Concentration #3
For my concentration I wanted to do one piece based around status and/or money. I wanted to do something with burning money, so I painted a rich man with a burning hundred-dollar bill for his head. It is symbolizing how a wealthy person can feel no worth from their amount of money. This man is freeing himself by burning the only aspect of himself that society sees. I put the money in place of his head to represent how they are interchangeable, his self worth being his monetary wealth. Similar to my last piece, I'm in love with the idea but not with the way I executed it. The composition is quite boring and nothing in the painting is very detailed at all. I like the color palette I chose- I think the maroon background fits nicely with the theme. The hand holding the glass of champagne/some yellow alcoholic beverage looks reallllyyy similar to my "Wine Mom" painting, which I realized later on. I don't think it matters much though. My favorite parts are the fire and the suit. I originally disliked how the fire blended into the red background, but now I think it looks cool and gives off a cool glow. I like the big globs of yellow paint I added to it at the end. I love how the fire looks like the second progress picture, but I did the gradient going in the opposite direction. I wish I just left it like that because it looked more realistic to me and I doubt anyone would notice. I've hardly ever used my black acrylic, so it was nice to actually use it in this painting. I had fun mixing various grey values in the tuxedo. I like the highlights on the arms and leg and around the jacket collar edge. I hate the wood floor the most. I feel like if I had wanted to spend more time on the floors that the whole piece would look more complete. The chair and floor combination along with the slightly boring background make this look like a painting I'd do in Art 2. I like the bookshelf okay. I'm just glad I put SOMETHING in the background. I feel like I should've made the two wall panels different colors to emphasize that they are in fact NOT the same wall. That would be a super easy fix that I should go back and do at some point. I would rate this painting a 6/10. I like it, but I know it isn't my best work. I think it'll do fine in the midst of my other concentration pieces and I like the message it's portraying.
Concentration #4
This painting deals with how people can escape from reality whilst dreaming. Dreaming is the only freedom from reality that some people can find. The watch and numbers around the person's neck symbolize the stress they feel from the real world. The little Sandman person sitting on the moon is fishing the person's head off their body and pulling them into a dream. When I started this piece, I was excited about it. I thought the idea was basic, but I liked how the body and head and cracks were turning out in the beginning. I still think it's cool, but it's not my favorite. I feel like I love the ideas of all my concentration pieces so far, but the execution is not up to par. I love the face and body and cracks in the skin. I also love the white dots coming out of the head and flowing out of the neck. I like the stars more that I dulled some of them down. They're still quite bright in contrast to the dark colors of the background and skin, but I sort of like their emphasis. I like my idea of having the little man fishing for the person's head and breaking it off. I think that's the only slight indicator that this painting is dealing with dreams. I'm not sure how well I portrayed the dream aspect, but I think people will understand if I explain it. I loved Rossi's idea of turning the moon into a clock because I originally just had random clocks just floating around. I always forget about tying everything together and making my pieces cohesive. The composition of this is very mediocre. It was fun to make use of the 12x24 canvas- something I'd never used before. I think I did a decent job at utilizing the space, but I don't LOVE the moon in the corner and the star all up top and nothing in the middle of the background. I didn't want to add more to the background because there's already so much going on. I like having the watch around the neck with the numbers flying off the face, but I hate the watch. You can't even tell what it is. I will 100% be going back in and redoing the watch, but for now I'm not touching it and moving on.
