Bottle Still Life
So I'm not the hugest fan of pencil or observational still life drawings, but I think this project was successful. I like the final product and I didn't hate the process either, so maybe I'm broadening my horizons. It took me a super long time, but I guess that's because I worked on a big paper and using pencil takes longer than paint, etc. The only thing I'd change about this would be to shade in the negative space really dark. Because I used blue paper, the highlights aren't as bright as I'd like them to be and I just think that darkening the background would add more variety and make it somewhat more interesting. I also might go back in to add actual text/details onto the labels because I really didn't even considering attempting them, but I know the drawing would look more professional/realistic if there weren't just blank squares on the bottles. Since the highlights didn't show up super well, I outlined most of the major highlights on the bottles to make them pop. I think the highlights look cool that way and kind of stylized. I was worried about getting the fabric right, but it really wasn't that hard once I actually just drew what I saw and shaded with the folds- it took me a few days to figure that out though, so the fabric was the most challenging part. My favorite bottles are the bottom right and the bottom left. They turned out the best probably because I used a sharp pencil and got really precise lines and values. I also think those bottles had the most difficult shape to draw, so I spent more time on them to get them just right. This project helped me get better at using all the different pencils because whenever I've done a pencil drawing in the past, I always think to myself afterwards how I used the same two pencils throughout the whole thing. This time I paid attention to that and tried to switch pencils often to reach all the values.
Hundertwasser
So this painting reaffirmed the slight dislike that I hold for oil paints, but I did it. I wanted to test myself by doing this in oils because I naturally gravitate towards acrylics, especially for something with detail. I'm proud of myself for conquering this, but part of me thinks that it could be better had I used acrylics instead. I'm glad that I decided to go over the crazy rainbow background because it did not do justice to the rest of the painting. Although this was Hundertwasser inspired, I think all those colors were a bit much for me and that they got lost in everything else going on. I think the new background incorporates more of my style, which I like, and that it compliments the ocean nicely. I think I was successful in making this in the style of Hundertwasser because of the variety of textures and patterns and basic colors all coming together. Looking at it now, I do want to darken up the sun's rays and make the trees' eyes one solid color again. A lot of people during the critique said that they loved the hills and houses, and I'd have to agree that those are also my favorite parts because of the brush strokes I achieved. The trees with faces have the potential to also be my favorite because they're kind of creepy and somewhat of a focus in the composition, but right now they look a little weird to me. I think I did a nice job with a balanced composition and filling the space. Other than the background confusion, the most frustrating part was the ocean and all of its little precise circles. That in itself took me a solid class period, and I can still see all the little smudges and uneven edges that they have. From a distance I think this painting looks awesome, and the idea of it isn't something that I'd think up on my own, so I know it'll make a cool portfolio piece (once I fix up my little issues with it). Mainly I'm just proud that this was done in oils. I'll continue to challenge myself with oils because I'm hoping to fall in love with them as I use them more. It hasn't happened yet and I'm four paintings in, but we'll see.
Mini Concentration #1
This is my first completed piece for my mini concentration. My mini concentration idea deals with what freedom means to different people and the concept of escaping viewed from different perspectives. This pen drawing shows a homeless man receiving a lot of money from a stranger, the money signifying the man's newfound empowerment that he gains from the cash. I love the composition that I chose for this, but there still seems to be a good amount of empty space. I was unsure if I should put things in the grass and on the sidewalk, so I just added texture and value to try to make up for the emptiness. I think I should've added another thing or two alongside the shopping cart to further express the piece's message and to fill the sidewalk space. Drawing in the lady walking the dog was a good decision and it adds a lot. The upper right half of the paper is my favorite section. Everything in that quadrant looks really well-drawn to me, and I like the variety of texture with the few values it has. It looks like a detailed sketch. Every time I use pen and ink, I realize how much I like it. I should use it more. I didn't get too dark in any areas, which always seems to be an issue, so clearly I'm learning to work more carefully. After I thought I was completed, I went back and made the grass and shopping cart lines darker and added to some of the shadows. I really don't think I'd add darker values anywhere else, besides the grass, which looks pretty flat. Opposed to strictly cross-hatching or stippling or scumbling, I used a lot of random marks to shade. I think it works since the drawing isn't super uniform and neat in itself. I want to do more of that in the future and then add in a little bit of watercolor to compensate for the lack of value. The blank white road may look bland and unfinished, but I like it blank. It breaks up all the texture going on and emphasizes the shadows of the car and dog. I think this is a cool drawing that didn't take me too long, and it gave me ideas and inspiration for future pen drawings.
