This blog is being designed for students, parents, faculty and staff at Walhalla High School. The blog is meant to provide a space for a continous display of artwork both in-progress and finished. In addition, information about upcoming projects and plans, resources to aid students with projects, photos of student work, and images/ topics open for comments from students as to provide with a way to better help and teach students.
Now that this piece is complete, I find myself reminded of my favorite coffee shop in Highlands and the lovely still life paintings that are for sale there. Perhaps my sub-conscious was secretly inspired by that place (and its delicious coffee).
My primary goal was to focus on color, value, and shape and I am pleased with the overall effect. I much prefer this to the pear I did last year who's color scheme was, in my opinion, too bright to be aesthetically pleasing. Had I not fallen ill, I would have liked to reproduce this in a darker color scheme with deep purples and rich browns, however that plan shall have to wait until a later project. Perhaps I can somehow orchestrate it to go aside this pear in a contrasting project, a study of color and shadow.
Or perhaps I shall tire of pears and revert back to my old habit of decrepit looking trees...only time will tell.
A Chinese exchange of arbitrary words left me with "flower." "Flower," was to be my inspiration for a piece of my preferred style and medium. As a first piece I played it safe; I pulled ideas for content from a previous pastel face and flower I had done. Stylistically I chose to do pop art. I was fortunate to be able to use "flower," as my motivation for this piece because I thoroughly enjoy drawing portraits especially when I can add the flare of a flower. Due to my love of flowers, faces, and pastels, it is probable my portfolio will contain multiple pieces of this style.
I've had a few ask, "who is it?" referring to the girl in my piece; I do not have a legitimate answer for that question, I just started drawing and that is what came together on my paper. I used all shade of blue for the face and hair, excluding the lips and shadows of gray and black. Once I reached the flower I was torn between color choice. I consulted Quinton with options: pink/magenta shades, yellow shades, or green shades (lime green is how I envisioned it.) Quinton advised no green because the color palette would be too similar. We decided yellow as best option. I also included one streak of yellow in hair for a random kick. I finished the whole portrait itself but was left with immense negative space in the surrounding. Yet again I consulted Quinton with the option of black. He gave good advice which was, black would make it too dark; he then brilliantly suggested red. I then consulted Hannah with the idea of red. We all liked it so it was a go. Because there were no red markers readily available at the time and I didn't want to compromise the pastel with paint, I painted bristle board red, cut out the portrait then pasted it to the board. Thank you Mrs. Glenn for that suggestion.
Self critique: the shades are brighter than I wanted but I can't control the shade of my pastels. While doing the right side of the hair I lost perspective of what the hair should look like; disregard hair on right side. (Luckily the placement of the flower on the left draws attention to that side and away from right). I added a shadow in dark red on the left of the portrait as a final touch but once I had finished I immediately regretted it. For one, the shadow is on the wrong side, and the proportion off it making it look awkward.
Give critiques please so I can better my art. Thank you much.
This is my first time using this blog, so i don't really know exactly what i am supposed to do. Anyway though, so when we all picked words out of the hat to figure out what our project had to be based on, my word was (obviously) fish. I was not really sure where to go with that, but i started drawing fish and eventually came up with the blue-green fish and the purple-blue fish. Unfortunately, these were in my sketch book. However,when i tried to redo them on actual water color paper, the results were so bad that I decided just to use the ones in my sketch book. The third red fish followed after those two were already painted and ready to be glued down somewhere. I found the back ground at my house- i am not entirely sure where it came from, but the texture reminded me of water. So... that's it?
According to Hannah, not quite. In a flash of originality, i believe i will name this project "fish". This was a mixed media product- paper, watercolor, white crayon and colored pencil. The dimensions are 11 inches tall by 8.5.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
When I pulled one of the pieces of paper out of the hat, I got tomato. The first thing to come to my mind was a still life. I don't really think outside of the box so I obviously didn't hide my object in my artwork.
When I first drew out the piece of paper from the hat with the word button on it I thought of a child tugging around a fuzzy bear with only one button for an eye. Then I started to remember when I was little and used to be afraid of the dark. So I drew a window with a storm brewing outside and a tree that could tap against the window. Then I got to thinking about how much you make believe when you are young and wish you could go to outer space and be a superhero, I got the Batman idea from a friend of mine, and added those into the drawing to contradict what was happening through the window. The one thing I wish I would have done though was make the button on the bear stand out more. I tried making it red but the red mixed with the pencil and didn't stand out like I would have liked it to.