Updated pic
Concentration #5
I'm so glad I decided to do this for my fifth concentration piece. It was quick, it was fun, it was easy, and I love it. I don't know why I've been focused on acrylic for the past few weeks when there are so many other mediums that I love. For example, pen and ink. I always sketch with pens, but I hardly do full projects with them. For some reason I had in my head that cross hatching and stippling are the only techniques to use, both of which are VERY tedious. I wanted to do a piece dealing with finding freedom through alcohol and/or drugs, and this was a nice, mild, school-appropriate idea. Aside from the execution, I like the composition. The overlapping of bottles reminds me of the glass graphite project I did in drawing class. I really like the glasses sliding off the face with the closed eyes and the hand running through the hair. I also love the spilled wine glass. I honestly have no complaints with this drawing. The perspective in the front bottle with the round top is off, but I don't think it looks weird just because the whole drawing isn't uniform. My favorite bottle is the "Vino" one on the right. I like how I did the top and sides with uniform lines, and the label is a fun font. I just wrote random things on the bottles and I'm surprised that it doesn't look bad. It took three days from start to finish, which I needed after spending over a week on each of my last pieces. I'm still behind, but I'm less behind. I added a good amount of value everywhere (not too light, not too dark) without even paying any attention. The sketchy scumbling style I used was super fun and relaxing. I often get caught up in planning and sketching everything out, but I almost always love the things I do when I freehand and don't think about it.
Concentration #6
This piece has a sort of transcendentalist theme with a hiker throwing all of her electronics off a cliff. It was fun and quick, just like my last pen and watercolor piece. My original idea was to have someone throwing their electronics out a window, but I decided to add more to the theme and make the person hiking in nature. Unless you really look at it, I feel like you can't easily see the electronics and figure out what's going on. They get lost in the background. At the same time, I like how the crazy pen marks make the piece look. The legs and feet and face are my least favorite parts. The perspective on the legs is way off. I wanted the legs to get thinner towards the bottom because I was trying to get an aerial view to see over the edge of the cliff, but it just looks weird. Then I struggled with the shoes and drawing them at that angle, so I just make them really dark to cover things up. The face is fine, but the chin is jutting out and the girl has an under-bite and pointy lower lip. I wish I left more highlights in the upper arm and legs and shoes. I like the varied lines in the rocks, like at the top of the leftmost one mixed with the squiggles in the middle ones. I like the water bottle and rolled-up mat at the bottom of the backpack, but the backpack itself should have way more wrinkles and be slouchy. I wish I put the camera up a little higher so that it would be in front of the blue background. I like that the laptop has an open DVD slot with the DVD flying out. I think this is a cool and different piece that goes well with my concentration, which is all I want at this point, so I'm happy with it. I like that I'm trying out new mediums to work with so that I'm not just slowly progressing with my acrylics throughout the semester.
Concentration #7
This concentration piece is showing how some people find freedom through dancing and partying. I was scrolling through my camera roll looking for ideas, and for some reason I had a plethora of pictures of my friends/myself jumping and doing weird things. I bought this gigantic canvas for like $7 at A. C. Moore a few months ago and didn't know what I'd use it for, but once I came up with this idea, I knew it'd be perfect. I wanted to capture the movement of the people jumping around, so I thought to do that by having their limbs just fade off in big paint strokes. I started out with the rainbow background, wanting this painting to be composed mainly of primary colors. I like the uneven gradient, and I think the "non-background background" works well with this theme. I painted this in a weird order. I started with the background, then moved on to painting the skin on all the people because I knew my perfectly-mixed skin color would be dried up the following day. I guess the progression of the rest of it was normal, but it started out a little backwards. I really have no complaints except the clothing. Clothing and fabric is always a struggle for me. The shirts look decent, but the shorts are horrendous. Luckily I don't think they're very noticeable in the midst of everything else happening on the canvas. The hair was frustrating in the beginning, but I'm happy with it now. I added a few layers, starting with the darkest and ending with the lightest. I made the strands different lengths and less uniform than my first attempt. I surely didn't want to add faces to the people because 1) I didn't think they needed faces, 2) recreating the skin tone seemed like a steep challenge, and 3) they're all supposed to be the same person in different poses and I know they'd all turn out differently, which would likely bother me. I was going to add balloons in the background, and the face shapes already looked like balloons, so I decided to simply turn the visible faces into balloons. Then there was a whole debate about whether or not I should add the string, and if they should be holding their balloons. Well, none of them have hands and I liked it that way, so the second option was not an option. I'm glad I added the strings to make them more balloon-like. Then came the splatter painting, which was part of the plan all along- I was just patiently awaiting the end. I splatter painted primary colors and white. I love this painting, and it's one of the favorite things I've done so far.
