In Progress PicturesFinal PieceI'd like to start off by saying I am so incredibly proud of this piece and it is so liberating to make something that gives me the same since of accomplishment as my self portrait. Don't get me wrong, the pieces after the portrait were successful, but nothing special.
For this piece I was given a task to depict a story of a girl who lost her best friend to suicide. The scene of the door is both literal and conceptual. Literally the last confrontation between the girl and her best friend took places on opposite sides of a door. The friend locked herself in the room and would not let anyone in. This upset the girl because her best friend wasn't opening up to her physically or mentally. The next day, the friend was found dead. Any who enough with the dark details. My conceptual approach to this piece is evident in the differing moods on the outside of the door vs. the inside. According to the girl her best friend was well loved and the world viewed her in a positive light. Unfortunately, the way people are perceived on the outside is not also true to whats happening on the inside. To convey this message the scene outside the door changes from bright happy colors and blooming flowers and inside the door there is dark browns and wilting flowers I added the shower curtain and bottles inside the room because her body was found in the bathroom and she had been drinking. Wow this is sad. The process of the piece was wild, I sat down at 10am on Monday and was done by 10pm the same day. I think i consumed 5 cups of coffee and an unhealthy amount of pizza in the process. The day was draining but incredibly self rewarding. On a technical level, the piece is composed of mainly prismacolored pencil with accents of acrylic paint. I love my vibrant colors and my use of complimentary colors that accent each other. The yellow, orange, and pink colors create a pleasing scheme and I believed every color I use I carried out in the piece. Overall I am very pleased with the outcome of this concentration piece.
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In Progress Pics and SketchesFinished PieceFor my concentration I decided to experiment on conceptual art and came up with the theme "The Different Stories of Everyday People". So to do that I asked a billion people to submit a story about a big event in their life with the permission to intertwine their story with my interpretation. My first story was a little more serious than expected but made the piece fun to figure out. The person suffered from anxiety and this particular piece exemplifies their coping mechanisms of a panic attack. They found solitude in a bath and would either eat peanut butter or drink orange juice to calm down. The literal aspects of the piece is the scene of the bathroom and the food. However, my interpretation is in the the texture and the bees. When I think anxiety I think a lot of crazy pointless thoughts that go around in circles. The bees and the brush strokes represent that. I also created an unsettling composition with all the bees heavily weighted in the top left corner to push the feeling of anxiety on the viewer.
Creating this painting was a rollercoaster. I started it right after Thanksgiving break but didn't finish it until January!! I got initially stuck on the floor tiles and the perspective and took entirely too long on them. I also fell in a painting rut over this piece and lost every ounce of motivation to finish so the last half of this piece was nearly impossibly. However, now that I am seeing the finished piece I am extremely proud of myself for sticking it out. I love my color palette and the contrast between the blue and orange. The pinks and yellow also create a nice harmony in the piece. I love the texture I created in the brush work and I think my use of perspective gave my piece a higher level of maturity. I plan to later go back and add more details to the bees and the peanut butter jars, but ultimately I deem this piece successful. In Progress Piece
Final PieceIf you gave a monkey caffeine and then told it to make a piece in a day, this would be the result. I am so disappointed in myself. I created this over thanksgiving break and I had high hopes in the beginning but trying to finish this in lieu of my large southern family was almost impossible, granted that is no excuse. Anywho I am over with the self deprecation and it's time to discuss that technical aspects and overall theme of the piece.