Unfinished Sketch Turned into a Painting
Mini Concentration #2
So this drawing is meant to represent someone from another country, a fleeing immigrant, etc., coming to America. As America is seen as the promise land to some less fortunate countries, the person is probably seeking freedom and escaping whatever persecution they were facing or simply seeking economic freedom within the American economy. I like this drawing okay. Nothing really stands out to me and it looks basic. I love my idea of putting the American flag stamp because I think it's a creative way of getting the message across. I think I did a good job blending the Prismacolors and have nice and smooth color transitions. This is my third Prismacolor drawing, and I've definitely gotten a lo1 better at using them. The colors I used in this are interesting.. I didn't plan for the airplane wing to be green, but then again I didn't really have a plan for what color I wanted it to be. I just didn't want to use much purple/blue because of the window right next to it, so I used a little bit of green, which turned into the whole plane wing turning green. I like the plane wing and think it looks cool but just a little flat. The bottom part of the sky is the part that mainly turns me off. It has all of this emphasis on it because it contrasts all the cool colors everywhere else, but then it doesn't deserve the emphasis because it looks weird to me. It doesn't look bad, but I just really like the top part of the sky and wish I had put land or clouds or something of interest in place of the sunset. Overall I know this isn't my best work, but it's not bad! Now I know that I need to really push myself with my composition because whenever I do, things turn out way better. If I had added clouds/something else in the sky, I know this would look more unique and that it'd look better.
Mini Concentration #3
This is my third piece for my mini concentration on freedom. It's a classroom on the last day of school a minute before school gets out and everyone is thinking summer-y thoughts. My inspiration came from two things- the scene in high school musical when school gets out and the anxious pre-summer feels going around school right now. Freedom for most high-schoolers comes the second the bell rings on the last day of school. The rough sketching and drawing out process for this took me a long time because of the perspective and hands and weird angles etc. I spent forever on figuring out how to make the boy who's leaning on his hand to not look awkward because no way that I positioned his hand looked right. After spending so long on the composition, I'm really happy with how it turned out. I recently made note that I need to push myself more with my planning and expanding my compositions, so I made an effort to do that this time. I think there's a lot to look at and that I filled the large space well. The watercolor process only took me about two hours, and then later I added in a few darker values. My original plan was to do this in watercolor and pen, but then I started to consider adding some acrylic to really get the lights and darks that I wanted. The pen looked really bad at first because I was using such a thick black pen, which looked harsh on all the light colors. Even the little bit that I added looked out of place, so I went over a few parts in acrylic (the popsicle boy's neck and shoulder area). Up close, the acrylic stands out, but I think it looks fine in pictures. I don't like the black and brown paint that I added to the door and have no idea why I put it there. I don't think it looks horrible or anything, but it draws way too much attention to such an insignificant thing and I don't have paint like that anywhere else in the painting. I could add some, but I don't want to risk it anywhere else just in hopes of evening things out. This painting didn't take me too long, and despite all the criticisms I just made, I think it's cool and unique. I like the idea that I had for it and the composition and the way that I drew it. If I could go back, I just wouldn't make a few of the random decisions that I decided to make and I would've followed my plan.
Mini Concentration #4
The idea for my fourth concentration was to have all kinds of animals escaping a zoo to show a type of freedom to something other than people. I planned to do this in watercolor and acrylic and maybe some pen at the end, but I only ended up doing acrylic. I did it on watercolor paper too, which is kind of weird but it works. I guess I would've liked to use canvas to legitimize it more, but at the same time it was easy to do on paper and I thought I'd be using watercolor anyways. I had never seriously drawn/painted animals before (besides pets). It was hard to get them all in different positions and overlapping etc. without having a reference picture. The only real reference picture I used was one of the San Diego Zoo sign, and I combined probably twenty others from the internet to get different pieces of my animals. I wanted to portray this scene differently, like tons of animals were running wild and breaking loose. Showing movement was hard for me, and I don't think I captured it very well. Aside from their bodies, I think I could've changed the animals' expressions to match the scene because they all have bored resting faces. I like the animals I chose and their placement, and I think the composition is one of the best qualities of this painting. For the whole week that I worked on this, I thought it looked too cartoonish and elementary. While I still think this a little bit, now that it's finished I can appreciate it much more as a whole. I know I'm getting a lot better at my compositions because they're all turning out to be my favorite aspects of my work when they used to be my least favorite. I've been making myself actually stick to my planned sketches and finding things to fill empty spaces while still keeping a somewhat balance. This will be the last mini concentration for me this year. I want to do a few random pieces before the year is up. Although I still really like this concentration idea for next year and think I could expand on it, I also want to chose something that I'm more passionate about. I know I can get deeper with my artwork, I just need to allow myself. I think once I make that switch I'll feel a more personal connection to everything I create. I like the idea of having deeper meanings to my artwork that others won't necessarily get out of it. I honestly love all of my artwork, but sometimes it feels shallow because I'm not using it to the great advantage of expressing myself.
