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.  

Perspective

Artists Create Original Work:

      I based this loosely off of the mills I remember that were situated on Souhegan River, below main street in the town that I grew up.  I don't remember the area exactly, because I thought I could always just go back and look at it again, and I wasn't really paying attention when we went down their anyhow because I was, like, seven the last time we visited and there were only shops, and it was boring.  So, in my memory, it's sort of a mystical place, covered in the haze of partially-imagined details.  I also added in elements of fantasy, because while the mills  are part of where I come from, the fantastical is what fuels me.

      I also left a border around the picture proper, because I thought that it looked sort of cool, especially since you can see the skeleton of one of the buildings in pencil in the border.  It makes the transition from three-dimensional to two-dimensional.  I could tell you that I left that there because it's my love of pencil and paper, but really, I just thought it looked cool.

Artists Develop Art Making Skills:

      I haven't really used pen before, because I have a fear that making lines darker will make them look crummier, and why would I want to throw away all of my hard work?  I used shading, too, which I use a lot (like, a lot), so I guess I can't say that's developing art-making skills.  I was going to shade with pen, but I couldn't do it.  What if I messed up, or ripped through the paper?  I was using newspaper print, so there was every possibility that that would happen. But, I used pen without messing up too badly, and I'm going to consider that a victory for moi.  

Shibori

Michael Smith  ( http://www.michaelsilks.com/shibori_about.html ) says that in this website he is the youngest shibori artist still alive,and he is one of two people I found during my search for shibori artists.  I believe that I would find more if I could google in Japanese, but alas, I do not have that ability.  I do not know where he was born, but his etsy page says that he is based out of Asheville, North Carolina.  He generally makes shirts, dresses,and other garments, dying silk and cotton.  I see evidence of arashi and kumo techniques in his work,but he doesn't specify, and I don't know nearly enough to speak of it.  His work his mostly retail but very elaborate,and he seems like a guy who knows what he's doing and likes to do it.

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These are examples of his work:

There is another artist I found who calls herself 'Shibori Girl,' though after a bit of creepy snooping I found that her real name is Glennis Dolce. I don't know anything else about her, but I really like her style of dying, though I don't know how much of it complies with the tradition of shibori.  She gives workshops on the art form, and is mainly a retail artist. 

This is an example of her work:

  I think that the last picture is very cool.  I think that is shibori dyed ribbon.                        http://shiborigirl.wordpress.com/ This is her webpage. 

70 Million

My group, Chayah, Morgan, and I, choose re-create the picture 'Cindy,' by Robert Longo. It is considered a piece from the Post-modern era, even though the pieces were completed in the 80's.  Post-modernism was a revival of the more classical style with elements of the modern world added in that came after the art period Modernism.  Pieces after the 1950's can be labeled as Post-modern, but the overall concept of Post-modernism is one of the most abstract that I have ever come across.  It is a style that spans architecture and novels, as well as art.
       My group decided to re-create the fist picture in this blog, and then decided, on a whim, to switch to the second position while filming. Both pieces are called 'Cindy,' and they are both from the 'Men in the Cities' series.  Morgan was the model for the re-creation, I was the researcher, and Chayah aided in the filming and coaching Morgan on the lyrics of the video.
       If I were to do this art piece again, I would probably play the music while filming, so the person being filmed would be able to actually lip-sync along with the song, instead of merely listening to the music in their head and singing along to what they think they hear.  That might help things quite a bit.