I wanted to convey the message that the industrial world (the monocles) affects the natural world around it. Thinking back it would have made more sense to have inside the monocle black and white and outside the circles in color. That would represent how a lot of natural resources are destroyed in the making a large building. However, For aesthetic reasons I did the opposite. On a technical level I believe I created nice contrasts in the colors, however I hope to go back and push the highlights. I would also like to go back into the piece and sharpen up the circles and bugs, in my mind they look sloppy. I think this piece has a nice textural element as well. While the piece may not be something I'm necessarily proud of, I can learn from it. In the future I will slow down and be patience. When dealing with black and white contrast I will let the black layer dry before I lay down the white and when working on a smaller scale canvas go a little simpler with my design. I hope to revamp this in the future, but for now I must leave it alone. Refrence Picture and In Progress PicturesFinal PieceOh boy this project was a rollercoaster ride. I was way to eager to get it done and started the piece with very little plan. I threw down yellows, purples, and red to make to rocks and I made mud. I kept over blending, trying to add texture, getting frustrated and then wiping the paint away. After much trial and error Rossi finial made me take a step back and paint in all the rock like shapes with a gray. From there I limited my color palette to white, black and yellow and finally acheved the look I was going for. After the first layer of paint dried I was able to add purple for the deep shawdows. The water did not give me a hard time and that aspect of the painting went quickly. The trees in this piece also gave me a hard time, but with layer values I was able to stick it out. All in all, I love this painting. It was so difficult and frustrating, but I am extremely happy I did not just give up. I created nice value changes and texture. The yellow added in the water makes the piece look a little more realistic. I believe this piece is neat and I am glad I did my landscape on a portrait canvas. Reference Picture and SketchesMy inspiration for the piece came from Izzy's expression. To me she resembled an angry animal terrorizing whatever. When in reality she was just yawning. In Progress PictureIts safe to say I will probably never draw fur again unless I have too. Final PieceThis piece was my way of taking a project I did not want to do and making it my own. I was rather disinterested in drawing my cat and I looked at it as tedious and believed the theme of the project was not my style. However, upon shuffling through old pictures of Izzy and believe me I have a lot, I found a picture I took of her yawning and thus my creative juices began to flow. I decided to break out of my oil paint comfort zone and instead make a mixed media piece. I wanted to make something fun and light hearted, a huge contrast to my portrait and to be honest, I went into this piece with little to no plan at all.
To start the piece I drew Izzy on tan-toned paper with prismacolored pencils. I then took a piece of illustration board and covered it in newspaper, next I laid down two different cut out city silhouettes, cut and pasted Izzy down, and lastly pasted down a third little city silhouette in the front. After everything was glued down I painted the buildings with acrylic paint, and the background with watercolor and a little bit of gouache. The fighter jet was a last minute add on and was drawn with prismacolored pencils. Overall I am satisfied with my pet portrait. I am glad I didn't oil paint the piece, but instead stepped out of my comfort zone. I am also thrilled about the uniqueness of this piece. However, I wish I could redo Izzy's fur and whiskers and use a little more realistic color scheme. I got lazy in making the texture of the fur and it definitely reflects in my piece. Reference Picture and SketchesIn Progress PicturesFinal PieceI find it funny how the project I dreaded most turned out to be my favorite. Last year I really lacked confidence in my ability to create and I held back in a lot of ways, always picking subject matter that was "safe" and I knew I could draw with out question. I believe lately I have started to lose that lack of confidence thanks to my summer adventures in Savannah, art 4, and the support/help I get in my independent study. This piece is extremely important to me because it was the cherry on top towards allowing me to believe I can create whatever I want (sorry to be all sappy). This is my second portrait ever, I even avoided them over the summer and I was so scared to start this piece. All I knew was that I wanted to create an expressive piece and from there I began taking pictures. I was even skeptical about painting this picture due to self doubt, but I decided to take the jump anyway and it was probably the best choice I could have made.