This is my first year in the Advanced art class (which is VERY exciting) and within my first and last year of GT I plan to branch out and experiment with new media, techniques, and other things of that nature... This is all in hopes that I will find my own personal style. I want my art to have a signature... other than my name at the bottom of the page.
Our first assignment- My inspiration was the word "feather" I loved ALL of the ideas that popped in my head! More of my projects later on will probably be inspired from feathers as well.
This one is Hail to the War God. It is an indian "war pony" when the Native Americans prepared for battle they dressed their horses in bright paints, with different symbols meaning different things. Feathers (and medicine bags) tied in the locks of the maine were seen as good luck. A Paint horse in general was preferred by the Natives. I wanted to show beauty within the horse rather than evil spite (a warrior) to show that these horses were sacrificed much of the time in battle. I wanted to represent the forced effort put forth by the horses of the Indians.
We were told to draw words out of a hat for this project, and I got 'Fork'. I decided to focus entirely around contrast, the graphite of the fork to the oil pastels used on everything else, the colors of the ballet dresses compared to the blue, darker background, ect. It is approxomately 12'' by 9'' and was done with oil pastels, colored pencils, and graphite pencils. I would've liked, I think, to have added more depth to the girls (darkening the farther back legs) and more emphasis on the eating weapon, but all in all I'm fairly pleased how they ended up sort of being overlook-able to the fork's presence. I'm not sure why they're trying to push a giant fork into the ground, but my former idea of a forklift turning on the fork of a road wasn't exactly fitting into my strengths.
Above is my watercolor painting to which I humbly title "Ladybirds". It is my piece for the class's paint-by-subject drawing, in which I had to draw insperation from the word 'ladybug'. Of course I played it safe by painting a bug on a flower, with maybe the slight twist of unique dimention. For this piece I tried to employ shape, color, and proportion, which I think turned out relatively well dispite my inability to paint a clean oval. This is the first time I've completed a watercolor painting (successfully) and I think this is made obvious by how I avoided detail work or intricate scenery. Also, as far as the illusion of dimention, I believe I made a mistake in darkening the stem field at the center, making there be shading at the sides and center which leaves awkward bright spots at the middle-left and middle-right. The ladybugs turned out okay, which was the point to begin with, but the overall picture dissapoints me and I feel I could have done better had I put some more time into sketching out the scene before painting. As far as tha picture itself goes, it could really be one of two things. If my illusion of dimention was successful, I've illustrated the journey of a single ladybug by painting several in a sort of mine that gradually gets closer. If I've failed to achieve the illusion, it is a diagram displaying the results of radioactivity in a dandilion field, flowers mutating to mature at a larger size and indiginous insects growing from their normal pebble size to that of a
To get us started on our first breadth piece, Mrs. Glenn had us draw artistic ideas from a hat. The idea I selected was apple...go figure :) So in true tradition to the AP artwork lifestyle, I completely deviated from what I was supposed to do. For my piece, I created two tree women or nymphs (whichever you prefer Quinton), with the main emphasis portraying the values of line and color. My mediums were colored pens and the approximate size is 11" by 13". As you can see, the lines are prominent in the bark and foliage and the colors border on extreme, from black and whites to browns greens and reds.
However, unwilling to break out into full mutiny, I portrayed the tree woman on the left as an apple tree. So, whoever says I don't deserve full credit because I did not include any type of apple into the theme, please turn your attention to the top, left hand corner :)
All in all, I like my piece, however I would love it if my pens hadn't quit on me in the middle of finishing. The blue is not as vibrant as I would have hoped and my attempts to create a flesh colored tone on the left tree resulted in a disastrous hue of yellow which I was eventually able to salvage. For my first breadth piece of an AP portfolio I would consider this successful, however it does motivate me to improve...and buy longer lasting pens.
By popular demand by the Art 4 students we will do blogs once again in order for students to post what they are working on so they may receive feedback and to allow others to see what we are doing out in the art studio at WHS.
Art 4 and AP Studio students are currently working on a piece of their chioce from summer sketches that will be completed by the end of class on Wednesday, September 1. They will post their work by 5pm on Thursday, Septemb er 2 and we will critique projects in class on Friday, September 3.
I am looking forward to an exciting year with this group!
