losing the will to live

Sorry to have disappeared for a while but the dots are killing me.

Death by dots- I could be the first.

My back hurts

My neck hurts

My feet are swollen from sitting in the same position for 800 hours

My thumb hurts from tweezer stress

I have not left the house except to go to Uni or to go to work every other Saturday in three months. I’m starting to fall apart, and I look like a wild woman who has forgotten about civilization.

If I had just thought of this idea a few months earlier I wouldn’t be going through this now Agh!!!

I’ll just post a few photos of what I’ve been doing and get back to you when I feel like a human again.

This bit I am doing now is really hard steps, people, dogs, it requires a lot of concentration this is the time where I am losing the will to live!

these two pictures have atken ten days and are not even finished, there is so much going on in this area it is really difficult.

Dotology

Over the past four days I have been sticking grass and bushes, and arranging full sheets onto the canvass. It is definitely quicker doing big sections rather than the smaller ones I was doing earlier. I just wish I had done this from the beginning because what I was taking up my time is definitely joining them on the canvass and the less edges I have the better. The problem is now that I have loads of the beginning edges still not sorted and that is taking ages, so I am doing an hour a day to sort them out.

Another thing I have learnt is that as soon as an area is sorted to varnish it straight away. I did not do this at the beginning and the bits I did seven weeks ago are finally starting to fall off in mass amounts, so now as I do a section I varnish it. Again I will have to go back and sort out the beginning sections as they have holes where dots have jumped off and tried to escape. Again I am doing a little bit at a time to fix this and will not be making these mistakes again. Very time costly! You can see the bits I have varnished and not yet varnished because the colour becomes slightly richer when varnished. I knew this would happen before I varnished as I did a sample back in February and compensated for that when I started choosing the colours.

I wish I had thought of this method years ago then I could have perfected it before I started this piece. But I didn’t so I will just have to learn as I go. The fact I haven’t done a big piece before maybe should have put me off doing this, but that would have been a shame, I’ll just have to do more when I finish this one so I can perfect one!
Yes I did really say that!

The thing that is bothering me is that I don’t feel that some areas are perfect. I have become addicted to sticking the dots and the fact the beginning areas are not perfect is annoying me. I want to fix them now, but I can’t spend the time on them now or I won’t finish anywhere near in time. But sitting looking at them is annoying me.

Fort instance one of the black sheets I have joined, one of the first ones I did, I did as a single sheet. Now I can’t get it to blend in with the surrounding black sheets. It has only happened on the really dark areas which I did early on, and hadn’t learnt to leave paper and gaps between the sheets, so the joins are raised and are really visible in this area. (See previous Blog – Catch up time) I will sort this out over the next few weeks, I need to think.

I really like the colours on the bit of bush I am doing at the moment. I have got better at mixing the colours which again makes me want to go back and change the first bits. But I can’t so I have to be careful not to get so good that it ends up looking like different styles. Although I did do the easier bits at the start for that reason.

I think the past two weeks I have done the same amount I did in the first five. But it is a "learn as you go" situation. I will be a “Dotology” specialist at the end of this!

Victor

Ages ago I named my hole punch Victor. Me and him have become very close over the past few months, and he has started to sound poorly, and that makes me sad. I really hope he makes it to the end of the picture so I can retire him. Feeling sad that victor has a bad coughing noise going on I decided to give him a face.

Maybe I am going mad!

Face off

I spent Sunday mainly doing grass, as a break from sitting at the canvas touching up areas. Monday since I didn’t go to bed from Sunday afternoon till eleven a.m Monday morning I had a long sleep and got up around five p.m. I decided it was time to attack the tidying up of the bits on the canvas, my back had recovered a little, and there is a lot to do over there. There won’t be as much in the future as I have learnt to do as much as possible not vertically now, as it takes three times as long because it is harder to stick the dots and one in three ends up on the floor.

I attacked the man on the left’s face and hands, I had been leaving this part until I was a little more confident about what I was doing since it is a focal point on the picture. After over 600 hours on this thing already I felt it was time to try. I am quite happy with the result but am not sure if the face isn’t too pale. On the canvas it appears lighter than on the photograph below.

Catch up time!

Ok, so after last week I have been in a panic about will I /won’t I get this done in time.
As I have been going along I have been finding ways of making this process work more efficient. When I did the first few rows I was doing two or three sheets at a time. I was butting the dots up to the edge of the sheets. I had to then remove the dots I had stuck to join them together, causing more work for myself. I have learnt now to leave a gap around the joining pieces so not undoing necessary.

I keep spilling dots all over the floor, which is so annoying I must do this about four times a day!

