21st September 2023

Today was a bit of a trial with regards to how much we needed to get done and how the ideas were or were not being liked/received well by each member of the team. My fellow second year student in my team, wasn’t in Uni. The two first year students, one had almost switched off because she didn’t think her ideas were any good. The other had ideas but honestly didn’t fit with the original brief we have been given and will be difficult to achieve in the four days, or should I say three days we have left. My idea to use the sculpture outside the second year art studio, is a non starter because according to the two first year students “It’s been done to death”.

However, looking at the photographs of elements of the structure started us talking and discussing ideas. The one above made us all think of tracks, lines, paths etc. Somehow we all agreed train tracks coming out the sea would look good! Although we have a railway line going under the top road near the college buildings, it would be difficult to actually go and take photos of the railway tracks for the angle we wanted. That’s when I remembered, having a family of steam train enthusiasts, that I had an image of the Flying Scotsman passing through Weston Super Mare from a few years earlier.

Finally, we have something we all agree on and are happy working with and it still has a local connection even though it isn’t entirely true to the brief. If it was an external customer, this will be a hard concept to ask them to accept, especially if they are set on the criteria parameters for the project.

All systems go to catch up on some lost time, we converted the image to black and white, printed out copies, decided on which elements of the image we didn’t want to keep and then used blank pages in a sketchbook to check out the composition. We all agreed it looked flat so a simple fold along where the train meets the track, just made it look more three dimensional and the train popped out at us.

Next step enlarge, print out and stick on the card. The idea is to go BIG!! However, due to the quality of the image, which we have no control over, we can only enlarge it so much before it looks very pixelated.

We have left it to dry overnight, with just a few finishing cuts to do in the morning. Although it has been a bit of testing day, we have managed to come together as a team.