Acrylic Portrait Practice
Smurf Party
This is one of the most random things I've done all year. It reminds me of my Hundertwasser painting. Although I started out with an old picture I took of my brother as a reference, I knew it was going to act very loosely as a point of reference. I was going to attempt a strictly monochromatic color scheme for this to challenge my color usage, but that proved itself to be a little difficult and didn't look as interesting and I switched to a more primary-color-based scheme. I was also having trouble blending the face values, but I'm really proud of how it turned out. I like the contrast of the blended face and the not-so-blended everything else. The composition is nice and has variety. I like where I placed each spiral decoration and how the white confetti spews out from the upper right corner. I think my values all turned out really nicely-it's easy to get darks and lights with acrylics. The man's neck looks a little more 2-D than I'd like.. his whole head is really stiff-looking, which I'm fine with, but I know I could've done something more to the neck to make it look more realistic. I don't like the hair either because it doesn't look like hair. The face is more realistic than the hair, so it looks off. It matches too much with the eyebrows and doesn't have any texture at all. This whole piece just has a lot of clashing elements with the adjacent contrasting colors and geometric vs. freeform shapes. It's sort of stressful to look at, but with the party theme, I think it works. I said that I wanted to make more meaningful art, and this is seemingly the opposite, BUT there are multiple stories that could go with it. The red eye was intended to go against the norms of eyes representing one's moral conscience, so I guess this is just a guy plotting his masterful assassin plan while having fun at a party. More contrast. I had been wanting to try painting a face for a while, so I'm glad I finally tested it out.
Pho Feast
I was looking through all my photos for inspiration because I had no guidelines for this last project. I found this picture of my best friends and I from winter break when I went to Florida. I loved the composition and was going to make a Prismacolor out of it, but then I remembered how Prismacolors are tedious and not super fun for me, so I tried another watercolor. I really appreciate good watercolor paintings and want to master the medium. I don't have my own watercolors (time to get some), and the only ones that weren't packed up were liquid ones. The colors were all crazy and vibrant, and not being familiar with liquid watercolors, this was an interesting process. I was really proud of the pen outline I did because it was freehand and turned out really well I think. I was nervous to paint because I didn't want to mess up my precious outline. This painting looks like an illustration to me. I should've added more color variation in everyone's skin and made more of a background. It looks incomplete because of the super basic background, but I honestly just wanted to finish it and not work over the weekend and rushed it. I really like everyone's clothing and the composition of everything on the table. I also love how the three of us look cartoonish but are still identifiable. My mom took one look at this and immediately knew who everyone was, so that was a satisfying reaction. The outline on everything was very thin, and I didn't have enough darks or sharp edges to compensate, so I re-outlined everything in a thicker pen. Overall I love this, it's just the background absence that bothers me, but that can be easily fixed.
Final Reflection
This was a really good semester of art for me. This is the sixth art class I've taken in high school. Woah. I've gained so much confidence in my art over the past couple of months. I proud of everything I make and can see my growth in every piece. I used to be shy about my artwork and would hate when people ask to see the stuff I've done. I think it's so great that I'm prepared for next year- I basically have a whole breadth and half a concentration at this point. I loved having class this semester and being able to have so much freedom. I never used to be able to think of things to draw or paint. Now I've figured out how to inspire myself and push myself more. These blogs honestly help me a lot to track what I need to work on. For example, I frequently notice how I regret not pushing my darks, and I used to think that all my compositions were boring. Seeing those repetitions in my reflections after I complete something helps my improvement. Art has been nothing but a fun outlet for me all year, so now that I have the fun stuff out of the way, I can say that I'm ready to focus and be stressed out of my mind next year. I'm so excited for everything to come, like seeing all my art side-by-side at the senior art show and feeling so accomplished after completing portfolios for school and College Board. I'm glad I chose this year as my "experimental time" to gain skill in various mediums and subject matters. This was an awesome year overall, a main contributor being my art improvement. It's a very liberating feeling to be able to say that I honestly love all of my artwork now.