Art 2 Final Portfolio

1. Octopus in a Bathtub acrylic painting was my most successful. The them for this project was sticky situation. For the longest time planning this project I was going to use my piece to send a message instead of doing a painting of tape or melting ice cream. I had it all worked out to use the subject of hate as my topic, to me it's a very sticky situation these days. I thought my final design would take too much precision and time to finish it before the deadline. So, I went back to my second idea that I had only drawn up thumbnails for because it was required. I think that the colors I chose to use in the background really make the purple and blue of the octopus stand out, as does the large white tub. I had originally drawn it out to be an old fashioned copper tub, but when mixed with the greens, purples, and blues did not have the desired effect I had hoped for. I think that the tub looks disproportionate to the bathroom itself, I did this to emphasize the strangeness of having a sea creature in the tub.

2. New York City, I grew up visiting Manhattan at least twice a year. With this project I wanted to show the joy the city gave me. I started with only concept ideas, I had no idea what i would use to show my subject the way I see it, as speed, excitement, crowds, and history. I started with covering a canvas with a subway map, then glued down pictures of landmarks, street signs, and logos. It looked like a 3rd grader's collage they finished in 5 minutes. I added more cites from the city, and drybrushed the background in purple to connect all of the pieces. it still didn't look like a complete work, just pieces of inspiration laid out with no distinct pattern. I then *tried* covering the work in purple tissue paper, but I lost most of the destinations on the subway map. Next i tried white tissue paper, and it worked, just a thin layer of semitransparent material that seemed to melt it all together. I used a sharpie marker to make the New York times heading stand out, and added some fireworks because New Years in NY is a magical experience. Overall, I think this project took the longest to plan out and make everything work, I was afraid that covering up anything would ruin the work. But, I am most satisfied by the way it ended up.  

3.For the Up Close and Personal project I learned that I am very strong when using chalk pastels, I learned to control texture and value. I liked the idea of taking something people look at as a whole and zoom into one specific area, in this case a Christmas tree. Most people like to step back and look at it from star to stand, I chose to show the importance of one little branch in the overall picture. For the What's the Point Project I learned that pencils with different hardness of graphite will make different values in a work. I wanted to use this to ask the philosophical question on "what exactly is the point of drugs?", but also I wanted to look at it from the point of view from the girl in the picture. She could be asking "what's the point of being aware of this life that isn't all that great, or what's the point of living at all?",also I could just show the simple fact that a needle has a point. 

4. I enjoyed this year's way of teaching much more than a usual art class. Instead of all of us doing the same painting of a vase of flowers in acrylic paint, we got to come up with not only the subject, but also the material (within reason of course). One of the best examples of that was the non-traditional portrait. There were works made of tic tacs, grass, fabric, frosting, and pasta. Personally, I had trouble with this project, not  because I couldn't come up with things to use, but because there were so many materials that I could use. I worked hard to decide how I would create my portrait to show the personality of the subject. Since he is in chorus, I used sheet music, and let him choose the songs.