Concentration #8
The idea behind this piece is that people can find freedom through moving out. Sometimes people need a new environment to start fresh and escape their situation. I like this drawing because it reminds me of Where's Waldo. There are a lot of little elements that all come together. On the other hand, nothing about it is AMAZING. I like everything except the house. For some reason I totally eyeballed the house and just went in with my pen before drawing it out in pencil, and the perspective is awful. I like the window and bushes and front door with the overhang, but I do not like the roof nor the walls. I wish I had looked up reference pictures of houses because clearly I don't really know what they look like off the top of my head. Aside from the house, I think my perspective everywhere else looks nice. I love the person on the right carrying the stack of boxes and how the body is leaning back with the weight of the boxes. The guy on the left is a little stiffer than I wanted, but I think he looks fine. I had some issues with the couch perspective, but I really like how the couch turned out with the pink and all the pen values. The front of the U-Haul looks weird and flat and white. Also the sky should have more values or clouds or something, and it just looks like a few little sketch scribbles. I really love this composition with so many different elements in the foreground, middle ground, and background. It reminds me of a Where's Waldo type illustration. I'm still sticking with my scribbly pen-and-ink technique because I love how it turns out every time. It's so fun and freeing being able to make random yet uniform marks all over the paper. I want to try out a different medium for my next piece because I am getting slightly bored, but I feel like I need to stick with what I'm comfortable with because of the time crunch.
Concentration #9
This piece took me way longer than I feel like it should have, but it's done, and I'm content with it. I actually really like it besides the person. I like the idea of the dog running free from its owner; I wanted to incorporate more non-human things into my concentration. Now I have two completed animal pieces, which takes the emphasis away from just the one I had done earlier. I love the dog's pen marks and tongue and ears and how he's chasing a tennis ball. The perspective on this in interesting. I intended for the dog to be bigger in the foreground and put a tiny human in the background, but the girl and dog are relatively similar in size. I laugh when I look at the person because her face is super weird and her arm is HUGE. I was aiming for a nice foreshortening look, but it just looks funny. I sort of like it because it adds to the cartoonish look of the whole piece. It reminds me of an illustration to a children's book about a runaway pet dog. I like how the flowers are all uniform and just look like happy little fake flowers on a hill. I wish I had put more detail/hidden objects into the background, like a person looking out the car window or people sitting on a bench. The composition is lacking because of this. I attempted to add more with the light pole, but let's be honest, it doesn't really add much. Aside from the hand being gigantic, the palm is also tiny and the fingers don't look right. I should use a reference picture next time. I do well with reference pictures, and lately I haven't been using any at all just because I'm too lazy to take my own and nothing online matches the image I have in my head. I don't have too many complaints about this, but there's also nothing very special about it. I need to challenge myself with more complicated compositions because that is the main thing holding me back right now.
