A Day in Tycross Zoo

Wildestic Animals in Twycross Zoo

I am very shocked that I gained so much attention from all the animals I saw in the zoo and Zebra was one of them.

As I was creating Zerbra stencils and spraying their geometric body strips around college and my art pieces. I took the stencil with me to the zoo. I pinched the stencil out of my backpack and used it as a lens to record the Zebra’s of the zoo. For some reason all of the four zebras gathered in front of the zebra stencil which I have recorded with my mobile phone.

Personal interaction with Wildestic animals in Twycross zoo

Today 23rd March 2015 in Twycross Zoo I have emotionally engaged with wildestic animals. I strongly believe I can have Leopards get off their back and move towards me. I learnt to get their full attention. I had always known to treat them with the right respect and act as I am one of them. I hid body and only showed my eyes and forehead looking straight into the eyes of the predator and move sideways locking my eyes on theirs. Always hiding the rest of the body, head really low almost parallel to their eyes. By doing so, the leopard are suspicious and come straight to the Leopard whisperer.

I saw a father, a mother and two cubs; male and female. The father was separated from the rest as it is known in the wild father attacking his young when extremely hungry. It was a sight to see the father walking up and down right at the other side of the cage looking at his family. This showed that he wanted to be physically in contact with them. I really love the art of Leopard’s body. I heard people talking about how “beautiful” they were in the zoo.

I had done research on endangered animals about a month ago and I note Amur Leopard on my blog. Fascinatingly, I engaged with the species on my day in Twycross Zoo, by acknowledging this resonance of me and my favourite animal I have composed a video of the Amur Leopard.

Geometrical rosettes on Leopard

Hyena was very territorial even in the locked up area. As I approached the hyena area, the hyena ran in circles, round and round without taking any breaks.

Striped hyenas amused me because of their stripes which I did not expect to appear on hyenas.

Flamingos

I came across a wall which had a very similar body marks as of giraffe's. Giraffe was one of the head animals of my study but unfortunately they weren't in the zoo at the time. Perhaps they arrive a week after my visit to the zoo.

A video for my A2 Art Exam preparation as I am studying "Geometry" deeply concerned of critically endangered animals with geometrical body spots/patterns/marks.

In this video I have experimented using a stencil of a giraffe with its body patterns cut out to create a vista to display the giraffe's habitat. 

A giraffe and its natural habitat look alike which I recorded in a bus on my journey to Twycross zoo, in Leicestershire, UK . 

Although giraffes are not threatened by extinction, the giraffe population is less than 80,000 and decreasing therefore I have planned on using various of different platforms and channels including Blog, Instagram and Youtube to create awareness of such beautiful wild animals.

Producing and editing long videos can be significant therefore for the video above I have done so.

Below is a screen video capture while I have edited the video of my giraffe experiment.

Giraffe, Zebra, Leopard, Jaguar and Tiger

I used a craft knife to engrave the geometrical patterns of the giraffe which took me longer than I had thought about 25 minutes but I was very exited as it was very first time using a stencil.

 

Spray Paint on recycled Canvas

 

The black giraffe on the left is the stencil which I used to create my sprayed giraffe next to it.

I noticed the puckering of the emulsion which gave the background a cloudy effect, illustrating a landscape out in the wilderness.

Therefore, I covered up the giraffe and sprayed the rest of the piece.

I have leant that I should spray ever so little to have the effect I want especially to show up the puckering effect. This is because I can add more if I want, but too much of paint can not be taken off without having to replace with another colour.

This is after respraying to get the landscape effect.

Here I have retouched the paining to cover up untouched places which I had concealed by newspaper and masking tape.

 Experiment on A2 paper

Here I have my stencil on A1 paper. What I like about this image is that it looks as it is a final outcome of a process. I believe this is because of the simplicity of the overall design and the construction. The very black and white colours contrast perfectly giving the balance on the piece.

Although by just laying the black stencil on a plain piece of paper looks successful as a picture, I wanted to experiment more of the Giraffe's geometrical patterns which is formed naturally on their body. 

The spray paint created soft and darker tones consisting of tiny blobs, some moving into one direction which appears to look like a sand storm.

Here I have six sprayed giraffe to construct the layout geometrical, 

I have also used spray paint to make darker and bolder visual which demonstrates movements of the the giraffes. 

This is the back of the paper which was an accident but it illustrates an attack from a predator's claws on the giraffe...

The very dark black paint emphasis the blood coming out of the giraffe's skin. This bloody concept brings my piece back to focus on "making awareness of these wildestic animals" using a fusion of the giraffe's body pattern joining with the predator's claw motion in one that have not been seen together before, but that through their association clearly demonstrates my new idea & message.

This medium I was using was a very thick cardboard which I was struggling to cut out the patterns, therefore I decided to switch the medium to a thinner material.

I got a tracing paper to trace the marks I had created and used the pencil mark to indent marks on the new thin plastic paper.

This is the back of the piece which looks very interesting as of the colours