Grading Art

Is there actually any point in grading art?

art /ɑrt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[ahrt] –noun

1.	the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

I have a feeling my art foundation is going to show through on this one and I may end up using stupid flowery terms, so be prepared.
Art is as hard to nail down as creativity, but I would say essentially that art is about provoking a reaction in people. A lot of people get angry that things like this:are considered art, but by getting angry at it they're proving the work a success, even if it wasn't in quite the way it wanted to be.

On my art foundation, art was primarily about raw power, and not really about technical skill at all. There is a technical right and a wrong to art, but I guess they thought if you were that bothered about it, you could go figure it out yourself.
I was frustrated at the time because I'm someone that does value technical skill, and had been training it up throughout GCSE and A level, I suppose because the system had told me to. Technical skill is very easily gradeable, which is probably why it's pushed so much. You can dock marks for perspective or lighting being wrong, or give marks for good use of media.

Art Foundation was a shock because suddenly the goalposts had been moved. Who cares that you can paint a lemon in perfect photorealistic detail? Someone has vacuum formed a mould of it, shoved the lemon in a blender with half a newspaper and some dirt, shoved it all back into a lemon shape and explored something completely different to what you have. And at the end of the day, it's just as right as what you've done.

My Art Foundation seemed to be graded simply by whether you had the 'it' factor or not. Some people produced bugger all but got fantastic grades, and some people slaved away and had little to show for it. The frustrating thing was, you could see when people did have the 'it' factor, and when pieces of art had it too. The hard bit was getting it yourself, and I still have no idea how people managed it. Picking something to explore and chipping away at it constantly until it produced something interesting seemed to be one way of doing it, but some people seemed able to just pull it out of a hat.

Yes, my Art Foundation was frustrating, but it also taught me a lot about life and the art world. Nobody cares how long you spent on something or how you got there, it's simply about whether it's good and whether it has impact.

So that being said, why would anyone care what mark you got for your art degree? If you're going into the commercial art world, people are going to look at your portfolio and judge for themselves whether or not you have the 'it' factor they are looking for. If they decide not to hire you, you whingeing that you got a first won't change their minds.
Conversely, if you have completed your art degree but aren't going into the art world, no one is going to care about your portfolio, they'll only care about your grade. Your abstract representation of the war in Iraq using toothpaste and a piece of old tyre will probably not aid you in your interview for the position of regional manager at Generic Offices.

So in an ideal world, people would just be given whatever degree mark they felt like having at the end of it. Everyone could be given a first, and the commercial arts could simply not even look at the piece of paper with a grade on it, and go purely on portfolio like they do anyway.
And if people didn't feel like going into the games industry, or the art world in general, they could sashay off into a nice job with their shiny first. Everybody wins.

Yes I can see the millions of flaws in this plan, but if we just did it and didn't tell anyone, i'm sure it'd be fine.

Poor Blog

Poor blog, I feel I have been neglecting you in the excitement of the group project beginning.

Luckily I have something I want to talk about.
As I'm sure everybody knows, being an artist is hard sometimes. We've all had the 'Emo days' where you can't bear to look at your own work because you're convinced everyone in the world is better than you. It doesn't help when you're living with people who are on the same course as you either, as you have a direct comparison.
But you also have the days where you are so full of yourself you almost can't believe it. You've just finished something, it's awesome, everybody loves it, you're an art GOD.
But most of the time you have to live somewhere in the middle, caught between putting yourself down and bigging yourself up. You have to have some sort of ego going on, otherwise you'd never produce anything, but you also have to be self critical so you don't get complacent.

I can't seem to find a middle ground very easily. It's so easy to yo-yo between the two extremes and I doubt it's particularly healthy. My up days are pretty rare anyway. Pretty much as soon as I finish a project I worry I won't be able to do anything that interesting ever again. I have no idea where my creativity comes from and my method seems to simply be to work like blazes, which surely anyone could do?

But I seem to need to stress to drive myself onwards, and I am constantly striving to do better. We'll see how this translates into the group project work.

Some attempt at wrapping things up

So what have I learned about creativity? While perhaps not directly related to the blog tasks, I've learned that creativity requires hard work. Both Jolyon Webb and Ben Mathis demonstrated their knowledge of pretty much everything, with special focus on anatomy and traditional drawing techniques. While being good at the area you're being creative in isn't strictly a requirement, having a broad base knowledge can make combinational creativity easier, and is essential for explorational creativity.