Concentration #10
My goal was to complete a small piece by the end of the week (I started on Wednesday), and I did it. This is a small 8x10 canvas. It’s not my favorite just because I rushed through it and hardly focused on the composition, but at the same time I think it’s a cool, fun little painting that will look good with my other concentration pieces. This piece is showing the freedom that a high schooler feels at graduation, a grande finale after 12+ years of standard education. It also marks a turning point in one’s career. I didn’t want to paint someone throwing his/her graduation cap in the air because I feel like that is the most basic association to graduation that exists. Instead, I simply painted a girl wearing her cap and her hand gripping her diploma. I like that the hand is more of a symbol than part of the painting, but it still contributes to the theme. There is supposed to be a slightly deeper meaning with the fact that the person depicted is a minority black female who happens to be graduating. My favorite parts are the hand and the background. I love the shadows in the hand and wrist. I also feel like the proportion looks nice. The background was really fun to paint- I painted the whole thing a solid blue/turquoise color, added some lighter strokes, added a dark hue around all the subjects, and lastly added some white and yellow dots and things for contrast and variety. Although the profile of the face looks unnatural, I like the colors. I like the dark blue shadows and stark white highlights and how they contrast each other. I don’t particularly like the cap because it looks too small, but the strokes look fine. I hate the hair and my random attempts at adding value. Hair is always a struggle, especially this time because I had no reference picture. I wanted the hair to simply be a dark brown color with light brown highlights and black lowlights, but for some reason this concept gave me much trouble. I think because the whole painting is pretty stylized with a lot of random white paint, it looks a tiny bit better. It’s still pretty bad. I at least need to go over the WHITE white parts closest to her face. Then maybe it’ll be a bit better. Overall this painting is just what I needed. It was a quick and easy thing to throw into the mix, and now I’m back on track. I didn’t have two weeks to spend on one piece, so I’m glad I got the easy one out of the way and now I can finish strong with my last two.
Concentration #11
Number eleven is now completed and it's almost all over. This piece is portraying the American Dream: an upper middle-class white couple, a newborn baby, a perfectly-obedient dog, the classic white picket fence, pristine lawn, and multiple American flags to show just how American they truly are. When I talk to my friends about the future, we all similar ideas as to what our lives will look like in ten years. We picture a husband, kids, a dog, a house of our own, travelling occasionally, and all while living comfortably within our financial means. I think I included enough elements to accurately get my point across. So in a summary, this is what American freedom looks like. This painting went by fairly quickly- only four days. Throughout the semester I've gotten much better at knowing what I can handle in the amount of time I have. I'm more comfortable with my techniques and can whip up solid, complete paintings without perfecting it for upwards of two weeks. I got a lot done in the first day because the lawn took probably ten minutes. I felt like Monet doing impressionism with my little brush and loose colors for all the greenery. I had never done an architecture piece before this one, and now I'm inspired to paint a picture of my grandma's house or my old house in Florida because I really enjoyed it. I'm not a big landscape person because I don't find it as interesting or challenging as other subjects, but I appreciate them when I do them. My favorite part is the tiny family and the landscaping (bushes, trees, grass under the fence). My least favorite part is the house itself. I like the style I used, but the sloppiness of the windows bothers me more as I stare at them. It was hard to get a neat, thin line with my smallest brush, and in the moment I guess I was too lazy to take my time or borrow someone's brush. It does, however, look exactly like the house in the picture that I used as reference. This is one of my favorites because I think it's just a very cohesive and aesthetically pleasing painting, no matter how basic of a scene it is.
Random Cat
Disclaimer if not obvious: this is not a concentration piece.
I started this drawing of my friend's baby kitten when she first got her, but this was a while ago and now she's a full grown cat. I had only done the face when I found it in my desk drawer of art stuff and decided to finish it. It doesn't look like much, but man stippling takes a LONG time. This is my first stippling drawing, and I'm used to scumbling around a huge paper in no time, so this was a challenge. I didn't want to do the background because I was becoming quite bored of the tedious dotting of my paper, so I cut it out and brought it to school to glue onto an illustration board and painted over everything in water color. It reminds me of some 2012 Tumblr art with the dripping colors, but I actually love this and think it looks super cool.
I started this drawing of my friend's baby kitten when she first got her, but this was a while ago and now she's a full grown cat. I had only done the face when I found it in my desk drawer of art stuff and decided to finish it. It doesn't look like much, but man stippling takes a LONG time. This is my first stippling drawing, and I'm used to scumbling around a huge paper in no time, so this was a challenge. I didn't want to do the background because I was becoming quite bored of the tedious dotting of my paper, so I cut it out and brought it to school to glue onto an illustration board and painted over everything in water color. It reminds me of some 2012 Tumblr art with the dripping colors, but I actually love this and think it looks super cool.
