I think these past weeks have been very productive for me. I am someone who usually just sketches in pencil on plain printer paper, so in this class I have done a lot of things that I've never tried before. It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to trying different techniques. I've been able to express a lot in my work by being a little out of the box, such as the ears on my mask. I've been able to be a little spontaneous as well, as I'm often very uniform in the sort of things I draw or paint. This class has allowed me to just go crazy with the sort of things I do, and it's been a learning experience.
1 Comment
This project was admittedly my favorite of the entire year, but in the end I really couldn't visualize what I wanted it to turn out like, and I began with something far different than I ended with. I had the issue of completing the painting part of the mask, but I really didn't like the way it turned out. To solve this problem, I painted it over white again, and then did a much simpler paint job. I am much happier with it this time around, and I feel like, with just a little bit of work, it could look very nice.
In terms of developing techniques, I have never used paper mache before, so this was my first time. It was a strange experience, but I had fun using it. I hope that I'll be able to work on my skills with it, because the ears of my mask had some open parts that I would've liked to closed. This project was interesting for me, but I really enjoyed how it came out. I am impressed with the shading job I did on the hands, and I felt I was really able to express myself with the different things I did here. The poetry on the left hand is actually a piece I wrote myself, as I enjoy writing a great deal, and I think combining it with my artwork makes for a much more expressive canvas. I originally got the idea from Cameron, who was doing the same thing with song lyrics on his hand.
The poem itself reads "To dream of want and to wake from such a sleep grasping at the cold edges of a soft comforting nothingness. Time wears away the dream and we find ourselves clinging to hat memory is sharpest. But a light that breaks through the clouds and a slow hand reaching for it like the withered branches of old trees. To dream of want and to wake to love. Love is not want but it is enough." For this project, we were assigned to draw a hand, and then shade it to give it value. I had no particular trouble with this project, although I learned a bit about shading, and I hope to use the skills I learned here to better the sort of shading I use. I feel that in this project I did not give enough shading attention to the contours of the hand and rather focused on the shading outside to make it look like it was off the backdrop. I felt that I probably should have allowed myself more patience when shading.
In this project we aimed to transfer what we saw in the 3D world into a 2D plane. Our focus was on using contours and shadows to render our images into a 3D look. I didn't have much difficulty with this project, although in the end I'm not really incredibly proud of the the color piece we created, as I felt it likely could've looked better if I hadn't made some decisions, such as making the lines a lot wider. However, I liked the color choice that I made. This second piece we did using view finders, where we draw all the contours on our hand on a 2D plane, with one eye closed. It shows that perspective is a big factor in art, as seeing the picture from only one eye definitely affected how we drew the subject. I am particularly proud of my hands, as I drew them in different shapes, and I think the one to the far right is my favorite.
Here we were experimenting with right and left brain sides, and how they affect our activities depending on what we're currently focusing on. Left brain is much more dominant in fields like writing and read and words, while right brain is the artistic, creative side. The R-mode focuses far more on shapes and colors, instead of our own mental pictures, and that means, if one is silent when they work, they will be able to focus far more on what they are drawing to draw. When we were doing the first drawing, our teacher slowly went through each part of the face- the forehead, nose, eyes, mouth, etc.- and it made it difficult to focus and draw the actual lines. The next time, she stayed silent, and it was far easy to actually draw the lines. In this project, we redrew Picasso's Igor Stravinsky, although we had him upside down, and we were not allowed to look at the entire picture until the very end.
It was much easier to draw him upside down because you didn't focus on the shape as much but rather the lines, and it came out a lot better when you weren't trying to draw exactly what you thought it should look like. I had a lot of fun doing this project, although I had difficulty at first completing the lines upside down, as it was something I had never done before. However, once I got into it, I was able to easily complete the drawing, and I am proud of the outcome. My lines were multiple scratches, as they often are when I am sketching or attempting to draw something I see. These images are before we received any art instruction.
It wasn't incredibly difficult to complete these images, but I am hoping I will be able to improve in all three of these fields. Specifically for the self portrait, it was interesting to see how following the contours of a face in a mirror was so difficult. Because when we have ideas of something, like a body part, we have a very specific picture of what it much look like. But in the end, people's faces vary greatly, and following the contours is far more gratifying than trying to draw what one thinks the face should look like. This project was aimed toward studying our innate artistic behaviors, and how we used the various skills to improve ourselves. I myself learned about using watercolors on a smoother surface, as it is something I had never done before. Because the paper is pressed in a different way to standard paper, it is not as absorbant, and thus the watercolors spread farther and wider. It makes for more interesting colors and shapes.
I also collaborated a bit on this specific project. My friend was studying a few of the shapes I had drawn, and eventually came to mention that a shape in them appeared to be a skull. Taking his notice into consideration, I finalized the shape instead as a skull. The said shape can be seen in the picture above, beneath one of the arms of the K. As a first day for art class, it was an interesting process to take part in, just to see how people who didn't know one another would work together. At first it was chaos, but eventually most of the groups were able to find a certain rhythm in order to complete the challenge. It was an interesting way to test out our different artistic skills.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2016
Categories |