Illustration Friday

Coloring Page Monster

I do not have the finished projected, because the app was messing up, but this is my original coloring-page monster.  We had to color it in and shade it using layers, which I had used before, but I found helpful once more.  In the first layer I colored the monster all one basic color, just going over it all without variation in tone or shade.  In the second layer, I shaded it partially.  I didn't get enough time to finish, because I take forever to do anything, so it is only partially and sloppily shaded.
    One thing I did not like about this particular app is that it did not have the shading tool I wanted. It had every shading tool under the sun, in all sorts of wacko patterns and pencil strokes, but it didn't have the smooth, partially transparent shading tool that I had envisioned.  Maybe such a thing did exist and I missed it because there were so many little icons, but that was one thing I did not like about the application.  
    Other tools were good for the base, though.  Instead of using plain elephant eyes as I did on my coloring page, I took a big splotchy tool and put huge black circles where they eyes would be, then I did a thin layer of red dots at the center of that, giving this elephant-frogish-reindeer creature a truly demonic look.  It was by far the most enjoyable Fun Friday activity that we've done.

Portrait Project

Artists Develop Art Making Skills

     This was the second time I'd used the technique of shading everything in order to produce the contrast of the values on the skin, and I think it went pretty well.  Previously, I've drawn myself in this style, but I think it came out here. I've also experimented with eyes, noses, and lips in this style (all individually, and per the warm-ups done in class), but I've never put it all together, or done the cheeks.

I was drawing my brother, because I haven't made that abundantly clear yet.  Also, this is just the in-progress sketch.  I think I have a better grasp of the proportions on the larger paper, which is backwards for me, but I think it will turn out better than the one featured below.

Artists Create Original Art

      I think I got my basic inspiration from the portraits of Kehinde Wiley.  A normal person against a very striking background.  Though, it doesn't really look like anything Kehinde Wiley would do, because it's just my brother against a red background, not a commentary of the black male put in a backdrop reminiscent of European paintings.  So, it is a very simple representation of Wiley's work, and therefore it is mine.

This is the picture I drew.

This is my reference picture.  I think the camera made it a bit foggy.

Prints

This was the best print.

This one was sort of messy, though it most defiantly wasn't the messiest of the bunch.

Did you use a source for inspiration, then combine it with your own ideas to make it original?
       I combined two sources together, the movie 'Terminator' and the search engine, Google.  In the Terminator, there's this AI computer program that controls all of the robots and starts against a nuclear war against the humans, wiping them out.  That program was called 'Skynet.'  Which, consequently, has the same number of letters as 'Google'!  And, the company Google has been creating self-driving cars, and it's really weird when Youtube videos I watched when I was ten show up on my search browser.  
      In 'Terminator,' the day that the nuclear apocalypse was supposed to happen was August 12, 1998.  That is why I named my print August 12, 2018.  I'm alluding to Google as the modern Skynet.
     Though, I don't know if I should be posting this up on a Google-run website.  They might track me down.

What issues are you examining through your artwork?
      I guess I'm examining the control of the internet over the people, and how people don't seem to mind.  Like, taking a million Snapchat photos a day?  Those photos just don't just disappear from the website, they're all stored in a server somewhere.  And, what people post on social network sites.  Everyone can know everything about everyone. 
     During lunch, too, when I'm trying to talk to people, they'll be playing on their phones.  If Google actually turned out how to be an AI that was plotting the nuclear takeover of the world, I'm betting that most people wouldn't actually mind, as long as they were allowed to keep their Candy Crush.  

I know that I sort of got on a high horse there, but it annoys me. And that's why I made a print of it!

GIF

I really like books (writing them and reading them), so this gif is a representation of my status as a bibliophile.  

Color Project Final

I don't know if I have much to say about the color project anymore, I think I said it all in my last post about the project.
    I think my pieces was pretty successful in the fact that it represented my subject matter pretty well.  I guess that it does look like a sea dragon underwater, to some extent.  Again, I wasn't too happy with the proportions of this final sea dragon, but I do think it's a pretty good considering.  I also like how the large blue sheet of paper sort of balance the top-heaviness of the nose.
     If I could go back and change one thing it would be, of course, the proportions.  I try to copy the second draft more precisely.
    From this project, I learned that shadows can be used in lieu of lines, which was really cool. I tried to do that for the top part of the head, where the eye is sort of set into the thicker head-bone.  Also, to indicate where the cheek muscles are and how the head settles onto the neck.  I think that, overall, I did a pretty good job of indicated elevation changes with value.
 

