Nathaniel, one of our Young Adult Carers, has written a blog for us about an art project inspired by a camping trip he attended with other Young Adult Carers.
I started off with getting a brief. The brief said “in this project you will be designing, prototyping and creating 3D models for a motion. You can choose either: characters, items and/or sets for a Stop motion or props for Larp” (live action role-playing game). I needed to make my set design on either 1:6 or 1:8 scale. I also needed to do some artist research, so I could get ideas on how I want to create my set. I did some research on Wallis and Gromit, Chicken Run and Fantastic Mr Fox, so that I could see the different materials that they use to create the sets, how big the sets are and what colours they use.
I chose to do my project based on the camping trip at Claydon with YACs because going on the trip inspired me with what the landscape looks like, how the tents were all set up together and how the Claydon business park looked like a campsite for one night. Also going on the camping trip at Claydon helped me build my confidence when around a lot of people and noise. It helped encourage me to talk to new people and it helped me open up to people on how I was truly feeling.
During this project, I learnt that I can do anything if I put my mind to it, and that I can reuse materials to create something. I learnt that I could remember a lot of the details of what the camping at Claydon looked like before looking at any of the photos I took while I was there.
The most challenging part was working out the sizes of the tents, pond, and hills because I wanted everything to look very similar to what the camping trip at Claydon looked like, and I wanted to add as much detail as I could. Another challenge was choosing a design and colour for my tents, so the tents on my set design didn’t look like the tents at Claydon because I wanted to add something of my own to it to make it a bit more personal.
The best bit was doing the papier-mâché because it was really fun to do and was really messy. I love how I used papier-mâché to create the hills, so that the hills would be strong and sturdy but also look like hills when putting the flock on to make them look more realistic. Also my favourite bit was making the design for the tent, because I got to use my own design that tents wouldn’t normally have and it was really fun with how I put shapes together to create a design.
