The Ingenuity of Enginuity, Day One

Now ... I was originally going to make a big long post on this as yesterday I was absolutely cream-crackered and fell asleep after I came back from Day One (the original-original plan was to post after each day). However, one big long post would be way too long, so I've decided to divide it back into two. I took a few clips of video and lot of photos while there - a loooot of photos - so I've picked the best ones to display here. So - Day One!

We all scrambled onto the coach at about 9.20AM. There had to be two coaches because of the number of us, so some students remained behind to wait for Coach Two. The trip to Ironbridge (where Enginuity, the museum, is located) took about an hour or so.

So, an hour or so later, we all stumbled out of our coaches and got here:




The second photo is just before a presentation was given, about the kind of work we had to do yesterday. (We had a similar one today, to get us all into groups - but more about that later).


The work we had to do over the two days was finding qualities of a subject. We didn't draw the item, we had to find its individual qualities, and - using mark-making techniques - portray them.

From a list of words, we had to select two and focus on those types of qualities. Decoration, Edges, Texture, Movement and Shape were five of them (I'm afraid I can't recall the others right now). The ones I originally selected were Decoration and Movement, but Movement turned into Edges as I progressed with the work. *facepalm* My subjects were a series of clothing on a rack (and one hat on display). I took a few close-up photos of the hats, as they had interesting qualities to their decoration and trims:






I especially like the lace trimming on the bonnet.


Then, at 12.00PM, we were allowed to go for a lunch-break and I took the opportunity to go exploring around the actual museum itself (we spent our working-time in a little side-room which seems to be set up for schools and colleges to use). I can definitely see steampunk fans enjoying this, there were a lot of older technology and gadgets on display, as well as a lot of clothing from the Victorian times around. Not only that, many of the machines you could play around with!

Me operating some of the machines and taking a peek around, wheeeeee:

NOTE: My camera records in Quicktime, and by way of video-editing software I only have Windows Movie-Maker (which can't handle MOV files), but OneTrueMedia came to my aid here!






The blue dress was in the window of an in-museum costume shop! I was going to go and have a look inside, but they required I take my shoes off and I was wearing lace-up boots. x_x So I was nosy and peeped through the window instead. :D

I love, love, love how the light caught the subject in the first photo. A lot of these pictures will be awesome inspiration for steampunk elements I incorporate into my work.



I adore this dress, it caught my eye straight away.



That's the Crazy Boiler you watched me feed those balls into (assuming you watched the video). xD



*beep beep*



*brring brring* I love old-style telephones. :)



There was a flight of steps leading to a higher floor (where the 'phones were), so this is a shot of the first floor from there.




Another interesting article of clothing. The dummy, too.




One of the objects that people from our course had to study to look for 'quality'. I didn't study it myself (I had the clothes for the morning), but as I poked around the large room we were working in I came across this and decided to take a snapshot. 'Shape' would have been ideal for this sculpture/carving. ^^


Lunch-time was over, and we returned to the large room. We had to swap items and start a new sheet of quality studies, so to get more 'Edge' studies in I parked near these signs:





And indeed, they were much more effective to study for 'Edge' (a few things could be used for Decoration, but Edge was the main one - it was vice versa for the clothing). I paid particular attention to the wear-and-tear the signs received over the years.


This is the work I did in the morning. Unfortunately I didn't have time to take a shot of the work I did with the signs, but here's my clothing study:



And ... I believe that's it, for Day One! If you do get a chance to visit England (or if you already live here, if you go on holiday to somewhere in the Midlands), Ironbridge is worth a visit if you're into this sort of thing. There's not just Enginuity but around nine other museums, and a nice little town.

Part Two of this post will either be 1) put up later tonight, or 2) put up tomorrow.