At least at the end of all this, I have found a definition of creativity that I agree with.
'Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising and valuable'
Although most of these words need to be further defined, it at least does make immediate sense. It can also be further broken down into types of creativity: combinational, explorational and transformational as explained in my post about the lectures.

I've had a scan back and it seems that a lot of my blog posts end up looking at the idea of process behind creativity. Whether a process is creative or not, (eg cooking) what steps you can add to a process to enhance creativity (like limitations) or even where creativity occurs in a process as mentioned in the lectures.

I do feel like I understand my own creativity a little better. Everything is a process, beginning with a brief with contrainsts.
I don't think creativity is easy, it's something you have to work at. When I do a project for drawing, I don't go with my first idea. For the one day projects and the speed paints I've had to, and I think some of them have been pretty good, but I think they lack the depth of my formal projects. With both the mechanical and the organic projects I had an idea about mid way through which I could have gone with as my final concept. But in both cases either I decided it wasn't good enough, or was frankly told by Chris that it wasn't good enough, so I returned to the drawing board.

I often think about the process of coming up with a character or making your way towards a final outcome. So many ideas are rejected along the way, and a lot of them aren't actually bad, it's just that I decide to go with a different one. How many outcomes would I end up with if I actually went back over a project and followed every variation through?

I think my creativity works because I constantly churn out work. Even if most of it is useless, by the law of averages I'm still likely to find something worth using. Looking back on things, all I seem to do is go one way, find something I like, then go another way, find something else I like, and simply splice the two things together. Unfortunately this process can be a little frustrating while in the midst of it, because it feels like I'm wandering aimlessly until I find the elements I want to staple together.

For once in my life I have actually produced something purely in photoshop that I'm happy with. I think having a tablet has made a lot of difference.
And as an added bonus, here's an animated gif of me painting it, although you'll have to click on it to get it display.

Pop Art Portraits

I'd known about the Pop Art Portraits exhibition since the end of Summer, and was gutted that I'd have to go away to university again just before it opened. As such, I made getting into town and seeing it one of my priorities of the Christmas holidays.
Pop Art has always interested me. It combines bold and exploratory styles with a probing insight into popular culture.
The exhibition was very good, although I felt some of the subject divisions were a lot stronger than others. The Marilyn section was very thought provoking, with many pieces exploring the price of fame, and the person behind the image. By contrast, the Experience and Innocence sections seemed slightly contrived. How can you define a point in history at which the public suddenly loses hope and becomes jaded, never mind having artists reflecting that? Why is Elvis being portrayed with a gun instead of a guitar an example of Innocence rather than Experience? Surely the manipulation of image and celebrities' experiences with this would suggest the latter.

The opportunity to see some celebrated pop art images such as the Warhol Marilyn prints and "What is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton is always a welcome one. When you see artists' work in the flesh it is always such a different experience to seeing them in art books. Something is always inevitably lost in the translation from real world to print, even if the piece was print to begin with. Standing in front of Lichtenstein's "In the Car" is an experience beyond the image itself. You are slightly dwarfed by the scale of the piece. The car's inhabitants tower impassively over you. And yet, you feel like you are getting let in on a secret. Up close, the brush strokes can be seen, the bleeding of the Ben Day dots, an area where the edge did not mask properly.I should really get myself to some more exhibitions, I forget how much I enjoy them.

Creativity Conference

On Thursday morning I went to the Creativity and Innovation conference at the City Rooms. It was pretty interesting, and I definitely learnt some useful stuff, both about defining creativity and about where it occurs in our work.
The first speaker was Margaret Boden, attempting to answer the question 'What is creativity?'. She gave the definition of creativity as "Ideas that are new, surprising and valuable."
Many of the words in that sentence need to be further defined, however. New can mean either new in terms of all human history (H-creative), or simply new to the person themselves (P-creative). Although H-creativity may seem far more important, it must still begin with P-creativity. When teaching children, they may be encouraged to come up with their own ideas about how something works. The answer may be already known, but they are still being encouraged to be P-creative.
Value of a creative idea can change depending on the situation. An idea which may be great for an advertising campaign will probably not be as valuable for an art exhibition. When people are discussing whether or not something is creative, they are often not debating the core creativity at all, but differing about the creative value.
Surprise at a creative idea can occur in different ways, depending on what type of creativity produced the idea.