     (Also, I learned that I really ought to find a smudging tool other than my finger.  I got a blister that pretty much takes up the entire pad of my right pointer finger, while blending in the ocean, which is very annoying.)

Memes, and What is Art?

My first definition of art was:
      Art is the combination of different elements into a whole that had previously not existed. Art is also the perception of the world, viewing things in a way that is unexpected.

This is my dog, who is perpetually hungry.

After the class discussions, my definition of art became:
     Art is your perception of it.  If you think it's art, then it is.

Origami Reflection

This is a literal reflection on my origami project, not origami in a mirror.  ;)
I do not have a phone, so I could not take any pictures of my project while I was working.

3. Artists communicate through their work.

- self-expres

- include personal interests

- examine important issues

What is this artwork intended to say?

What issues are you examining through your artwork?

How is this artwork about who you are or what you like?

I came up with the idea for my project, which is a collection of folded paper, some pointy and some rounded, arranged in such a way as to (hopefully) create a topography of mountains and hills.  I came up with the idea because I wanted to re-create a scene from a book, but I couldn't fold the key element.  As I continued, I felt that I was turning my mountain range into something from where I used to live, Souhegan Valley, where I was always in sight of the mountains.  

    I don't know if this model examines important issues, or says anything poignant about the world, but it's a piece of my past.  It's strange to live down here, in North Carolina, where it's pretty flat.  So, this piece of art is about me, I guess, and how I miss the landscape of New England.

2.  Artists develop art making skills.

- learn techniques and processes

- explore media

Did you learn new techniques or processes as part of the work for this project?

Did you gain skill with familiar materials?

While watching the first video, I noticed that one man made an origami bowl by accordion folding the paper one way, and then another, so it was made up of a lot of squares.  then he folded the paper in a way that created a spherical shape, and the outside of it looked a bit like an armadillo.  I tried to do the same in created my hills, but sadly they came out looking more like armored turtles then armadillo-bowls.  I think that if we'd wet the paper before we'd worked it, like the artists did in the video, we would've have more decisive results.

Color Project -- In Progress

For our Color Project, there were three themes; explore, creature, and disguise.  I combined 'explore' and 'creature,' and have decided to draw a sea monster with a globe in its eye.  Instead of having sea monsters on the map, like 'here thar be monsters,' I have a map on a monster.

     I'm doing this in oil pastel, because I wanted to sea monster to look a little wet and shiny. That's not really happening, though, because I'm smudging the oil pastel to such an extreme degree to blend all the color together.  It does produce a cool effect overall, though.  I'm glad I didn't chose watercolors, because that doesn't really make something look wet, it just makes something look watery.  

     One thing that annoys me is that I like my rough drafts better than I like my final draft.  The proportions of the eye changed in every rendering, so in the first draft the sea monster had a really large eye and looked a bit like Toothless from "How To Train Your Dragon," but in my final the eye is pretty proportionate. Also, my final draft looks a lot like Christopher Paolini's drawing of Firnir on the front of "Inheritance," which sort of annoys me, because I'm supposed to be drawing a sea monster, not a dragon.  But, I used his work as reference.  So, I like my second draft the best of all my drafts.  I think that that's the best one, and I wish that it was big enough to use on my final project.

     I cut out my final sea monster and pasted it onto a light blue piece of construction paper. I'm going to color the blue in with a darker blue oil pastel, and then smudge that, and then add in other colors. So, it will look sort of messy, but hopefully it will communicate the idea that my sea monster is underwater.  I also messed up on the eye.  I didn't want the colors to be too vibrant, sort of brown and yellowed like an old map, but that wasn't really possible with oil pastels, because the pigment is too bright.

This is my first draft.

Halfway through my second draft. 

