30 posts tagged “art”
Last night/this morning I finished the big jellyfish I started over break. My 3rd term portfolio review is tomorrow and I wanted to get this done before then because they want to see us do non-school-related work (called "personal projects")and this is almost the only art I've done apart from schoolwork all year. Many Art Center students just don't DO art for themselves (because there is no time! and probably the last thing most of us want to do during the little free time we get is more art) and the higher-ups think it's important that we do. So I hope they dig this. (ie it isn't for school, but it is. It's not-for-school-ness makes it for school).
So anywho. Here's a big jellyfish drifting across some cardboard boxes:
Cutting out the top layer of the cardboard in all those sections with an exacto took the most time, was the most labor-intensive, was the most annoying, and was most definitely the messiest. I have cardboard scraps all over my floor and my bed and my clothes and basically everything. For a week I've been walking around with little brown paper scraps stuck to various spots on my body. Probably in my hair, too, but I wouldn't know. But it's cool. I'll clean it all up some day.
I like it! I think it's perdy and I'm glad I decided to paint it. It looked pretty cool when the only differences between areas were the levels of depth in the cardboard, but I like it this way.
And now back to more homework. This week has been Stress Mountain. I can't wait until Thursday afternoon.
woo midterms and portfolio review in the same week! jerks :(
man. I've been painting all day. I started at like 11:30 and just cleaned up my stuff at 8:00. Ridiculous. I spend way too much time on these things. It is unnecessary and it hurts my back. And I've still got another painting to do before Thursday. But hey I'm pretty happy with the painting. It looks good. Want a picture?
and, BTW, I hate acrylic.
Okay, my dinner is done cooking now. Mmm, food.
I said I'd post a picture of the as-big-as-me drawing once I took one, so here it is:
What happened: I got to class about an hour early just to give me some time to erase stray pencil lines, re-ink some spots, and generally clean it up before critique. I worked on it a little bit and everything went fine. But then 5 minutes before class was to start, I was putting my supplies away and cleaning up my area when I grabbed my nearly-full bottle of blue ink by the not-actually-screwed-on cap and spilled the whole thing onto the table, the floor, and the right edge of the drawing. Disaster! My frantic 2-second solution was to cut the figure free from the now-stained surrounding paper and add some more color splotches to make it look intentional. I think that cutting it out was a positive change.
As far as the drawing goes... it is about things like the beauty of the human body, starvation, protest, veganism, efficiency, body temperature, thermography, maps, and size.
I wish I had a place to put it.
Good things!
- Body Worlds was amazing. The fetuses were definitely the strangest part, for me. It's amazing how even the
squiggly little 7-week-old wormy fetuses actually LOOK like Impossibly tiny humans, with their teeny little hands and fingers. They are so ugly and weird dude it's awesome. Among the other highlights: blood vessel configurations floating in space (as pictured to the right [more photos of these things can be found here), the thoracic and abdominal organs (especially the intestines. In person, they look much more like balloon animals than they do in illustrations), and the entire muscular system. The elaborately posed (mostly)intact bodies were all incredibly beautiful.
- Um I am still on break and it is still awesome.
- Check this shit out: illustrations by Emily Jo Cureton, based on words from crossword puzzles! It's basically the greatest idea ever and I'm really excited about them.
See the rest of them HERE.
(I found out about these, as well as the stop-motion movie I posted a few days ago, from the illustration blog Drawn!)
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Bad Things!
- Thomas might be allergic to Wednesday. (the cat).
- Gas prices.
- That is all.
Other!
- Pasadena just passed that law about smoking in public places. I will personally enjoy not encountering smoke as often, but I feel sort of bad for the smokers in my life.
I just got around to taking pictures of more school things...
The pink and blue one was done in one class session. I kind of like how the mailbox sorta looks like a second dog.
This is a combination of Mexican folk art designs and amanitas muscaria mushrooms. I was running on 0 hours of sleep when I drew it.
This was for drawing concepts. We had to paint a portrait of someone we had never seen, based only on the information given in his/her obituary. This is Kate Webb, an Australian woman who was a foreign correspondent news reporter in Cambodia during the Vietnam war. She was captured by Vietnamese troops and mistakenly reported as dead. After being held captive for three weeks, she was released for no apparent reason.
detail:
and how I imagined her feet might've felt...
I'm not sure how to begin to explain this one, but it means a lot to me and I am very happy about it.
This hairy sucker sort of relates to Stuffed-animal Face up there. These are also from drawing concepts.
That's all for now. I still need to take a presentable picture of the big drawing. I'll do it later.
PS: I just set up a flickr account where I'll keep all of my art junk organized! --->LINK
Here is my design 2 final! It's what I was laser cutting the other day.