Combinational creativity:
is making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas

Exploratory creativity:
is working within a structure or style, and working to find the limits of a creative space

Transformational creativity:
is a new structure or style. The creator has learnt how to explore the space, and then changed the space itself.

Transformational creativity is rare and often only occurs after the creator has first mastered the existing creative space through many years of exploratory creativity. The backlash against transformational creativity can often be great, as they are challenging the current accepted system. An example of transformational creativity is the development of pointillism.

These definitions are theoretical distinctions between types of creativity. Creativity does not need to occur in one or other category, it can be a mixture.

Creativity can be discouraged by punishing new ideas, especially for being 'wrong'. Combinational creativity can be encouraged by having lots of ideas from different subjects readily available. Doing exercises such as making up a sentence or story to do with two random things can also encourage combinational creativity by getting the creator to think about the process itself. For successful exploratory creativity, the person needs prolonged experience in the area they are exploring. For successful transformational creativity, the creator should first examine other examples of transformational creativity and evaluate what they changed and how. They also need to learn to evaluate their own ideas. For all styles of creativity, the person's motivation needs to be encouraged.

The second lecture, by Claudia Eckert, was about analysing where creativity occurs in the processes of both artistic design and technical design.
Artistic design is design fields where visual or tactile appearance is key to the design and sale of the product, whereas in technical design the function of the product is more important.
I might skip to the conclusion for this one, as the main portion of the lecture compared different design processes in some detail. The main conclusion of the lecture was that creativity in technical industries such as engineering is seen as a necessary evil. It leads to uncertainties in the design process, which can mean increased production time and costs. Things are done sticking as strictly to the design process and brief as possible, and creativity occurs when a problem arises.
However, in artistic design, the process is almost approached from the other way. Creativity is factored in from the beginning, and through the design process itself the technical restraints are realised and decided upon.

It's interesting to think about where we fall in the processes. We're probably somewhere in the middle, we have a large amount of artistic freedom but we also have to stick to strict criteria.

Gender and creativity

I thought it would be an interesting idea to examine whether there are any links between creativity and gender. I did find a few papers online, most of which seemed to reach the conclusion that there isn't really any difference in creative ability based on gender alone. However, one paper did make an interesting point.
Girls in their early teens are more easily discouraged from being creative by a reward or assessment based system than boys of the same age group.

This is worrying. As creativity is inherent in pretty much every subject to varying degrees, does this mean that the discouragement of creativity is making girls less ambitious? If you are afraid to experiment, you will probably stick with what is safe and known to you. This article states that although girls are doing better and better at GCSE level compared to boys, they are still taking stereotypical subject choices.
This is a tough thing to think about. When you make decisions about what you want out of life, how often do you think of yourself as an ambassador for your gender? When I consider what I want to do, should I be considering working in the city as a high flying banker just because it's a male dominated arena?

This wasn't really as focused an exploration as I was hoping it would be, but it is at least an interesting aside.

It's review O' clock!

Since I've bought my Wii, I've felt like I haven't really been getting the most use out of the thing. I've got Wario Ware and Twilight Princess but for some reason I never really play them. Wario Ware is for a more party situation and Twilight Princess has annoyed me within the first few minutes, both with the art style and the gameplay (although I've since got over that). The Miis are hilarious but all the fun seemed to get milked out of that in the first few weeks. It seemed like my Wii was destined to be nothing more than a shiny Gamecube which we all only used to play Super Smash Bros Melee until Brawl comes out.

But then I bought Mario Galaxy, and realised that there was a sound reasoning behind me buying this console. Mario Galaxy is a wonderful game. It's not graphically impressive, it's nothing groundbreaking in the engine, but it is pure fun.
The hub world is a really nice environment that improves as you progress through the game. More and more areas light up and the whole place fills with Lumas, little star things that dance around looking cute. Other characters like toads and Luigi wander around, and the whole place feels very vibrant. The orchestra playing the background music also grows, making the music much more epic. From the hub world you can access the galaxies, or levels. The galaxies vary greatly, but most consist of separate planets with their own gravity fields.
The way gravity is used in this game is really inspiring. Like Braid uses time, Mario Galaxy uses gravity. Gravity can change in different areas, leading to platforming puzzles. The gravity gives a great twist to the gameplay. You get on a platform, it starts to move and dangerous objects are hurled at you for you to dodge. So far, so standard. But it's when you remember, hang on, i can stand on the underneath of this that it starts to get interesting.
The controls are pretty good too, given the constant changes in camera angles and directions Mario is actually facing. You simply press the way you want to be going, and ignore wherever might have been forwards beforehand.

