PAINTING

In this project we had to paint a landscape.   For the first painting I thought Mr. Sands meant landscape format, apparently he wanted scenery meh.  So my first painting was a splatter painting.   I enjoyed it although it may have used quite a lot of paint.  Although I just couldn't bring myself to do a realistic painting, I did attempt to make a scenery painting.

 I created a tree that represents life, death, war, and peace.  In Maori culture, black and white are used quite often so it meant a lot to me to use them.  However, red is also used frequently but I couldn't think of a way, that I liked, to use it in this painting.  To me it feels like a human wouldn't belong in this paitning.  It feels like it something out of reach, you can just see it on the horizon but you can't get over the hill.  Using the dark black as the sky is really a statement to how blindly we live in this world.  The white tree is something you can see but you can't reach. 

EYEBALLS!!!
Yay, I love my eyeballs, they're just the right amount of creepy.  Of course the last picture, with the face, was not my idea but I really like it.  It makes me laugh and it made the eyeballs look good. 





In all these projects I would not cange on little thing.  Although I have a tendency to do things a little differently, I usually get a result that makes me happy.  I feel bad for my teacher who has to put up with it. But, I know if I tried to do art in a way that wasn't me I would die inside.  Of course it's not like anything I do is really that unique, but it's still what I do and that's good enough for me.

Adobe

  Today was the first day I had ever worked with Adobe Illustrator.  The assignment was to make flowers and mess around with the settings.  Honestly, not my favourite project in the world.  It was boring and well, not fun.  I'm not much of a computer art person, I guess I prefer to use my hands in a physical reality. 

Clay

 The Clay project was a big learning expierence since I have never really made a serious attempt at doing much sculpting with clay.  Our first step in the project was to work with a clay ap on our ipads and create prototypes of what we might want to make out of clay.  However I kind of got bored with the ap and only did a couple.

My final project was a couple of clay eyeballs, wonderful I know.  They turned out just as creepy as I had hoped.  I really liked this project and wouldn't mind working with clay again.  I can't wait to see what they look like when they cook.  There is nothing I would change in this project, it was lots of fun!

Zentangle

My Zentangle project was probably one of the longest projects we've done in art yet.  As usual I worked with my friend Julia in a very cooperative fashion.  We started off with the paper zentangle as shown in the very top picture.  After that we moved to the concrete outside and we painted Julia's shadow with the so called "mud".  This mud in reality is clay and I really wish we had painted with actual mud because it would have been more fun.  I still don't understand why we didn't use mud but I figure curiosity kills the cat.

Next we moved to the courtyard where me and Julia decided to continue with our shadow idea except this time we painted Julia's body.  We spent the first few days filling in the outline of Julia's body.  Then, after hearing we had to fill in the entire wall, we went into turbo drive and got almost our entire wall painted in one day.  Of course we had some help from a few friends along the way, but in the end the final product was worth the effort.  

If I ever do this project again then there would be nothing I would change, except for maybe the boiling heat that pounded us.  It was a fun project and I would be happy to do it again with no more zentangles.  Although I enjoyed the clay paint, I didn't really enjoy the zentangles.  To be honest the zentangles kind of bored me and I don't think I'll be jumping for joy if we do them again. 

Forced Perspective

I had a bit of trouble creating my forced perspective.  For starters I worked by myself so it limited what I was able to do, but it was better than working with people I didn't know well.  My main trouble was that I didn't have many ideas and just wanted to take pictures of birds. The picture you see is one of the very last pictures I took and maybe it's not the best but I like it.  Although I can already see ways to improve on this photograph and on my ideas.  If I could have moved my hand a little bit in the photo I think it would look better.  It was an interesting project but I'm still not sure if I would want to do it again. I would much rather be taking photos of nature.

Flowers

 While me and my friend were outside spray painting with some yellow and blue cans, we found these beautiful flowers.  They are a perfect example of genetic variation because they are of course  completely natural.  

Spray Paint Portrait

 Best project yet!

New project, we had to create a stencil and a frame, put them together, and create a portrait.  I decided to make my stencil first because everyone else was being noisey and building a frame.  It took a couple days to complete but once I did, I moved outside with my friend to build our frames.  This was done quickly and easily. Once both the frame and stencil were complete I painted the background of by portrait yellow.

It took a day to dry by once the backgrounds were done I was eager to get outside and spray paint.  Of course all I spray painted was my portrait I most definitly did not spray paint anything else.  First I layed out my stencil and preped the black paint to spray.  In other words a shook a can vigorously for five minutes.

 Once the can was ready, I began to paint.

 Next was the blue which didn't require much vigorouse shaking.  It went down easily and quickly withouth any problems.  After blue came yellow which unfortuanetly did not go so smoothly.  I sprayed to close to the portrait and then took up the stencil much to soon.  The yellow pain spilled out onto the painting where it was not wanted.

 I decided to redo the blue so that I could redo the yellow and make it how I wanted.  It took quite a while to dry but the effort was worth it, my portrait was done.

By far this has been the most enjoyable project.  Partly because we got to go outside and partly because I got to spray paint.  Next time I will definitly make less mistakes with spray pain because now I have gathered expierience.  I'm looking forward to more fun projects.

