back in school, cause we are the leaders...

First day back to school, and its been a bit of a shambles already!  To start things off, today isn't actually my enrolment day, its tomorrow!  The college made a balls up and sent out the wrong date on the letter, so I've come in to do half the things I could and should do tomorrow, I can't even get my student card yet!  Next, the fire alarm goes off so I have to stand outside on my own like a plum amongst a lot of other plums, some of them being my ex pupils from Tavistock College...always fun, feeling old.
Despite all this I'm embracing today!  I'm meeting with old friends, going shopping and once again, preparing myself for a new, new day!  Coffee has once again wound its way back into my life, which is a god thing I think.  It's certainly helping me to get all this down slightly quicker!
As for actual uni work, the whole reason I'm here, some will get done, I will use my time wisely, I've got a whole city with three vast libraries to explore and one big list to tick off as complete.

Something that has been helping me out finding new and upcoming artists is pinterest.  My own pinterest board is here.  It's incredible, so many artists and literally any image you can imagine.  Its a great place to search through and find all kinds of artwork.  Someone I've decovered through this process is Katt Frank.  She is an illustrator who does work like this:

A stunning piece of illustration that catches the eye of the viewer and teaches them something!  It's similar to botany and science drawings how it looks at individual parts of the insect/subject.  It gives small facts about the bee, such as 'Bees have a long proboscis'.  This is definately something I can take away as in influence as I love the idea of using art to teach and educate without losing sight of it being an art piece.

I've also found Erin Ashley.  She uses missed media on canvas, which gives me an interesting idea of using marine debris and incorporating it into a piece like this, using colours and shapes, possibly text and textures from the marine and coastal environment, to reflect our damaging effects on our coastal habitats and marine ecosystems.  I can find a way of researching marine pollutions effects on wildlife and input this into my artwork so art and science are combined.  This is just one of my many ideas of how to begin my third and final year of artwork that I can incorporate and use to support my dissertation project.

'Around 60% of the wastewater discharged into the Caspian Sea is untreated, in Latin America and the Caribbean the figure is close to 80%, and in large parts of Africa and the Indo-Pacific the proportion is as high as 80-90% (UNEP, 2006). An estimated US$ 56 billion is needed annually to address this enormous wastewater problem. However, the costs to coral reefs, tourism and losses in fisheries and human health risks may be far more expensive. It is also the area where least progress is being made globally.'  http://www.grida.no/publications/rr/our-precious-coasts/page/1292.aspx

Plastic marine debris:

Direct Impacts on wildlife - Studies have shown that fish and other marine life do eat plastic. Plastics could cause irritation or damage to the digestive system. If plastics are kept in the gut instead of passing through, the fish could feel full (of plastic not food) and this could lead to malnutrition or starvation.

Indirect Impacts on wildlife - Plastic debris accumulates pollutants such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) up to 100,000 to 1,000,000 times the levels found in seawater. PCBs, which were mainly used as coolant fluids, were banned in the U.S. in 1979 and internationally in 2001. It is still unclear whether these pollutants can seep from plastic debris into the organisms that happen to eat the debris and very difficult to determine the exact source of these pollutants as they can come from sources other than plastic debris. More research is needed to help better understand these areas.http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/plastic.html

These could be snippets of information I begin a piece of artwork from.  Using a map with these facts as the beginning of one piece of art really excites me, I love the idea of starting an art project with a scientific fact, incorporating the two to educate and inspire is my main goal this year.