Mixed Media

Did you learn new techniques or processes as part of the work for this project?

I haven't worked very much with mixed media and so I learned a lot about how to apply different mediums in various ways to portray what I want. It made the overall composition a little harder to do, but overall I think the techniques I used worked really well

How is this artwork about who you are or what you like?

This artwork's main focus was another one of my pets, the main idea I wanted to portray in this piece was amusement and simplicity and because I find dogs to be very amusing animals I picked one of the most amusing dogs I've met which is my own and I simplified him into what I think of him which is a ball of fluff and fur, however I did change the color prescription, instead of colors that normal objects would be I portrayed them the way that I perceive colors and how they apply in this piece. To me yellow is a warm and fun color so I painted the main focus of fun, my dog, with yellow and the sand that he's running on I painted green because I think of green as a natural and revigorating color which is how I perceive the beach sand, the clouds are red/pink because to me it represents happiness and clouds are something I view as happy, so all together this piece is very much about having a fun day at a beach with my goofball dog which are two things I really enjoy.

Did you consider how ideas would work before you tried them?

I had a basic idea about what I wanted this piece to look like when I came up with the idea, and I let myself run crazy with it, I had a basic composition laid out, but I felt in order to get the genuine feel of fun I had to go in with very little planning and just let the vision in my head work it's way onto the canvas and I feel that I did that very well.

Fun with Paint and Cats Painting Final

How did you use your own unique ideas in your work?

I used my own ideas through portraying my own pet in a situation that i feel would be completely feasible to happen, i've always loved pianos so when i was working on my thumbnails i had two separate ideas, one that involved a pianist playing the piano and another involving the repetition of a cat, specifically my cat, however i was having a hard time choosing between the two because i felt attached to both, eventually i merged the two ideas into the idea of my cat having played in some paint, had proceeded to decorate the piano in paint, as well as other places, this piece was a split second idea that was merged between two ideas i had, and it made sense to go with this because it felt like something my cat would do, and it was a situation i wanted to paint, and i think it turned out marvelously.

What is this artwork intended to say?

I intend my artwork to say that little moments can be fun, those little moments of splendid laughter, and the times where we all laugh so hard that we have a stitch in our side, little moments like those.  I wanted it to be bright, bold, colorful, and fun.  I also wanted to portray a small piece of my life, my cat has never actually jumped on a piano and decorated it with paint, but in my childhood i was infactuated by my grandfather when he would play the piano, it's always been a memory that's stuck in my head, and my cat is a complete goof, he's always known to do wild and crazy stuff, most people would find it annoying, but i find it endearing and quite funny, i wanted to portray a small piece of the joy i feel whenever i hear someone playing the piano, and the laughter that my cat evokes.  The main thing this piece should say to everyone is fun, in one way or another we all have moments like this, completely unintended, but absolutely wonderful to remember, and i wanted to immortalize that.

When did you step back and analyze you work during this project?

About half way through with the painting i had started painting my cat, and i didn't feel like it was coming out right, the way i paint tends to be very comical, bright, and bold, i've never been afraid of color and certainly not when it comes to painting; however it just didn't seem to be working, and i took a step back and looked at my painting, and i found that it was way too proportional, my cat has these really green eyes that are really beautiful and he's basically a puffball when it comes to fur, so i scrapped the original head, and instead made it larger and increased the size of the eye, then i kept painting and after i had laid down the basics of the new cat i was starting to really like it, so i kept painting and painting, and then it got to where i was comfortable with the cat, and then it was time to add the fun, because with just a cat and a piano it looked really boring, there was no story to tell, and then i just placed paw prints all over the place, i didn't organize them at all, just went for it, and the result has made me very happy because it now tells a story, and i hope that everyone who sees it smiles because it reminds them of something similar. 

Fun with Paint and Cats painting progression

Up Close and Personal

In progress:

Final:

 Artists Develop Art Making Skills

With this piece I have gained a lot of experience with Chalk Pastel, i have never worked with the medium before and when i was planning out this piece i was thinking about what medium to use, and Chalk seemed like the best option to give the piece the image that i had.  It was a great chance to work with Chalk and use it in a lot of different ways that worked really well, and establishing a good foundation for my knowledge about the medium and it was fun to have something turn out extremely well with a completely new medium.

Artists Solve Problems

I had some trouble with this piece with getting the contrast and realistic look that i wanted to have for it.  It took some work and thinking about where to place the colors to get just the right about of contrast and value ranges.  When i was working with the silver stripes around the eyes i had tried to make it look as a part of the skin by blending, but that wasn't working the way i had hoped and instead it looked just like another value in the skin, after adding the white line through the blended part that's when it really popped and i got the look i needed as well as the contrast that makes it look a lot better.  The neck was also difficult to get it to have that rounded neck look and so it took a couple of tries to get the shading and value just right, but after adding the white spots it really stood out and gave it the last thing it needed to look realistic.