In order to make up time I have told my friends that if they visit they have to hole punch for me. Chris has been doing this on his days off since the beginning, this can knock about an hour a day off my work. So my next victim was Pete who popped over to borrow my car for the next six weeks since I won’t be needing it!!

I have started to stick more sheets together before I attatch them to the canvas as this leaves less edges to try and stick vertically. Vertical sticking as opposed to when the canvas is flat takes about three times as long as I keep dropping the dots whilst trying to attach them.

Some parts obviously take longer than others, and at the beginning of the week I was doing a really hard bit which took four days to get that far. I was losing the will to live so I switched to an easier bit for a while so I could get timing into perspective. There are more easy sheets than hard, and timing things whilst doing a hard sheet just made things feel like I would never finish.

When I looked at the rest of my picture I realised that the sheet I was doing was actually probably the hardest part of the picture. The flat lines that I had in front of me had three levels of depth and I had to slowly pick out what bits of grass were foreground which bits were in the middle and which bit is background.

The next bit I decided to do is eight sheets as apposed to the six on the hard bit. But had taken twelve less hours and is nearly done.

Week of nightmares

Week starting Monday 17th of March turned into a living nightmare. Firstly we had no hot water, then the bathroom flooded breaking the ceiling and raining down into the kitchen. Then we had no water at all.

On top of that, I could feel whilst dotting on my canvas that things were feeling a little wobbly and creaky so I took a peep behind to see what was going on, and I’m glad I did but wished I hadn’t at the same time.

The right hand support on my canvass had split in the middle and the canvas no longer lay against it. It had tightened and bowed the beam to the point it had split and the other one was on it’s way too.

Not wanting to make things worse I stopped working on the canvas, and asked a friend’s dad to come over and asses the damage. He suggested support pieces of wood on the back to straighten up my canvas and told me not to work on tit and he would kindly make me some support beams.

By Thursday I had a migraine. I have not had one for years but the stress of losing sticking time with the kitchen and canvas disasters along with the lack of sleep from sticking approximately fifteen hours a day for weeks on end just tipped me over.

I spent five days in bed. I tried getting up every six hours to see if I could continue but couldn’t even open my eyes. In the end I gave up and stayed in bed until it went away the following Tuesday. I had lost a whole week of sticking time. I had saved a little extra time at the end but now that had gone, I will have to make up for lost time.

Chris’ dad came over later in the week and helped me fix my canvas. The dot loss of laying the canvass flat on the floor was minimal, far less than I had expected. I have to get on now and try and make some time back for a week that just went horribly wrong!

fixing in progress !

We've only just begun

This is approximately the real size of the dots and so far i have stuck about 50,000!

Sunday afternoon, Chris caught me singing along to The Carpenters, (I was brainwashed as a small child!) Maggie is not happy because mummy is sticking dots all the time and not playing with her, so sits and sulks next to me in order to make me feel guilty.

From now on I will take pictures every day, and try and update this every few days with my progress.

Welcome to the Madhouse!

Hello, I am Nikki, a 34 year old Interactive Arts Student at Manchester Metropolitan University, and I am in my final year. In January I decided that I would like to recreate a "Modern" day version of Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", but instead of using paint, in a moment of shear madness, I decided that I would use hole punched dots.

This picture is of me and my beloved dog Maggie when she was a pup. Now two years old she is probably going to be the one thing that keeps my sanity over the next two months!

Anyway, I went to Paris at the end of January to research the Island where Seurat once parked his butt cheeks, and sketched for his fantastic painting.

On return from Paris I got my canvas organized, spent two weeks dotting away, then had to take time out to do journal writing for my course. So here we are eight and a half weeks left, (with a week to spare for emergencies), on a mission to complete this piece in time for our degree show.

I wanted to make this the exact measurements that Seurat used, so the canvas is 207.6cm by 308cm, split into 120 sheets of A4 paper, to manage the size. The Canvas takes over my friends lounge, which he has donated me to use as a studio for the next few months, as his is the only house it will fit in, in one room.

I have worked on these sheets so far for two weeks and have started to arrange them, and join them together to form my picture. In order for me to complete this I will have to do between 15-18 hours each day of sticking and arranging. Yes i am completely mad and luckily for me I don't sleep a lot! It will take approximately half a million dots to complete this picture.

I will update this blog every couple of days with my progress, and mishaps, so you can follow what I am doing, and hopefully this won't turn into me needing to be committed! I am kinda excited by this piece for two reasons. One being that I suffer from OCD so this is perfect for me, and the other is that I can't find any other artist who is stupid enough to attempt this before. So this is where i am up to. I Just wish I had thought of this in September, not January!