Shakespeare's Animals - At the Guildhall, Portsmouth 2016

Josie Keable - Walrus

For my Shakespearean animal, I focused on walruses. This was mainly because they're quite an odd animal, and you don't really see or hear much about them so I figured it'd be interesting to find out more. I found out they had quite a high spiritual profile for the people of the Arctic and mainly focused on this aspect within my work, as there wasn't much related to Shakespeare other than a description of what they looked like. I eventually started looking at Act 4 Scene 1 of Macbeth and started playing round with the idea of the witches wearing walrus themed masks. From these masks I started making colourful animated gifs to bring back the idea of spirituality and Shamanic rituals. Eventually I delved into the idea of these animated walrus masks being like a sort of alternative 'God' for people in a post apocalyptic world and made another, much longer, animated gif from this.

An initial drawing, exploring spirituality

The first gif I made, only changing the eyes

Another gif.

Final outcome.

The two figures are part of this 'walrus' religion and bow down to the masks

(This doesn't continually loop)

Georgie Underwood- Dragon

I decided to focus on the dragon as my Shakespeare animal, as I am interested in fantasy as a genre. Dragons have always intrigued me, due to their importance in some modern cultures, as  well as in classic mythology and legends. With this in mind, I researched what 'dragon' meant, as a word and as a creature; the main focus though, was how the animal is portrayed in Shakespeare. The Shakespeare quotes that I chose to explore, were "sparkling eyes"(King Henry VI, Act 1, Scene 1) and "come not between a dragon and his wrath"(King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1). To portray this, I looked at why a dragon would be wrathful; researching this idea, I found that the main reason for a dragons anger, would be when gold is stolen from its treasure hoard.  I decided to experiment further, thinking of ways of how to illustrate the idea of a dragons eyes being "sparkling" whilst also showing a picture of destruction and anger. The result of this, was an image of a village burning as the dragon watches- implying that the dragon was seeking revenge on whoever stole his gold.

Experiment with scraper foil

Adapting the final outcome on Photoshop, by removing some of the clarity and changing the colour.

Final outcome
The dragon watches over the destruction it has caused.
This piece shows the result of the dragons wrath- a village being burnt to the ground.

Second Final outcome
I decided to create a secondary outcome, that works almost as a 'prequel' to my final outcome.
This piece shows the human in the midst of the dragon's hoard, waking the beast after having stolen gold.

Shakespeare's Animals Exhibition

We are very excited to have now installed a new group exhibition piece for Shakespeare's Animals, part of the upcoming Much Ado about Portsmouth Festival (maap.port.ac.uk) marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.

The work is a large scale group student piece and depicts some of the (over 4000!) animals which Shakespeare alluded to in his writings and will be gracing one wall of the Portsmouth Guildhall's Freda Swain room from now until 7th June 2016. During that time, Portsmouth Cultural Trust tells us, thousands of visitors will be able to see and read about the work and the students, and we hope, through coming to this blog, be able to give us feedback too. We think the diversity and talent of our first year students is well represented in this group show, as well as the explorative and questioning approach to illustration which is central to the BA (Hons) Illustration course here at Portsmouth.

We will also have the chance to celebrate with an opening event on Friday April 22nd at 6pm - 7.45 in the Guildhall, Freda Swain room. Please let us know if you'd like to come along!

My Dog Sighs

Lost and Found workshop

Many thanks to My Dog Sighs, who joined us today for a workshop and tasked the first years with finding a discarded item which they could up cycle into a characterful animal.

They returned with a wide array of found items to transform into original artworks and then return to the original location, photograph and leave behind, to be found and possibly kept by a passer by. Inspired by artworks shown by My Dog Sighs the students were introduced to the concept behind Free Art Friday, a global community of artists creating work which is returned and left for any member of the public to take home and enjoy.

The weeks so far spent studying the characteristics of the animals is becoming more apparent in the pieces the students produced.

Drawing in the air

Researching into animals according to Shakespeare is yielding some fascinating results; you should never come between a dragon and its wrath, rats would desert the vessel described in The Tempest and the goat is coming across very cheekily. The next stage for the students is to vigorously research and develop ideas to convey some of these results, how can wrath, desertion and cheekiness be conveyed with a drawing, a sculpture, an animation or a photograph?

This workshop involved 'drawing' with wire of varying thicknesses (and it is easier said than done) to encourage the students to explore spacial and gestural properties they could employ in their explorations with conveying their animal and the specific focus they are working towards

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SHAKESPEARE'S Animals - the first workshop

Welcome back all our first years after what was hopefully a lovely (and well earned) Christmas break. Today we started the new project 'Shakespeare's Animals' (The Illustrated Menagerie's focus this year) with a warm up workshop involving charades, a Mexican wave, some 'exquisite corpses' and label line work.