This was my last art piece I made my senior year. It is a simple piece due to the fact there was only 4 days of art class left. It is an old merchant ship on the water made from pastels.
For this art piece, I used a charcoal pencil for the tree branches and out lines. Then for the eye and body I used lite water pastel to fill in the white spots with a smooth color. This is a piece inspired by little red riding hood. I used a black and white base color to have the red hood stand out to the observer. The colors were created with basic paint.
This was my first plaster art piece I made this semester. It is a black leopard with tribal designs. I got inspiration for this piece by the ancient Inca's. They have a lot of art of animals with dot and line designs on their bodies. This art piece is a toad resting on a leaf floating on a pond. Both the toad and leaf are made from plaster molds, but the pond is made from a flattened spiral clay design. I got the inspiration to make this piece from my love for the outdoors. I love taking my dog to this one pond where there are hundreds of fogs and in the spring time you can always find them on old leaves from the fall time.
This was just a quick sketch I did on a block day. I just used a stencil pencil for shading. I like drawing scenic and nature images. This is a drawing of an ocean inlet from Norway. Norway is one of my top 5 places to visit because of its natural beauty so I wanted to draw the scenery.
In the past eighteen weeks of school, I have made many art pieces that I am really happy about, but there is one specific piece that is my favorite. That one piece that I love so much is my dark shading of a crow sitting on a branch. I spent a lot of time and heart into this piece, plus it has a lot of influences from my past put into it. To some, the picture may seem dark, eerie or depressing but to me it has many emotions in it. Most people can't find all the emotions in my pieces of work, but I know this one is extra tricky because it has depth to it.
A big influence for me to use a crow in my piece for starters is that it is my favorite bird. For a bird they have a very unique personality and are very smart. I have always liked them since a child even though people call them pest or think they are evil by associating them with death. To me crows are a joy to have a round because they are funny to watch, so it just had to be in my piece of work. Next I had to decide what material I was going to use as my canvas. I didn't want a plain white piece of paper because it was to bright and it didn't allow the black to have the grainy texture that I wanted. So I went with one of my favorite materials, the light brown, rough paper. It gave the picture a warm background which helps throw off the darkness of the black. Now I didn't get this piece right the first time I attempted it because I just couldn't get the tree to look the way I wanted. I also had the hardest time trying to evenly balance the crows body with the tree and the size of the paper. I am not used to drawing birds in the first place, but especially one on a large scale. Finally after getting everything sketched out correctly on the second try, it was time to color. I used a black pastel for the whole picture and the technique I used for light shading is quite unusual. I would break a piece off the pastel and ground it down into dust. Then I would rub my finger in it and use my finger like a brush adding accents to the picture to give it depth. The shading also gave it the emotional depth I wanted. I have already talked about the happiness in the picture but there is a sad side too. This piece is a representation of me, and my anxiety that I live with. Birds at any point can fly away when they are scared, where with me I have to stay where I am. When my anxiety hits, it feel like a a numb, emptiness inside, like the dead tree in the piece. The is not flying in the piece but instead is holding onto this branch of a dead tree. There is a warm light in the background but is slowly being covered with darkness from the tree. But it doesn't consume everything because I am able to cope with it with happiness. Hence the bird in the picture being my favorite bird. This piece has many emotions, thoughts, and planning in it, giving it a special connection for me. This is not a sad piece, it is not a happy piece, but a part of my life on paper. A visual casing of what goes on in my mind that a lot of people have never dealt. I have made many pieces of my past, but never a piece about me. Everything I have made shows my interests, passions, hobbies, but never me. These are the reasons that make this art piece my favorite. I have really came a long way of the semester when it comes to my art work. A lot of my art, I like to work with dark colors and shading because I feel like it adds depth to my images. From my very first pieces I've found a lot on new techniques to add texture to my pieces with pastel chalk. It allows me to shade my pieces with the color I want, from making it seem misty in my Lighthouse piece to adding a dark depth in my Raven piece. I've learned a lot from trial and error this semester but I have definitely gotten better in my free hand/ shading in my art pieces.
Me and Austin Back decided to work together for our new art piece. We decided to make a large scale lighthouse out of cardboard. After we make the basic shape of the lighthouse we will cover the cardboard in either paper mache or some kind of blaster to smooth out the connecting pieces. It will also give it a nice texture. I estimate it will be complete in the next 2 weeks.
Right now I am currently working on an art piece that focuses on blending of dark colors. I started it on October 30th as a creepy painting for a Halloween mood. It's been pretty difficult to make of the past several days because it's not easy to blend the same color that I had previously had the day before. It's also been difficult to paint around the tiny branches mainly since its hard to find a fine brush in our art room. So the final touches I need to add is to repaint some of the branches and add a few finer details. After all this I should be able to get it done before the end of class.
While waiting on normal days (the days I can't spray paint), I decided to start a new art piece to pass the time. The current piece I am working on is a scratch board of a scarecrow during a full moon for Halloween. Originally it was going to be a white background with a yellow moon but I ran into a problem with the white. The white hard to notice how much I had down, so once I started scratching a lot of the paint wasn't coming off without tearing the paper off. So I decided to start over completely and now my new piece will still have the yellow moon but instead of the scarecrow being white, it will now be orange. The orange works out best because black and orange are Halloween colors.
I am making progress on my altered book even though it is taking me longer than I thought it would. I struggled with cutting out the bird cage shape through the book and cutting out the bars to be even with each other of the indention. It is also taking me a lot of time and concentration to cut out the white spaces on the branches with out cutting the colored areas. But even with all of these time consuming tasks I think I'll be done sometime next week and I think it'll be my best work so far!
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