which people may not know about-eg her input in the first world war.

jk rowling

J.K. Rowling’s parents, Peter James Rowling and Anne Volant, met on a train that was travelling from King's Cross, London to Scotland. They were just 18.

the first idea of harry potter came to her on a train from london to 

When J.K. Rowling was nine years old, the family moved to Tutshill, near Chepstow on the Welsh border. The girls went to Wyedean Comprehensive School and College where they both loved their schooldays. Much like Hermione Granger, J.K. Rowling had a thirst for knowledge. She says, 

jk rowling

n 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind.

I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six

I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, and the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head. I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one… I did not have a functioning pen with me, but I do think that this was probably a good thing. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. Perhaps, if I had slowed down the ideas to capture them on paper, I might have stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen). I began to write 'Philosopher's Stone' that very evening, although those first few pages bear no resemblance to anything in the finished book.

I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter."^[21] Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing^[21] and that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.^[47]

marriedtelevision journalist Jorge Arantesin 1992, sperated in 1993

 Biographers have suggested that Rowling suffered domestic abuse during her marriage, although the full extent is unknown.
n December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling's sister in Edinburgh, Scotland,^[25] with three chapters of Harry Potter in her suitcase.^[24]

Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew".^[50] Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
 – J. K. Rowling, "The fringe benefits of failure", 2008.^[50]

During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide.^[51] It was the feeling of her illness which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.^[52] Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless"

The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury's chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.

‘You don’t expect the kind of  problems that [fame] brings with it,’ she says. ‘I felt that I had to solve everyone’s problems. I was hit by this tsunami of demands. I felt overwhelmed. And I was really worried that I would mess up.
‘Everything changed so rapidly, so strangely. I knew no one who’d ever been in the public eye. I didn’t know anyone – anyone – to whom I could turn and say, “What do you do?” So it was incredibly disorientating.
’

She had an unhappy early life, with a difficult relationship with her father and a mother who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was 15 and who later died when Miss Rowling was just 25.

She said these circumstances made it all the more difficult adjusting to the sudden public attention

Marie Curie

Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.

She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.

born in warsaw-part of the russian empire

On both the paternal and maternal sides, the family had lost their property and fortunes through patriotic involvements in Polish national uprisings aimed at restoring Poland's independence

dad taught mathematics and physics- Russian authorities eliminated laboratory instruction from the Polish schools, he brought much of the laboratory equipment home, and instructed his children in its use.^[8]

The father was eventually fired by his Russian supervisors for pro-Polish sentiments, and forced to take lower-paying posts; the family also lost money on a bad investment, and eventually chose to supplement their income by lodging boys in the house.^[8] Maria's mother Bronisława operated a prestigious Warsaw boarding school for girls; she resigned from the position after Maria was born.^[8] She died of tuberculosis in May 1878, when Maria was ten years old.^[8] Less than three years earlier, Maria's oldest sibling, Zofia, had died of typhus contracted from a boarder.^[8] Maria's father was an atheist; her mother—a devout Catholic.^[12] The deaths of Maria's mother and sister caused her to give up Catholicism and become agnostic.^[13]

Unable to enroll in a regular institution of higher education because she was a woman, she and her sister Bronisława became involved with the clandestine Flying University, a Polish patriotic institution of higher learning that admitted women students.^[7][8]

A governess is a girl or woman employed to teach and train children in a private household.
While working for the latter family, she fell in love with their son, Kazimierz Żorawski, a future eminent mathematician.His parents rejected the idea of his marrying the penniless relative, and Kazimierz was unable to oppose them.^[14] Maria's loss of the relationship with Żorawski was tragic for both.

Still, as an old man and a mathematics professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic, he would sit contemplatively before the statue of Maria Skłodowska which had been erected in 1935 before the Radium Institutethat she had founded in 1932.^[9][15]

 educate herself, reading books, exchanging letters, and being tutored herself.

She was still laboring under the illusion that she would be able to work in her chosen field in Poland, but she was denied a place at Kraków University because she was a woman.^[

On 26 July 1895 they married in a civil union in Sceaux (Seine);^[21] neither wanted a religious service.^[7][19] Marie's dark blue outfit, worn instead of a bridal grown, would serve her for many years as a laboratory outfit.

Her achievements included a theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined^[2]), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium.

Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes.
neoplasms-an abnormal mass of tissue as a result of abnormal growth or division of cells. cancer is a form of malignant neoplasms. 

Curie died in 1934 at the sanatorium of Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), France, due to aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation – mainly, it seems, during her World War I service in mobile X-ray units created by her.^[6]

though a french citezen, she never lost her polish routes.

world war 1 

she realised X-rays could save soldiers' lives, she realized, by helping doctors see bullets, shrapnel, and broken bones. She convinced the government to empower her to set up France's first military radiology centers. Newly named Director of the Red Cross Radiology Service, she wheedled money and cars out of wealthy acquaintances. She convinced automobile body shops to transform the cars into vans, and begged manufacturers to do their part for their country by donating equipment. By late October 1914, the first of 20 radiology vehicles she would equip was ready. French enlisted men would soon dub these mobile radiology installations, which transported X-ray apparatus to the wounded at the battle front, petites Curies (little Curies). president of France said, “As the country bows before her ashes...I form the wish, in the name of France, that everywhere in the world the equality of the rights of women and men might progress.” https://www.aip.org/history/curie/radinst3.htm

harper lee

American novelist

 she observed racism as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

to kill a mocking bird- only published book- though it led to her being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature.

presidential medal of freedom -recognizes those individuals who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors"

Her mother was a homemaker; her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, practiced law and served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. Before A.C. Lee became a title lawyer, he once defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Both clients, a father and son, were hanged.^[3]


Having written several long stories, Harper Lee found an agent in November 1956. The following month at the Michael Browns' East 50th townhouse, she received a gift of a year's wages from them with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."^[5]


"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

truman capote :Capote based the character of Idabel in Other Voices, Other Rooms on his Monroeville neighbor and best friend, Harper Lee, and was in turn the inspiration for the character Dill Harris in Lee's 1960 bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Capote once acknowledged this: "Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Harper Lee's mother and father, lived very near. She was my best friend. Did you ever read her book, To Kill a Mockingbird? I'm a character in that book, which takes place in the same small town in Alabama where we lived. Her father was a lawyer, and she and I used to go to trials all the time as children. We went to the trials instead of going to the movies."^[13] Later, Lee was his crucial research partner for In Cold Blood.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality.
Lee based the character on her own father, Amasa Coleman Lee, an Alabama lawyer who, like Atticus Finch, represented black defendants in a highly publicized criminal trial  "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."