Mario Galaxy is frankly inspiring in its gameplay and I'm hoping for more fun innovations from Nintendo in the future.

Limitations on creativity

It's strange to think that sometimes having limitations can open up more ways to be creative. I started thinking about this after Gamecity. Having helped out in the Indiecade for a couple of days, I was struck by what some of the games managed to achieve by actually have less going on that most mainstream games. The Indiecade, for those of you who may have missed out, was an arcade showcasing games made by tiny development teams or students. Some had been created entirely by a single person.

The fact that many of these games could not compete with the technological achievements of mainstream games actually seemed to free up the creative aspect of many of them. One of my favourites which I've actually downloaded and have been playing at home is Endless Forest.


In Endless Forest you play as a deer with a human face. You can communicate with other players simply through gestures and occasional mooing. There isn't really much of an aim either. You can explore, there are random events triggered by the game's creators, and you can collect different items to change the appearance of other deer from around the environment. It's easy to see why this could quickly become boring, but I find it quite liberating.
There's no pressure to do anything, and the fact that no one can type means you don't think of the other players as people sitting at their keyboards, but rather just as the deer they are presented as. It's very absorbing, and the fact that there aren't really goals makes it easy to dip in and out of.


Another game that was interesting was Braid. Braid is a 2D sidescrolling platformer. The main idea of the game is that we should learn from our mistakes, but not have to suffer the consequences of them. So in the game, you can rewind time at any point, for as long as you like. This way, if you are killed by an enemy, you can rewind time and revive yourself. You have now learned something about how or why the enemy attacked you, and can change tactics accordingly. The real puzzles begin when some items are not affected by time, or behave differently when exposed to time reversal. It leads to puzzles where you are forced to fling yourself onto spikes or drop to a place you have no way of escaping from in order to grab items such as keys which you can drag backwards through time with you.

While games such as Prince of Persia have the time rewind element, the fact that Braid has no limits on its rewind system makes you play completely differently. Prince of Persia still forces you to be cautious, whereas in Braid you can fling yourself into a situation just to see what will happen, and then reverse it if it wasn't the outcome you wanted.

So that's how it applies to games, but what about art? Forcing yourself into a limited artistic situation can lead to interesting results. It seems though, that you need to push it away from the familiar to really get deeper. Everyone uses pen and pencil, limiting yourself to just one of those doesn't cause any difficulties or present you with problems you have to solve.
However, if you only allow yourself to use tin foil and glue, or paint and a piece of card with no paintbrush to draw with, you start to open up more interesting things in what you are producing. The fact that you have having to fight your choice of media in order to show what you want makes you think differently than if you had chosen something you can use with ease, and this shows in the piece.

You get unexpected outcomes, things you didn't mean to put there simply because you're not good at using the media. Rips in the paper with the craft knife that actually look really good, mistake lumps of paint that show contours. Sure, it might look terrible, but that's the risk you take. And the best part is that you can give people the same media to use and everyone will use them differently, there is still personal style even in such an unfamiliar thing.

So what's my conclusion? A selling point for most games is going to be having the latest graphics and engine technologies. But sometimes the games without those things have got something more interesting to say than those with them.
If we can just learn to take risks with the small creative things we do, maybe it will feed into everything else.