On a technical level, the piece is well executed. My face looks like my face, the color harmony flows nicely, I created nice texture and still managed to incorporate a very stylistic feel without over doing it. I first drew the piece on newsprint and then traced it over to the canvas, this technique reduced any stress I had because it allowed me to make mistakes until I got it right. I believe my proportions are correct, I am a little skeptical about the neck and forehead, but for the most part everything looks good. My goal in the beginning of the piece was to use more warm colors than cool, I still incorporated warm colors, but decided to great more of a gradient in the hair. The sections closer to the face had more red and orange hues and as they got further away I added more blue and purple hues. I also carried out the light blue and green in the piece through the shirt, butterflies, and eyes. I enjoyed making the swirls because I didn't have to think that much and just took big globs of paint and worked it onto the canvas. Thus creating a nice texture as well. Ultimately, I am incredibly proud of this piece. I LOVE the juxtaposition between the distressed expression and bright, lively background. I plan to hopefully make more portraits in the future. Reference Picture and SketchesIn Progress PicturesFinal PieceFor this project I was asked to create an interior space piece and in the beginning I had no idea how hard finding a subject matter would be. It took me nearly a week to choose what I wanted to do, I contemplated a bathroom sink, an alley, a front porch and even the inside of a toilet. After I had wasted a lot of time, I finally settled on a picture of my moms birthday cake. I definitely didn't like settling and it felt like I was doing this piece just to appease the project (if that makes sense). Anyway I definitely believe my distain towards this piece comes from the subject matter.
Apart from the subject matter, I believe this piece was a good way to practice my painting skills. This piece forced me to color block a wide variety of colors, unlike the shoe piece where I only had a couple colors in a square, and ultimately helped me get more comfortable with the medium. I really love the designs I created on the cake and the texture I was able to create with big blobs of paint, and speaking of creating texture, this piece allowed me to get more comfortable in doing so. I think I was successful in creating a nice color scheme, however it wasn't the color scheme I pictured. Originally I wanted to create a more mono-chromatic piece, but I always seem to return to the same color palette. I believe the perspective of the cake is off, but that is because I drew the angles wrong and was too lazy/ stubborn to take the time and fix them. My shadows and highlights are also a little off because it was hard for me to figure out the light source in the picture. Regarding the box, I am frustrated on how it doesn't look like a box or really like the viewer is looking into it. I think the curvy sides are what throws off the eye and I regret doing that. Lastly, I think the piece is definitely not my favorite, but because of it I was able to get more comfortable with oil paints and can safely say, they are my favorite medium. I enjoyed the definitely simplicity of the piece and the texture I created. However, I hope I can one day sell this piece and get enough money from it to go shopping. In honor of October, my mentee and I and did some Ink monsters. We learned about an artist who splatter ink onto paper and created a monster so we did the same! My Ink splatter did not turn out quite how I planned and I didn't really know what to turn it into. I basically just started drawing super fast without thinking and it turned into this creepy looking guy. I don't necessarily know how I feel about my piece, but it was fun to make. Reference Picture and SketchesIn ProgressAt this point in the project my opinion of oil paints had changed greatly since the apples, I had learned how to have better control of the medium. I was able to apply the paint without over blending and. as a result, could create nice contrast. Final PieceFor this project we had to create an oil painting of an everyday object and at first all I could think of was things that represented a still life and the idea of that was incredibly boring to me. I also struggled to think of an object that sparked my interest or represented me as an artist. After lots of mediocre ideas, I finally settled on my Birkenstocks.The idea of the long canvas and pop art feel appealed to me because it allowed me to address the prompt while still being original.
On a technical aspect, this project really made me fall in love with oils (or at least appreciate them) because the paints allowed me a achieve a rich color, create smooth value transitions, and achieve texture throughout my pieces. I was able to plan and section out colors and then over time blend them together. I also enjoyed taking large clumps of paint and strategically placing them on the canvas after the under layers of paint had dried. I did however struggle greatly on the red shoes; the underpainting was red and the red oil paint looked brown before the background was added. As a result I kept over blending colors and applying to much paint, forcing me to scrape the shoe and start over. Ultimately, this is one of my favorite pieces ever. I enjoyed working with oils and I like how it literally forced me to plan my colors, which is something I rarely do. By planning my color scheme my color harmony worked nicely with the shoes being order cool, warm, cool and the backgrounds the opposite. In the future I plan to work with oils and continue improving my skills. For my first time using oils, I was definitely not a fan. I kept over blending or trying to lay colors down on top of each other like it was acrylic paint and I learned very fast that you can not do that. For the palette knife piece, I also started out too fast and went to dark. In the future I plan on planning out color schemes and trying a more structured approach to the painting.
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January 2017
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