Concentration #12
My final concentration piece. It has to do with life and death. I wanted there to be a lot of symbolism within the piece. I drew a girl on her death bed, her angel flying through the window, her older self staring straight ahead and sitting in a chair, and contrasting pictures hanging on the wall that portray life and death. From the beginning, I wanted my final piece to be about death. I brainstormed for a while, and this is what I came up with. I like the composition, but I wish the colors were brighter or I used more varied pen values. Also, the whole bed area is not proportionate to the huge things around it. It took me 2-3 class periods, and it shows. I like contrasting blues and oranges I used to emphasize the life and death theme. It was fun to draw this perspective and all the cartoon-y faces. I used more of a wet-on-wet technique with the watercolors on the walls and floors, and I really like the effect it gives. When I was finished, I went back and added random dots of acrylic paint. I like how you have to really look at this piece to see everything that's going on. Like I said earlier, I wish I used more pen. I basically just outlined everything and then quickly painted the whole thing. In previous pen and watercolor pieces, I used a lot more pen and added watercolor as a final touch to break up all the black and white sketchiness. In this piece, I wanted to focus more on watercolor and use pen as a tool to get darker values in the outlines, but then I failed to use darker watercolor values. I like the idea of this piece, but it's not my favorite. Especially against the white matte and white wall in the art gallery, nothing stood out very much. My other pieces looked much better in my opinion, but it was a good end to my twelve pieces because it wrapped everything up.
Final Reflection
I've taken at least one art class with Ms. Rossi every semester of my high school career at Apex High, so you can imagine I will feel lost without it next year. I picture myself as a young sophomore new to Apex High School in Art 2 making clay cinnamon buns and look at how much I've grown. My character has developed along with my art style these past three years. Art has been basically the only constant in my life for a while now, and it will stay that way forever. I have gained enough confidence in my artwork to display it, sell it, and experiment with it. Part of this is that I've gained confidence in myself as well. I didn't think I'd be a stereotypical art kid in high school, but that is what many people know me as (secondary to being a runner). I've sat in on the AP Art classes for the past three years through independent study and taken Art 4 multiple times, so I could guess how the year would play out. I remember looking at previous AP Art student's portfolio's and loving every single one, and that's exactly what happened this year too. I made so much art over the course of three years without my portfolio in mind, so it was weird to finally put together my 24 pieces and include random pieces that I didn't even care for. Everyone talks about how stressful this year has been, but it really hasn't been stressful to me. I feel like I knew what to expect and how to avoid procrastination to the best of my ability. Everyone thought I worked so quickly and was way ahead, but really I just learned to work quickly with what I know I am good at. I made the most of my class time and took pieces home on many weekends just to work to catch up. At the end of the year, I still made time to do "fun art", like the cat stippling piece, and was even able to include it in my breadth. I thought that doing a lot of art and being on a time crunch would stress me out and teach me to hate art, but it was the opposite. I really liked the loose deadlines and having to work hard at what I love. It pushed me to not waste time and stay on top of everything. I am way more comfortable with doing random art pieces because I know I'll enjoy the process and will probably enjoy the end result. I have so many leftover canvases and materials that I am excited to use them in the next few months. Because I'm going to camp all summer and won't have access to much art nor have much time to do it, I am excited to simply sketch in a sketchbook like I did last summer and see what I can create. This year has given me a different outlook on the art world. I'm always contemplating art school/studying art in college, and this year made me realize that I can handle more than I think I can and that maybe art school wouldn't be a bad idea after all. Thank you to my wonderful class for inspiring me every day. It helps immensely to have such amazing influences pushing you to do your best every morning. Also thank you to Ms. Rossi for changing the art game for all of us- I don't know how she does it every year, but she does. This has been a great year, and I will miss a lot about it. I will hopefully continue to post my artwork on this blog.