Cooking

I thought I'd make a post about cooking. Cooking is one of my hobbies which has only really started once I got to uni. I think of cooking as being a very creative process, although it isn't normally mentioned in the list of creative things everyone has been making in these blog posts.
Having had a trawl around the internet, there's not that much about cooking in terms of the creative benefits it brings. It seems to be assumed that you're cooking to produce the end result, rather than enjoying the process itself.
I don't like this idea. Cooking can be as much fun as any other creative activity. My favourite thing about cooking is mixing stuff together. It's like making mud pies in the garden when I was a kid... only hopefully without the horrendous food poisoning which would inevitably result from actually eating mud pies.
Throwing in loads of things which on their own are rather unremarkable and turning them into something that tastes good is one of the most satisfying things for me. It reminds me a lot of painting - paints on their own are nice, but you have to put them together to really achieve something worthwhile. My rapidly expanding collection of herbs and spices reminds me of my mostly useless collection of art junk in my room. Sure, I don't have a use for tons of different types of wool right now, but one day I'm sure I will.

I think perhaps cooking isn't seen as being creative because you're following a recipe. When you have strict instructions, is there room to be creative? Of course there is. You have to exercise personal judgement in when stuff is done, when to move to the next step. You can do things differently to how the recipe says. You can add, substitute, take away, present differently. Or of course, you can always do things wrong. Sometimes you'll have a happy accident, other times you will do something monumentally dumb like burning rice and stinking out the entire downstairs of our house.

Of course, there is the theory that cooking is actually some elaborate form of procrastination, and that the whole process, creative or not, is simply an excuse for me to avoid doing my actual work. I'll let you be the judge.

Creativity continued

For my mechanical project I've been researching Leonardo Da Vinci, and one of the most interesting things I've found about him is how he managed to combine so many different skills and areas of interest.
Da Vinci was "an artist, architect, musician, scientist, geologist, physicist, designer, mechanic and inventor" as it says in the book I borrowed from the library. In the 1400s, artists weren't mainly hired for their artistic skills alone, but for their knowledge of engineering, which they acquired during their apprenticeship. In an age of changing warfare, new inventions and reworked traditional weapons were the key to success.
Learning about everything makes complete sense. It's what I thought my art foundation would be, being taught as many different ways of creating as possible, so you have more tools at your disposal. Unfortunately it didn't really work like that, which I think is a shame. For all I know, I could have some secret metalsmithing talent which will now forever lie dormant.

Things are split up far too much, especially when it comes to school subjects. History links to geography, which links to the sciences, and then maths, and then music and so on. Separating things so much makes sense from a teaching perspective, but also forces people to drive a wedge between their interests.

Is it wise to specialise? Does focusing on one subject specifically give you a deeper understanding, or should you widen your horizons and have a larger understanding of everything?

I've often wondered if it's best to train for something completely different to what you actually want for a career in life. That way when you do work your way there, you'll have a completely different outlook and set of skills to everybody else, and will maybe think in a more creative way about the tasks in hand. Having come from a wider employment circle, you'd also have more objectivity.

Perhaps we should all have an Ancient Greek style education, where we are apprenticed into as many different jobs as possible.

Hooray for the Tate

I ended up at home this weekend, and therefore ended up London town. After watching Have I Got News For You the week before and finding out that several people had fallen down into the current exhibition in the Tate Modern, consisting of a crack in the floor, I decided to go, and dragged Tim along with me. The piece is called Shibboleth and it's by Doris Salcedo.
Looks impressive doesn't it? It's really not as vast as it seems in that picture. The crack is only about as wide as a person's leg in the widest sections, so to fall down it you'd have to be pretty determined.
I've seen some really amazing exhibitions in the Turbine Hall, and a piece has to be incredibly powerful to hold its own in the space there. I don't think Shibboleth really did it for me. The crack seems very unnatural, it has regular spacing and you can see the chicken wire holding the two sections apart. It does make sense as the piece is about separation in society, and therefore man made divisions, but it seems to distract from what should be a powerful reflection about nature. Tim spent the whole time trying to figure out how it had been created.

But even though Shibboleth was not all I was expecting, there was another nice surprise. This monstrosity, sitting outside the Tate Modern. Maman, by Louise Bourgeois. It's an amazing sculpture, alien yet so very rooted in the familiar. Kids were saying to their parents that they wished it were real while Tim and I just widened our eyes in horror at each other.
We also saw some people having to shield their view as they walked past along the river, probably due to arachnaphobia. It seems almost insensitive to have a sculpture which for some people is horrific, out in full view in a popular area. Even worse is the face that there are posters all over the London Underground with the spider on, advertising the full Louise Bourgeois exhibition.
Art is supposed to provoke a response, but if it is involuntary, and people don't want to be exposed to the art in the first place, is that fair? Should art be concerned with what is fair anyway? It's certainly not concerned with what is legal in many cases.
But anyway, the sculpture was certainly unexpected, and even helped me out with my drawing project a little bit.