The assignment was to make a 3D object whose design was to be based on a plant or animal of our choosing. Clearly, I chose a millipede for my inspiration. Because millipedes are awesome.
I was pretty excited about making it, since I so seldom stray from the 2D world. Something not flat! Amazing!
I also think it looks pretty neat upside-down:
And for scale:
I am building a millipede! Today I used the laser cutter to make something more substantial than the little keychainswe made during the lasercutting demo, and it was fun and educational. There were some difficulties with the process (my sheet of acrylic was warped so the laser didn't cut evenly and the acrylic was re-melting together in places etc) but in the end it all worked out and now my milliede body is coming together. I'll show you when it's finished.
Yesterday I was at school from 8:00am to 6:30pm working on my drawing concepts final, which is a 3'x5' drawing.
(This is my "I have been at school for 10 hours" face:
I got it mostly done. I am working with ink, and I had a bit of a disaster on my hands this morning when I unrolled it to find that in many places the ink had not dried completely when I'd rolled it up to take it home the previous evening, and it was stuck to itself all over the place. There were some little tears here and there but nothing too terribly horrible and I was able to cover most of it up by re-inking it. A second disaster came, though, when I spilled some acid-green ink on my bedroom carpet and my pants :(. It didn't come out of either very well. Fortunately none of it spilled on the drawing, which was mere inches away and which was sort of all I cared about anyway. Score.
My floor, currently:
Let me tell you, IPS Weld-On #4 For Joining ACRYLIC is the shit. It is joining that acrylic up like no other. And it doesn't even get my hands sticky when I clumsily stick my fingers in it. It dries so fast that when it touches my hands it creates a cool sensation and then disappears completely, almost instantly, leaving my skin just slightly drier. I don't know if it's absorbing into my skin or just plain drying, but I like it. Yay chemicals!
Yeah, dude. Making progress on the finals.
One more week, four more classes, four more days.
The Iron Giant is a good movie. Have you seen it? I've been getting into watching a ton of animated movies lately. You should rewatch Bambi. It is am-a-a-zing. That kind of animation drawing just doesn't happen anymore. And the storytelling is perfect. There is just the right amount of talking--which is to say, not very much. Kind of like No Country for Old Men. Ha, there's a comparison for you.
I'll leave it at that.
FIRST: IF ANYONE HAS AN EXTRA ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR CODE ON THEIR HANDS AND WOULD LIKE TO HELP ME OUT IN AN ENORMOUS WAY, SEND ME A MESSAGE!
Here is what I've been doing in comp and painting, in chronological order, the one in color being the most recent. Oil paint. Most of them aren't finished because 5 hours isn't really long enough for a painting class. The ones that ARE finished are things I did at home. Most are 16"x20". (The spacing of these thumbnails is all retarded because vox is dumb).
The rest of these are from drawing concepts...
These two are from the Ugliest Person I've Ever Seen assignment. The one on the left is my interpretation of someone else's ugliest person, and the one on the right is my ugliest person. These were fun to do. I shouldn't even be posting these pictures though, as the terrible photos have killed most of the detail, which is sort of the most important thing about them. These are pretty big; 18"x24"
Um, if you'd like an explanation of this one, I will give you one.
This is most recent. We went on a field trip to downtown LA to draw the people and scenery around us, and our homework was to use those sketches as the basis for a finished drawing. This is a mash-up of things I saw at the Alamdea st market. (I demand you full-view this! Notice their hands!)
I used to do this with scotch tape when I was a kid, and got scolded for wasting whole rolls of tape. Well, now I can by my own damn tape and waste as much as I like.
Thomas's arm:
They now hang from my ceiling:
They're like skin. We molted. I have vague intentions to do many more, based on the body parts of many different people. Suspend them all from my ceiling. Or something.
Tonight the amazing Walton Ford came to talk at Art Center. If you haven't seen his paintings, you oughta. He does HUGE (life-size, and one is an elephant) watercolor paintings of exotic animals. He was there to sort of
promote his new new ginormous $7,000 coffee table dinner table book. I wanted to go really badly, but I had to go to Intro to Modernism instead :(. All day I have been going back and forth on whether or not I should skip class to see him talk, but in the end Modernism won out. Can't miss that class. By the time it let out, the lecture was over but I did get to hang around in the crowd outside the auditorium, where some of the lecture-goers were hanging back to schmooze. Walton as there and seemed in good spirits. There was a sample of his gigantic book there and someone had him prop it up and pose with it for a photo. He was funny. Apparently for the lecture he'd told the stories behind lots of his paintings and it was really great. I wish I could've seen it but whatcanyoudo, grades grades grades.
