Amusement and Variety

I chose to represent amusement by selecting New York City as my subject. I spent many day trips to Manhattan while i was living in New York. This project was a little difficult to make it all work together and not seem like I just threw everything together. I started with a blank canvas and covered it in a subway map, then I added a heading from the New York Times, a skyline of the city, a taxi cab, the Yankee logo, and some other NY hot spot items. I drybrushed some purple acrylic paint mixed with a gell medium so that the subway lines would show through. I then covered the whole thing in a layer of tissue paper and gell medium. I retraced some of the the subway tracks, colored in the New York Times headline, and added some fireworks to represent the huge New Years celebration that is held in the city annually.

Nontraditional Portrait

I chose to do my portrait on 3 of my friends from theatre, obvioulsy I didn't get to the other 2. This is Danny Martin. He's a good friend of mine, and I was going to do a series of sheet music, play script, and sheet music again as backgrounds for my pictures. Danny was the perfect person to use because he is very involved in chorus and theatre. I was contemplating using costume fabric, sewing stuff, play posters, pictures of the casts and chorus classes and other such objects, but I wanted to use materials that represented my subject specifically, so I chose the sheet music of 2 songs that he said he liked best. I wanted to be able to see the sheet music under the picture of Danny, so I needed to find something that was tranparent. He looked confused in the picture I took of him so I used blues and greens to show contrast but still stick with a color scheme.I think the product is a great example of what I was trying to show of Danny.

Sticky Situation

     To come up with ideas for this project I first started with sticky food, but then I figured that would be obvious so I tried to think outside of the box. I thought of a person in jail or a trashcan full of positive pregnancy tests. I thought they would be cool, but then I thought lets go crazy and imagined something wild that would really freak someone out if it happened in real life. And so became the octopus in the bathtub. To incorporate repetition I made the wall paper of the bathroom striped and the floor black and white tile. I used acrylic paint for my project. It was difficult becasue I had to use so many layers and had to keep mixing to get the same color over and over again.The mini lessons helped me learn how to layer the paint effectively.

Up Close and Personal

1. At first I only thought of things that would be personal to a person, but then I started to think of things at a close up. The subject I chose, the pine branch, was actually one of my mom’s ideas. I thought it would be a great textured example of the theme.

2. I used all cool colors for the background and pine branch, and then used a warm, bright red for the Christmas ornament.

3.I chose to use chalk pastels. I used these because I had more experience with this medium having used it in Art 1. I think the chalk gives a rough look to the textures in the piece.

4. I didn’t smudge the chalk pastels like I had before; I didn’t want the lines to look smooth except for on the red ornament. I think that that risked my piece looking rushed, but I believe it came out the way I had planned.

5.I used technique in my piece. I used straight, short strokes for the branches needles, and long flowing strokes for the background.

What's the Point?

1. Some of my solutions were pyramids, swords, needles, a compass, a graph, and giving up on life. 

2. I chose to go with needles, though I had difficulty drawing a realistic one, so I thought to draw something that had to do with needles. I ended up using a girl with track marks as my subject.

3. I made the background darker so that the girl would stand out against it. Then, I made the part of the arm with the track marks the lightest to emphasize the focal point of my work.

4. I used pencil as my medium, I thought it would give me more control over the shading in my work.

5. I used contour lines to show the curves of the arm breast and torso, and the straight, rough bricks of the background.

6.My subject was my risk with this project. i felt it was outside of the box and might be considered crude rather than striking.

7. The message I am conveying is: What is the point of ruining your life for one fleeting moment of relief?

Depth Shoe Drawing

 This was one of the first projects I did in Art 1. The exercise was how to show the depth of one item in front of the other. To show that depth the item in the back must be smaller than that in front. Also the object in the front must be drawn in darker to show its closeness. This drawing was particularly difficult for me because of the turned up toes of the boots. This is one of the drawings I am most proud of from this semester.

M. C. Escher 2-point Perspective

To create this image I had to select where to place my horizon line. I placed it about 1/4 up the page. I started with a plain rectangle building. Slowly, I added features such as the windows and doors. At first I had no idea what my picture would turn out to be, I had not planned at all. I came up with the idea for the prison while watching Walking Dead. I figured a prison would be a simple enough building because it was just one large shape without a roof. The fence was difficult, I had to find a way to keep the wires in perspective using my view points and went through a lot of trial and error. The bricks were quite simple, but also tedious. I had to match up each line of bricks with the view point on each side of the image. The zombies and TARDIS (from Doctor Who) are meant to be the imaginative creatures we could put into our drawings.

Arcylic Landscape Painting

To organize the layout of my painting I took multiple pictures from the internet and pieced together parts of each picture to create a new landscape. Before I started my painting I did an ink drawing to get a feel for where all of the features would be placed on the canvas. Next I chose a color scheme, I used an orange to violet analogous scheme. My painting had to have 4 parts to the landscape: foreground, middle ground, background, and sky.
To create the sky I used long horizontal brushstrokes that started at one end of the canvas and stopped at he other. My sky involved a lot of layering to get it to look like the sun was showing through at different intensities in different areas.
To create the background I used a dulled version of the colors in my scheme. I blended in some of the colors from the sky to give the mountains atmospheric perspective. Atmospheric perspective is a method of producing depth by making the object hazier and less distinct in the distance.
The sunlight showing through the purple clouds is my light source. I followed that source through the painting adding lighter colors where the sunlight hits the mountains and the reflection of the sun on the water.
I used different brushstrokes for each geological feature. For the mountains in the background I used thin, flowing strokes to give them a hill-like look to them. Each of the mountains in the middle ground is completely different from the other. The mountain on the right slopes down in a very smooth slide, while the one on the right is very rocky, with lots of different levels. The water fall is dry brushed on so you can almost see through the water to the rocks behind it.
Value is evident in the painting, there is great contrast in dark and light colors to show depth.

Ceramics Project

Size: 21cm in diameter x 6.5cm in height
           The design element stressed during the construction was form. To create this project we used the hump mold technique. The function of my piece is to hold keys or jewelry at my house when my parents get home from work. To create my design, I found a Celtic knot design online and used it as a template, I poked holes along the outlines into the clay. Then i connected the dots and filled the outlines in with red clay. I learned how to set up clay for a project, not to spread the clay too thin, how to paint with red clay and the right way to stack the kiln when our projects did not have glaze and also when they did have glaze. If I were to repeat the project I would have made the edges of my bowl smoother, and I would have made the design darker in some places so it was all the same color.

Pastel Still Life

For my composition I chose objects that were related to each other. Then, I arranged them in different setups until I found one that I liked. Last, I chose to use a cool color scheme. A thumbnail sketch is a sketch of a particular area of your setup that you will draw. The view finder helped me choose which part of the setup I would draw.To make my objects seem 3D I used value. I started with light colors and used darker colors to create folds and rounded edges. To create a light source I used cast shadows. I made the background area where the light was coming from brighter than the other side of the drawing. I also highlighted areas that shined where the light hit the objects.