Creativity

OK, so this is the start of us revisiting the issue of creativity. After the interesting video shown to us by Mr P about creativity being stifled by the school environment, I decided to look into that a bit more. I work with kids in the summer so I feel like I have some vague connection to the issue.

I found this on the National Assosciation of School Psychologists website, which was very interesting to me:

The personality traits which some creative children develop are often viewed by others as strange or unproductive:
(a) Free Thinking. Toying with ideas may appear undisciplined and lacking in goal orientation;
(b) Gullibility. Creative children get excited about "half-baked" ideas and may not see the drawbacks or flaws that an adult would easily see;
(c) Humor. Creative children find humor in ideas which adults consider to be very serious. This ability to question and see other perspectives may be interpreted as mocking and obnoxious;
(d) Daydreaming. Creative children learn through fantasy and solve many of their problems through its use. Letting one's mind wander can help imagination to form new connections but may be seen as being inattentive or spacey;
(e) Aloneness. Creative thinking develops from delicate, unformed ideas. Children need to be alone while their ideas emerge, but society's emphasis on togetherness makes this difficult; and
(f) Activity. Ideas often come at times of "doing nothing." But once the idea comes, the creative child will become absorbed in the activity. This fluctuation, from what may seem to be laziness to over commitment to only one thing, is confusing and frustrating to others.

I wonder how many of those are familiar childhood traits of people on this course, and how of us didn't even realise what they were indicative of? Thinking back, I was certainly gullible in many situations because I wanted to believe in things that I thought were exciting.

I also found a few lists with Do's and Don'ts for encouraging creativity when planning activities with children.
Don't: Constantly watch over them, evaluate their work, offer rewards, over control, encourage competition, restrict choice, give examples.
Do: praise work, remember that the creative process is more important than the final product.
OK, most of those make sense but some of them are just impractical. Restricting choice is often a necessary evil, especially with things like equipment. If you get all the art equipment out for every session, you'll spend half your day getting it out and putting it away and all the kids' work will be coated in an inch thick layer of glitter which will never dry. And glitter gets everywhere. For their choice of what to do with their own work, sure they can do whatever they like.

The one I did really take issue with was 'Don't give examples'. Kids copy stuff, it's what they have always done. I drew a dinosaur on a whiteboard once just to make the art room a bit more interesting. There was extra time at the end of the activity so we let the children draw stuff. At the end I collect up 12 drawn copies of my dinosaur from the board.

When we offer a choice of activity, being able to say 'you can make a hat like this one' and demonstrate the hat, is far better than just saying 'you can make a hat', it captures their imagination more and gives them more ideas. Children do have brilliant imaginations, but they also draw a blank on so many occassions it makes you wonder.

In the morning on playschemes, we have a big roll of wallpaper for the kids to draw on. They're meant to draw stuff to do with the theme of the week, things like Summer, around the world, history, but they can do whatever they like really. A lot of times you would tell them what the theme was, and encourage them to draw things and they would have no ideas or enthusiasm at all. Around the world especially stumped them completely.
So I guess my main point from all that was that children are unpredictable and you can do everything articles tell you to and still get it wrong.

I also found this poem, called The Little Boy by Helen Buckley. It illustrates brilliantly the problems stifling creativity creates. And the sad thing is, this was written in the 1960s and not much has changed.

On an entirely different note, I found an article about how the height of ceilings affects creativity. The article is here, but the basic summary is that people think in more abstract terms when in a room with a higher ceiling. However, this does not extend to being outside, without a ceiling. Perhaps we should see if we can apply to have the graphics floor removed entirely so we could have a nice high ceiling in the lab? Maybe that storm last year was trying to tell us something.

Crying for fun and profit!

If you don't get your way, cry and throw a wobbly. This seems to be the common mode of attack for many kids at work. However, what they don't know is that all the staff have absolutely no tolerance for this, as when you let one kid get away with it, they'll all start to do it.

