The motion itself...

The swing motion itself when drawn hand to paper with your eyes closed is like a wave except tighter not loose. Bought the book Slash: Paper under the knife http://www.amazon.com/Slash-Paper-David-Revere-McFadden/dp/8874395299 So have been looking a lot into paper art and cutting etc. Paul Hayes http://theunobserved.com/art/paul_hayes/ is a paper artist and his work reminds me of the swing movement and motion. It looks almost like a school of fish but the outer curve of black paper shows the whole movement, that's what reminds me of the swing moving.

Repetition...

After standing taking photos and videos for ages I realised that the swing movement is so repetitive yet mesmerising. Instead of repeating the same few images in sequence to show the movement, I sketched the entire sequence, took a photo of it and used paint to cut, paste and rotate the image to link it together in a "chain" so to say..... the image keeps repeating itself from one end of the swinging frame to the other. I think it's quite effective as the eye tends to draw towards the zig zag shape of the swinging frame..... which again makes a back and forth motion!!!! I'm quite pleased with this... might bring this repetition into some more work as I progress.

Just a quick paint shop edit I did to my photo of a sketch ...

Swing in the Park...

I got my friend Eva to sit on a swing for me in the park across from the college, I took a bazillion photos but realised the movement was to fast to get each stage, I ended up mixing and matching them to create a smooth - ISH swing movement. THEN I decided to take a video and take stills from it.... made much more sense. This is a short clip....

I traced these stages of the swing onto acetate. My reason being for using acetate was that it was see through and when drawn on with a black marker and held against a light source it creates a projection..... the size is up to you! It's also flexible so I could roll the image up and shine light above it to project disorientated images. I traced these shadows directly into my sketchbook..... I adjust each one so the eye can recognise a body part or the swing frame. 

I think this line drawing captures mostly the legs and really shows how much movement is going on when all the stages are merged together!

Building Cheese!

I did a few sketches of buildings with spherical chunks missing from them as though a wrecking ball had hit it all over. Turns out when I outlined my sketches in black they looked a bit like od shaped cheese blocks...... not really the plan but I think they look kinda quirky.

I made little paper buildings, burnt wholes in them and cut polystyrene blocks and carved wholes into them. I was going to continue with this idea of demolishing buildings and the left over results, But after a meeting with one of my tutors she thought I was limiting myself too much, that the swing was more interesting and varied. I have to admit once I discovered this quirky cheese block idea all I could think about was clay and ceramics and what kind of plates and "finished" pieces I could make!

Must admit finding it pretty tough to not think of a final piece when staring on an idea.... not used to forcing myself to experiment this much :/

What else swings back and forth?

The motion of swing is basically back and forth and other than an actual swing I thought of other objects like a pendulum of a clock and a wrecking ball popped into my head...

This is a video of a wrecking ball in action.... what i didn't know before hand was that not only is the ball used in a swinging motion to demolish things but you can see in the video that it is raised into the sky and then dropped almost like a hammer action, like beating a nail in!

Ink & Layering

I tried to use a different medium to portray the quick movement of the trapeze artist. Ink seemed to be quick and not so perfect as a pencil of one shade. I applied it with a twig I found in the park so the lines would all be different.

In my previous post I layered a few different positions of the trapeze artist on top of each other. I tried this in different colours on Ink. I took pictures of the swing in the park untwisting and sketched four pictures in different positions over each other in different colours.

Below are just one or two sketches I did with Ink out and about.

Trapeze Swing

After trailing through a load of videos on the internet I eventually found this great quality one, Caroline Wright is the Trapeze Artist.

I printed some really good stills from this video and sketched them. Below are some of my sketches...

Mind Maps

When I started the mind maps I found myself more drawn towards the mechanical and man made objects that suggest movement and motion. In particular the swinging movement of a playground swing, pendulum and demolition ball.

Section of Mechanical/Man Made Mind Map