Self Portrait

 In class I spent an entire week learning about self portraits and the proportions of a Homo Sapiens face/head.  Our project was to draw a self portrait, using a mirror to see your face. On first day of  self portraits I added the basic outline of my face.  On the second day of self portraits I added detail and some shading.  On the third day of self portraits I filled in most of the shading on my face. (I have yet to complete this and will add a photo of the finished product.  The only reason it's not done is that I was away for a day.)

The most surprising thing about this project was the different proportions of the face and how different they are from what you would think.  Overeall I'm very pleased with what I've done and hope the final product is even better.  Next time though, I think I would work a litte more on the shading and highlights, especially in the eyes.

Shading

   You see that photo up there, well that's my shadow project.  Most people will think it's weird, unless of course you're from New Zealand.  I wanted to draw something that reminded me of home and someone who's maori is as pretty close as you can get.  When I started drawing him I used tracing paper to get a faint outline of different areas of darkness.  After the outline was complete I started with the darkest part and then tackled different areas of the face.  Even though I don't think this drawing turned out well I'm happy I at least attempted to do it.  The only thing that was bad about this is the inexperience in shadowing and that is the only thing I would change.  Personally, shadowing is hard and not so fun but I wasn't unhappy drawing him.  I learned that even if I don't like something I can do better next time.

Junk Project

 In this enjoyable project each table in trailor 14 had to design some random thing out of junk so that its shadow looked like it was something whole and interesting.  My table started by finding something to make our light a different color, the picture above shows the color best.  We used a small translucent, yellow cup and covered the head of the projector.  After we figured out what color our background would be we had to figure out what to make.

     First we thought of things that could be yellow and decided the sun would be best.  We'd made our decision and went back to the junk pile to find things for eyes, mouth, and sunbeams.  Another person at my table had already found a long strand of tough, green wire and we attempted to curve it so that it looked like sun beams, as shown in the above picture.  However after several tries we decided that the sun beams weren't going to work out because of how hard they were to manipulate.  We turned our attention to the face.  We then proceded to test round objects for the eyes and unique objects for the mouth.  One eye is a giant bead and the other is a plastic wheel from a toy, lastly the mouth is a piece of cardboard.

Even though this project looked rather simple, I am extremely happy with its outcome because looking at it makes me happy and like I've accomplished something.  If I did this project again, I would definitely hook the facial parts up to something so that they didn't have to be held up by hand.  However the most difficult part of the project was figuring out what we were going to make.  It was a hard decision and took most of our time to decide.  In the end I learnt that an art piece doesn't have to be sophisticated to be good to at least one person and/or yourself.

First Photoshop!

      Today I completed my first photoshop!  First I used a pentagonal tool in photoshop and cut out the background behind the rhino.  After doing that I moved the rhino to this beautiful image of prehisoric sea animals.  Then I shrunk the rhino a bit so that you could see the face of the magnificent Mosasaurs.  In the end I think it turned out pretty well.  :)

Unit 1

This Unit has been fun and enjoyable!  The class has been a lot more fun than I was expecting it to be.  Visual Arts has turned out to be my best class this year (not just grade wise).  I was excited to see the difference in my drawings of Mr. Sands girlfriend.  The newimals bones project was fun and I loved drawing the skeleton.  Hand painting was another fun project and probably my favorite, I did this project in an hour and trust me my hand ached for another hour afterwards.  Overall I'm looking forward to another enjoyable unit!

Thanks for reading. :P

Hand Painting

          For the Hand Paintings project we had to first draw a selected shape of our hand in our sketchbook and then over that draw our selected animal over that hand.  Once this was completed we showed the rest of the class our drawings and then painted the animal on our hands.  I had to hold my hand in a very uncomfortable position for an entire hour until I finshed painting.  Even though there was discomfort I did enjoy this project and had lots of fun.  The end result was better than I had expected but left room for improvments.  For example if you look at the picture included then you'll see there is still skin shoeing at the top and I don't belive that the painting as is realistic as I would like it to be.            

           The project went smoothly without any problems, I did exactly what I wanted to do since day one.  However if I did this project again I would probably select something without fur so that I don't sit there drawing hair the entire time.   Drawing the eye and having to hold my hand in that position for an hour were probably the hardest parts of the project.  Doing this project helped me learn about how to pain on skin,  how to draw insects, and how to have some fun on a bad day.

Newimal Skeleton

 

 The newimal I chose was I flying parrot kitten.  I wasn't worried about the bones in the wings since there are barely any and the tail also consisted of few bones.  Mainly I was just drawing the skeleton of a little cat, also known as a kitten.  On the drawing of the skeleton I focused on the main body of the kitten, cutting off part of the wings and the kitten's feet.

When drawing the skeleton of the parrot kitten I first focused on the skull.  After drawing the skull I determined how large I was going to draw the rest of the body.  To draw the most the bones on the cat I first needed the spine so that's what I drew second.  I found the ribcage and one of the arms the most difficult things to draw and redrew them several times.  After this picture was taken I took the drawing home and redid the ribcage because it was bothering me.





All the information I used to do this skeleton was the skeleton of a human, pelican, and saber tooth cat (saber tooth tiger is incorrect).

Thanks for reading!