 I could not get them to flip on their sides, I apologize.

These are pictures of my second draft, colored in.

 So, this is my project so far!  Hopefully, it will only look better as time goes on.  

Two-In-One Final

This is my finished project; I think this picture is a bit too small to legibly read the writing, but you can sort of see where the letters stick out into the white space.  Overall, I think I was pretty successful in my attempt to portray my idea, and it looks much better than what I originally had in mind, which was turning the wings of a butterfly into the pages of a book.  This looks simpler but still has the same core idea.
     I am most proud of the bottom wings.  Most people notice the bigger top wings, or, at least, I usually do, but in drawing this butterfly I actually noticed the patterns on the bottom set of wings.  I think they are the best part of the entire drawing.  I also like how the black is so small that the words stick over the edge, so it looks like the black is actually made of the words, which was my original idea, before I realized that there would be too many white spaces if I did that for the tips of the wings. I also--and this has nothing to do with my drawing--just like the lines on the bottom wing, how they all connect to one, which swoops upward.  Because of that, I think I paid more attention to this section, which leads me to be more proud of it.
     If I could change anything, I would change the wings.  I am a perfectionist and I am obsessed with symmetry, to an unhealthy level, and even though I know that a butterfly's wings aren't exactly symmetrical in the flesh, it annoys me that on the right wing the bar between the orange spaces is bigger than it is on the right wing. Also, the black wing tips aren't so large in real life in comparison to the wings themselves.
     If we did this with color, I would have done watercolor orange around the edges of the butterfly, so it would've been a black-and-white monarch butterfly against the orange background. To sort of mix things up a bit.  
     I've incorporated the theme Two-In-One into this drawing by writing Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" outlining the black on the butterfly (I think I wrote the poem a total of four and half times around the edges of the butterfly).  I don't know if this is strictly 'two-in-one,' because my picture doesn't morph or compare the shapes of two separate items by combining them into one, but it contains two elements of art in one. The art of words and the art of nature.
      Maybe I should call it 'Message On Wings.'  But, maybe that would be a little cheesy.

                                                 Adios!

Two In One -- In Progress

For my Two In One project, I am drawing a monarch butterfly with Robert Frost's "A Road Not Taken" written on its veins and on the edges of its wings--basically, a line of text in place of any definitive line on the butterfly. I am doing this piece in pencil, and I briefly thought about writing the words in pen, but it would've made the poem stand out over the butterfly, and I wanted the words to become part of the butterfly.
     Originally, I thought that I would write the poem only on the veins in the butterfly's wings, which would then appear to be a book, thus creating a two-in-one, but after looking at the shape of the butterfly and the position of the visible veins on the wing I decided that would look a bit cheesy.  So, my Two-In-One is less of a visual two-in-one and more of a conceptual two-in-one, I guess.
      One of the most problematic things that have come u in my creation of this project is the proportions of the butterfly.  I choose to do this project on a large piece of paper (I am not sure of the dimensions, but it's a large rectangle), with the butterfly's body a bit off-center. My wings were then drawn, and I found the right wing to be a foot in length.  When I drew the left wing a foot in length, it disappeared off the side of the paper.  I believe that I will keep the butterfly in its same position and have it go off the page a bit, but I don't know how proportionate the wings are to the body.  I believe it might be too small, but if I change the body then I would have to change the wings.  I'm going to attempt to find some way to alter the body without altering the wings too drastically, because I like the symmetry of the wings as they are.
      Also, the pencil is showing out to be a bit scratchy.  Hopefully I'll be able to smooth the shaded areas with smudging, but I'll have to figure out a way to get a dark, smooth area without using the tip of my pencil.
     For the white spots on the butterfly's wings, I'm going to be erasing, so they'll be gray, not white.  I won't do words around them because they would be really cramped and I want the poem to be legible.

   

This is the image I am basing my butterfly off of.

                            Ciao!