Allow me to provide examples. One merry Tuesday we were working in a village which is barely in the district the playschemes serves. The main road is actually called The Street, as it's the only flipping road there. We all have a theory at playschemes that every kid in the village is related to one another, with their collective father being Mr *villagename*. Some of the kids are Odd.

But anyway, we only have 12 kids so we decide not to offer separate sport and art activities like we usually do but to lump them all together. It sounds a bit mean but when you have 4 kids decide they want to do sport and the rest want to do art, the sport kids are going to struggle to have a decent game of anything.
So we start playing uni-hoc (kids are given numbers, when their number is called out they play one on one hockey with the corresponding number from the other team). Great fun, everyone loves this game! Except we have two sulkers in the corner. One is just sulking, the other one is full blown crying.
They don't want to play this. In fact, they want to go home. They haven't even given it a go. As it's the start of the day and some kids get a bit homesick, they're found another activity, but the cycle starts to repeat itself and our patience wears thin.

The cryer proceeded to throw several strops, each with different excuses as to why she wanted to go home. She was ill, she had a headache. She came up to me at lunchtime and told me that her dog was at the vets and she needed to phone home to check if he was alright. It was clearly an excuse to phone home and whine about how she didn't want to be here.

Even in the art activities she threw strops when things didn't go her way. When her clay didn't turn out right, she started to cry.
At the end of the day the deputy leader told her mum that if she didn't want to be here, it was pointless bringing her.

At another site we had a girl who cried in order to spite other people. Some girls were playing a game and then suddenly one leaves the group and sits down in a corner, crying. I ask her what's wrong and she says the other girls stole the ball off her. I ask the other girls and they seem genuinely confused, saying that was part of the game they were playing. I ask if they'll apologise anyway as the other girl seems upset. They do so and the girl continues to be in a huff.

She later asks me when one of the other playworkers will be coming back off her lunch break (she'd grown attached to her), and threw a strop when I told her it would be 15 minutes or so.
"But she said she'd be back in a MINUTE"
"It's a figure of speech. She didn't literally mean one minute. One minute to have your lunch in is a bit harsh"
"But she said in a MINUTE!"
"Have you never heard someone use the phrase in a minute? It just means an amount of time!"
A pout, followed by her storming off.

I caught her later trying to land some other girls in trouble. When I was talking to them she had a massive grin on her face, thinking I was telling them off. I confronted her about it.
"I'm just a happy person!"
"If you're such a happy person, why were you sulking earlier?"
"I wasn't sulking. I was having a tantrum!"

Sigh

I hate children

And my job has only confirmed that.
OK, that comment was a little sensationalist. I don't hate all children. On an individual basis I quite like many of the kids at work. But as a whole, children are awful. Children are like humanity filtered down to it's basic elements.
Children are curious, and they are innocent. But they are also cruel, selfish and ignorant. They are also incredibly prejudiced without even realising what a terrible thing it is.
I suppose you want some examples.

Gender values are hammered into children as soon as they can start absorbing information. Girls like Bratz, Barbie, Dora the Explorer, etc. Boys like Transformers, Star Wars, etc. There is no middle ground for a lot of them.
"You can't play football, you're a girl!" This statement, and many others like it, have made my blood boil these past few weeks. Where are they getting these ideas from?! Yes, a lot of the girls are not as interested in football as the boys, and therefore are not as good at it. But to say they CAN NOT play is just unreasonable to me.
"Euuuuuurgh, you like girls' stuff!" When said to a boy this is for some reason one of the most cutting insults there is. I have tried explaining that even though so-and-so might not actually like Barbie, there is nothing wrong with him liking it if he wants to.
*Cue puzzled look* "But he's a boy!" It went round and round like that.

You also really see the differences between the genders at this age. Young boys are awful. They won't sit still until they have run out all their energy, they play up and refuse to listen, they fight. And if there's a creative activity of any kind it always comes back round to ways of killing things. Or creatures that kill things. Or just killing. It actually seems to be an inherent male thing.
Conversely, young girls are also awful. The trick with girls is that they never SEEM to be awful. They are a lot better at the creative activities than a lot of the boys and they join in with the sports. But when it gets to play times they get nasty.
"SHE did this to me!" "So-and-so's being mean!"
They will gather in groups and giggle about each other. They will cajole others into doing their dirty work for them and send their lackeys to say things to people or attack them with play equipment. They lie to you about what others have done. They enjoy getting others into trouble. They sulk, they cry, they get in a huff about nothing.