Artists Reflect

Looking back on this project i'm really happy with how the Chalk turned out, and that i took that risk with a completely unfamiliar medium.  The ideas i had planned out for this piece was for it to be really colorful and bright and pop like how a lot of seahorses look, but that didn't exactly translate on page and so i had to shift from it being really bright and colorful like i wanted it, to subduing it and adding spots of color to pop, the idea of adding the white dots was more of a whim of the moment, it was never something i had planned and certainly hadn't tested out before i did it, but that is really one of the defining aspects of this piece that ties it all together and makes it look the way it does, without these dots it wouldn't be as convincing of value change or 3D appearance.

Oil Pastel, Chalk Pastel, Colored Pencil exercises

Colored Pencil lollipop

The colored pencil was a familiar medium to work with for this little project.  I think i might use this for one of my final projects because it's a detail oriented medium that can get those little details that i need for this final.

Oil Pastel Coca Cola can

The oil pastel is another medium i'm familiar with, it's still difficult to use, but is really enjoyable to use for shading.  I don't think it's likely i'll use this for my final project due to how messy the medium can be and how inexperienced i still am with it.

Chalk Pastel Gumball

The chalk pastel is a new medium for me, and it was really fun to use, the coloring and shading with it was easy and very cool.  I think i might use this medium with my final project.  It was really fun to try out this new medium with a little exercise such as this.

Scientific and Contrast Drawing

Some of my design solutions for this theme were to think outside of the box and not do the standard lab coat and other objects that a lot of people think of when they hear the word scientific, i wanted the theme to influence my piece, but not be a direct link that is easily pointed out, so after lots of brainstorming and thinking i came up with the idea of drawing the x-ray of a birds wing, which after more consideration and looking at the other option for my project i decided to go with this one because it appealed to me the most and was out of the box for me to accomplish.

The mini lessons we had during class were helpful in learning how to use the different mediums available to us for the project it was helpful to learn what mediums did what, how they worked, and how to overall use them for the future.  Learning how to use pen and ink was interesting as a different medium to use for the future.  Pencil is the basis of drawing so being reminded how to use pencil again was very helpful.  The charcoal was interesting as it's not a medium I've used before and it would have been nice to work a little more with it, overall it was good to be able to test out these different mediums for both this project and future projects.

To try and show contrast in my work with the white charcoal and white pencil I put to use the lessons we learned about both pencil and charcoal, being careful where i applied pressure, being conscious of where i wanted the lights and the darks to be overall.  It was a little difficult for me as the pencil i was using didn't blend well with the charcoal so that was a bit of a struggle to get the full range of values i wanted, but overall leaving key spots black or white i think i achieved some good contrast with this piece.

Moving on the charcoal and pencil i used.  I chose this medium because it provided the best visualization for what i was trying to achieve that would have been extremely difficult and tedious had i used pen and ink.  I wanted to work with the charcoal a lot because I've never really used it before and wanted to try something new.  Overall i like the way that the charcoal and pencil helped bring what i had imagined onto the paper in the way it does.

Overall the techniques i used during this piece were line work, as seen in the feather bones, there were a lot of lines to do, and they had to b noticeable and clearly distinct which was somewhat difficult to create as i was working with the charcoal because of its tendency to smear while i was working on other parts of the drawing.  Most of what i used was shading and value range to create the look of a bird's x-ray'd wing which involved very dramatic changes in values.

The risks that i took in this project were working with a new medium, which I've had next to no experience with and doing something that's very outside of the box from the drawings i normally do. For me doing anatomy of any animal is very difficult because often times the look expected from a relatively analytic drawing and my style of art clash in very weird ways that don't tend to work out well so this was a big step for me.  The anatomy was the hardest part, finding the bones and the joints and the different parts of the bird that i needed to display, first starting the sketch i had planned an entirely different drawing, but what i had envisioned i wouldn't have been able to draw due to spacial issues and finding how to place what and where it would all go.  So this was definitely a big risk for me to take, but it came together wonderfully in the end.

So my overall experience with this project was positive as i took that big risk and it turned out extremely well, working with a new medium was fun and informative, it was also interesting working with black paper which i haven't done before, but hopefully i can do more works like this in the future.  Overall this project bettered me as an artist and exposed me to things that are relatively out there for me.