Art Journaling

So, for my Art Journaling project, I was assigned 'anger.'  I was also assigned, 'tell a funny joke,' but I'm very bad at telling those.  Anyhow, I must confess that while I can get very angry very quickly (like, say, when I'm drawing a pair of lips or possibly carving out the innards of a book about the birds of North America), the anger always dissipates, and I am left with a very small recollection of the emotion. Also, modge-podging makes me happy because the gel medium smells like chocolate chip cookies (is it healthy to think like that?) and it is generally just a very happy thing because it's slimy.  So, this thing is more of a fan-fiction-French-newspaper-yey-let's-play-with-orange-tissue-paper-because-it's-orange-and-awesome! than an actual project on anger.  Excuse me for forgetting my primary objective.

Artist Create Original Art:
Because I can.  Um, I guess this art is relatively original.  I took comic book pieces from a Marvel adaption of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" (Lizzy Bennett is the one features on both covers), a copy of an illustration from the inside jacket of Cassandra Clare's newest book, and a picture of Drogon, one of the dragons from Game of Thrones, that I printed off from the internet.  It would probably be good to mention here that this was done on the back of a notebook.  That might be prudent.  Anyhow, yeah.
I pasted a page of a newspaper titled 'Les Mondes' or something similar onto the notebook first.  And then I pasted on black tissue paper, and it was really annoying because I couldn't see the newspaper through the black tissue paper, so I had to go wet the tissue paper and bring it back to where I was sitting, consequently getting black tissue paper dye all over my hands and all over the floor.  I looked like I had zombie hands for a week.  When that was all dry, I pasted orange over the spots that were coming up.  One phrase that I had accidentally pasted onto the front was "les revolution," which I highlighted by not covering it with black tissue paper and covering it with orange instead.  I did the same with the word 'femmes' in the back, but that sort of got covered up by Jace's head.
For everything else, I just sort of wung it.  I really like modge-podging stuff, and so basically I just put stuff anywhere and hoped it came out well. I sort of messed up the face of the left-Lizzy Bennett by putting red tissue paper over her face, so I had to doodle on her with charcoal, and then paste Jace over the part of her that was actually ripped paper and not her. And, I wish I'd done Drogon's flames better, but I don't really know how, and I think it looks fine as it was.  I was going to just give him a yellow halo, but that was more angelic than mad, and I'd forgotten to cut it out before I'd put Drogon onto the paper, and I wasn't about to exacto my carefully wetted tissue paper.
The horror of it.

The cover, detail.

The back cover, detail.

Lizzy Bennett's messed up eye, detail.  I actually don't think it came out to bad.
I would have done the charcoal elsewhere, but you can't charcoal over gel medium.
The only way I was able to do it here was that I ripped up a ton of paper trying to get rid of all the red and brown tissue paper.

Land Art

So, Olivia and Hannah graced my house with their presence, and then they immediately began to eat all of my food and complain about the weather.  Only after a quarter of an hour was I able to make them come outside so I could stick thorns into the side of their head.
    Okay, so, that's not really what happened.
     We only stuck Olivia with thorns.

Artists Create Original Art:
I seem to really like this question.  Okay, so, I guess I got my inspiration from Faerie Queens and such.  I don't know.  In YA lit, the queens are always portrayed wearing wreaths of flowers.  As are May Queens from the Middle Ages.  So, it's strongly symbolic of magic and spring and such.    Also, and I don't mean to be sacrilegious, but even though I'm not Christian, I've always been sort of interested with Christian symbolism.  So, instead of a crown of thorns, we made a crown of roses, which took the Christian symbolism and mashed it with the more pagan one.  I don't know. I didn't let anyone else in the group in on my personal reasoning because I'm selfish like that. Personally, I thought it was really interesting, though.

Olivia, with the original grass circlet in her hair.

Olivia, as we try to get the roses to actually stay wrapped around the grass circlet in her hair.

Olivia, looking like a monster from the gardens deep, with flowers in her hair.

Hannah, trying over again, because obviously I hadn't done it right.

Sculpture

Okay, so, technically I'm not done this project.  The theme of sculpture was 'tell a story,' and the story I was attempting to tell was a boy, riding his horse, while holding a lantern aloft, running away from a monster.  And, of course, it would be doubly cool if a book told this story . . . So, obviously, there was only one possible recourse.
     Which, of course, I had neither the patience nor the time for.
     So, half the story remains untold.  I would hopefully rectify that problem over the summer, but for now, the boy stands alone and unpursued.

Artists Create Original Art:
I think that this piece is fairly original.  I mean, I know a lot of people carved books, but I really enjoyed coming up with my own story.  (I consider myself more of a storyteller than an artist, no matter how pompous this sentence sounds.)  I don't know where I got the idea from--maybe I was more-than-slightly influence by Game of Thrones, of which I have been reading almost exclusively for the past month.  This scene is nothing from the Game of Thrones, though.  I picture the boy riding the horse to be about nine or ten, and maybe it's more of a Little-Red-Riding Hood scenario, where is mother sent him into the woods to fetch something, and he stayed after dark.  Or maybe he's a courier who stumbled through the wrong copse of trees.  I don't know.  I find these things interesting to think about.

Artists Develop Art Making Skills:
Ha.  Okay, so, this was my first period of extended usage with an exacto knife.  And yes, I learned out to cut stuff!  Um, I used the fancy exacto knives, so they were really sharp, and I figured out the quickest way to cut the most amount of paper in one class period (cut two pages at a time, so you cut on and score the other), so that was greatly beneficial.  Though, I do not think I will be let near sharp objects for a very long time.  It will save all involved a lot of frustration and pain.

This is the main piece of the sculpture.

This is how it looks when you open it completely up.

A view of the different layers.

A squirrel.  He's in the upper right corner of the book.  He's just adorable.