So, summary: Boys are into causing physical pain, girls causing emotional pain

It really makes you think. If it weren't for hormones that kick in at puberty, I honestly think men and women would continue having little or nothing to do with each other for the rest of our lives.

That post seemed very negative, but I've had a terrible day today. We only had 6 kids (all boys) and they managed to drive us all absolutely crazy.

So that was gender values, next update, I shall write about crying for fun and profit!

City of Heroes

Alex tries to kickstart his modelling career

In other news....

I made a 3D graphic for one of my website designer mates. Check out the rotating Z at the top of this page. Uh huh, that was me. Pretty happy with it, and it gave me good experience of working on something that didn't really have a final outcome planned out from the start.


I wonder if saying 'Hey I designed your website banner logo' will get me in for free?

Goodbye Bede Hall

Well, I am currently at home as I'm typing this post, although I'm heading back to uni tomorrow so I can go to the GameCity meeting. I just thought as I started this year's blog with antics of me living in halls, it would be fitting to post something about moving out.
Halls has been a positive experience for me on the whole. I got on with pretty much everyone in my flat, which I know is a pretty rare thing. I aim to keep in contact with several of my flatmates next year and continue our girlie nights out. Dancing to cheesy music and drinking strange alcoholic cocktails made of whatever was on offer from Nat's, does it get any better?
However, life was not all sunshine and roses. Things I will not miss:

• The guys downstairs with their infernal music travelling up through the floor
• The constant stench of weed throughout D block
• The hall manager who hates all of humanity, with special wrath saved up for students
• People rolling in at 2 in the morning screaming/ singing 'Oggy oggy oggy, oi oi oi' in the courtyard
• Fire alarms at 3am
• The piles of bins in the kitchen (which actually spawned maggots at one point, thanks everyone!)
• Becki with her cooking that splashes everywhere, thieving of cheese graters to grind weed, and screeching arguments with her boyfriend at midnight - complete with slamming doors and sobbing in the toilets. When asked to be quiet the response was 'I'M HAVING AN ARGUMENT!'

So I'm glad that chapter of life is closed and next year I will be in a house. With 3 guys. Everyone has told me I'm crazy and to be honest I don't doubt it. Alex is already threatening to limit my time in the bathroom. He shall be pranked, and pranked severely.

Everything I cook is orange.

I discovered this when I decided to defrost something I'd previously cooked from the freezer. Only problem was, I - in all my infinite wisdom - had not labelled it.
"Well," I thought. "It's orange, so it must be spaghetti sauce or bean chilli." Easy.
Six hours later and said object is defrosted. And is in fact chicken tikka. Good job I like chicken tikka.

I had a sitdown and a think about these events and I came to the conclusion that EVERYTHING I cook is in fact orange. Or at least turns orange when you freeze it. I shall dazzle you with a list:

Bean chilli
Chicken tikka
Spaghetti bolognese sauce
Bacon pasta sauce
Chicken fajita mix
Sweet and sour anything
Sausages in barbeque sauce

The one exception to this rule was when i tried to make a stew of my own invention and it froze grey. Which is really not a very appetising colour, and just goes to show that I should not try to be creative in the kitchen ever.

What is it? Nobody knows.

OK, I felt I should blog about something, simply because I haven't done so in over a week.
I achieved some, but not all of my holiday objectives. I did work at playschemes and earnt myself some cash by playing in glue and dealing with children on a sugar high. I also went round London a lot and returned to some of my favourite places. Canary Wharf, the Natural History museum and Covent Garden.
I didn't quite make it to Turkey. The flight costs went up too much so we went on a day trip to France and Belgium instead. It was lots of fun and I returned with crateloads of cheap alcohol. All the bottles are currently lined up on top of my shelves like an identity parade.
Welcome to sunny Belgium!

It's nice to be back, it seems like I've been here weeks I've already done so much. Night out at Liquid sporting a top hat, surprise birthday party for Alex round Caz's (a big surprise as it was 3 weeks after his actual birthday), lots and lots of Lord of the Rings and two house viewings. Phew!
And I have actually done some work. I should really get over to the library and try to scan all my sketchbooks in, but I might give up and just take photos.